Web means something. It's about creating networks between writers. When it's allowed to work remarkable things can be accomplished. Most people who think they're using the web have never used it. The original web is still very much here, ready for us to start building on it again.

Listened to a podcast interview with the CEO of AWS. It's a $107 billion business with hundreds of thousands of employees.

The NakedJen film festival is coming up.

I wrote, in a reply to Ben Werdmuller on Bluesky: "I’ve had 66K followers on Twitter for many years, but when I post something there it gets 250 views, not even sure what that means. These days all I use it for is communicating with insiders on certain tech platforms, and ev...

I wonder if MAGAs like Archie Bunker too? It would be funny if Rob Reiner in the afterlife could bring us together. Speaking as a kid from a liberal NYC family, we had a bit of Archie Bunker in our own family. We all felt an affection for Archie, and he was actually right about some things, and he was funny and underneath his highly opinionated exterior you could see he had a heart of gold. Is it too much to hope that Meathead and Archie could be the cultural bridge we need to get Americans to pull together? Neither of them were perfect, but we can all agree they were both American.

I asked ChatGPT: "Has anyone ported QuickDraw to SVG in the form of something you can include in a browser-based JavaScript app?" No. I wish the answer was yes, so I could create UIs that are at least as good as the stuff we did in the 1980s on the Mac, inside a web browser. I keep learning new ways simple things are impossible in CSS. Clipping for example, is torture.

One more thing, people are posting Trump's vicious eulogy for Reiner and his wife. Why are they helping him piss on the fresh memory of the life of these people who gave us so much. Stop and think before you express your outrage at Trump, and realize you're giving him exactly what he wants, and you tarnish the memory of good-hearted and generous people. Just don't do it.

For some reason, I'm hit especially hard by the death of Rob Reiner. And it's coming at a time when I understand a lot more about how movie directors work, having watched the fantastic Mr Scorsese 5-part documentary series on Apple TV. The movie director can be as involved i...

It's not just me that says that our social web is connected by RSS.

• Cory Doctorow said it.
• Molly White said it.
• And last week Ben Werdmuller said it.

If they all did it, we'd have all the freedom we could ever want.

So what's holding it up?

Let's make a resolution for 2026, that we the people, will demand that the social networking software we use get in tune with the web, and support two-way RSS.

I will help any and all to get this going.

I'm just like you, if you don't want your online world to be owned by billionaires.

Dave

An idea I posted on Facebook in 2021 about an app I wanted. Here's an idea. I have a drone that communicates with my peloton via satellite, so it's not constrained by range. I can send the drone anywhere I like, but I have to ride there on my peloton. Obviously what I see ...

Just wrote a post for Scripting News, then flipped over to Daveverse to see what it looks like. See for yourself. I think we've come pretty close to cloning Scripting in WordPress.

As a lifelong Mets fan since 1962, I say they blew it. And if you follow my sports writing here, mostly about the Knicks and Mets. I can usually see a pro and a con to everything. And I let the team run itself, and I ponder the philosophical intentions, because to me the Met...

In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)

The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcasting, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress business model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.

Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus made me both emotional and aroused at the same time. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like Last of Us or Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy.

I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people can be exactly the kind of people who make you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter," or perhaps "TWTR 4 U" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens.

The real reason the Dems lost in 2024 is they ran the most inept campaign in history. You could argue about who was to blame, but that is, net-net what happened. They were so bad they made Trump look better! And that is hard to do. :-)

If you develop a feed reading app and have suggestions for the new howto, please post them here.

Feed discovery 23 years later. "You can see how these things got ratified in the early 00s -- in the most web way imaginable, by individual users seeing the benefit, adding it to their sites, and quickly the entire feed world got an upgrade."

Every time I go to the supermarket I'm reminded of how scary the times are. People want to just live their lives, never has that been more understandable, but food prices are a constant reminder for everyone there's good reason to be scared. And if you want to really feel it, imagine what happens if we somehow let Trump flood the economy with dollars. Talk about a recipe for disruption, this time, of our lives, not just some kind of PC or network or game software.

Feed discovery tips. How to help readers find your feed.

Here we show website devs how to help readers find their feeds.

Ben Werdmuller wrote a new perspective on RSS. It's great, just what we need. RSS is of the web, and is the simplest most obvious way to get all the twitter-like systems connected.

I've found that the twitter-like social networks I'm part of have slowed down to almost nothing. Have you experienced something similar? Here's a link to my accounts on mastodon, bluesky, github, twitter. Tell me what you see.

Idea: I could probably hook WordLand up to GitHub pretty easily. It's really good at Markdown, btw.

One thing I realized I should point the ActivityPub folks to. I implemented Inbound RSS for WordPress. I was going to request it as a feature from the WordPress community, then realized I could write it fairly quickly with the system I already have built. After all, FeedLand already supports Inbound RSS, that's a lot of what it does, as a feed reader, esp along with the websocket interface it has. I already have complete code for writing to a WordPress site, that's a big part of what WordLand does. WordPress does a fantastic job of outbound RSS, but why not inbound? If Substack, for example, supported inbound, we'd all be using their mail distribution systems, and sharing revenue. Here's the source code, MIT license, so party down, Wayne.

BTW, a frequently asked question, where can I get your blogroll list to import into my feed reader? Answer -- here.

I should have demo'd the blogroll stuff at WordCamp Canada. Next time I will show products people can use right now.

Doc always has a link on my home page. That's because I have the best blogroll ever. It's hooked up to a feed reader via a technology called websockets that came along after the heyday of blogging. If you want to see its heart beating, go to scripting.com, in the browser, open the JavaScript console, and watch the updates flow in (screen shot). While we weren't watching the web got some really badass new features.