BTW, these days the images are served via HTTPS so they don't show up in broken links in RSS readers, including my own FeedLand which is served over HTTPS.

I asked ChatGPT when Google started making HTTPS a requirement. Then I asked when was HTTPS first deployed, and was surprised it was in 1994 in Netscape Navigator. But apparently it was really buggy and wasn't codified until much later. Then I asked when HTTPS became the norm? 2017. So there's a lot of web out there that isn't being maintained by anyone, it just works, that predates HTTPS being widely adopted, if you believe the timelines ChatGPT produced.

Why is scripting.com not https? I hope you can see that I have no trouble deploying https sites here. I use Caddy on my Linux servers, and I don't see why anyone uses anything else. It's really easy and requires none of the work people complain about. Anyway the reason script...

My suggestion re Schumer et al. It's over -- remember the lessons, let's look forward, tonight's vote is already history. Let the Dems in the Senate take care of themselves. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.

Question for WordLand users. When you published your first post, were you surprised that the window didn't clear? Did you understand that you can make changes and update the public post? I was just talking with a friend who didn't expect it to behave the way it did.

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post using the technology of 1993.

I was looking over my blog archive for August 2006, which was when I started using Twitter, and came across this video of Jason Calacanis, at a Wikipedia conference in Cambridge. This is what videos were like back then, tiny and very short. I probably took it with a fairly expensive Nikon camera.

Saw an interview with Mark Cuban where they asked why would Elon Musk do something that would cause Tesla stock to tank. How could he say no? He's got the power to play with the biggest financial thing that has ever existed, and quite possibly that ever will exist. In compari...

I heard an idea that really resonated in a Brian Lehrer interview with Anand Giridharadas, who says among many other things, that we should aim our ire at the leaders of the MAGA movement, and stop bringing our angst to the people who voted for them. Every time I see a condescending TikTok story about them, I think about how that takes us further from getting where we must go. We have to reconcile, we share a country, and our interests are totally aligned. We need each other, that will become completely obvious, and the sooner it does the better.

Please, today -- write a blog post that explains why you believe in The Writer's Web. That the best way to express our ideas on the web is with all the tools that writers have invented. And while we may enjoy using social media like Bluesky or Mastodon, we understand that they are not for writing and are not the web. Please send me a link to your post and I will read what you've written with thanks for believing in writers and the web! You can use any blogging software you like. My email address is dave.winer@gmail.com. And thank you.

I keep hearing pundits and incumbent Democrats missing the point, that the people are the ones whose opinion matters about the Republicans dismantling our democracy in the United States. I want to celebrate those leaders who totally get that the power is with the people, no...

"It's the people, dummy!"

The web was initially designed for writers. Styling, links, paragraphs, titles (at all levels). The ability to edit. No character limits. That's what we had to work with when we started blogging in the mid-late 90s. Then there was a big corner-turn in 2006. In an instant th...

Highly recommend this week's New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Stephen Kotkin of Stanford. He's an expert on Russian history, biographer of Stalin, he talks about what Trump is doing, and as I listened I realized we have not filled in how crazy or challenged the leaders o...

Today's song: Starting Over.

First I want to say that Bluesky is nice software, good design, attractive, they have a goal and stick to it, and it stays up, no fail whales that were so vexing of early days Twitter. That said, I have two criticisms: They are implementing the same limits that Twitter desi...

A hard lesson to learn -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.

BTW it's worth calling attention to a bit I linked to yesterday. Cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon is not on the roadmap for WordLand. They are too limited in the features they support for writers. This is a big point, not a casual thing. I am trying to create a network t...

A new kind of WordPress post for me. A big picture with a punchy caption and a teasing title.

The word is starting to spread about WordLand. And the product is holding up pretty well. There are some issues in Safari with the toolbar that pops up over selection. I see people pasting in URLs that makes me think it's not working for them. Don Park started using it. I did...

I love how people declare that Trump doesn't represent us. But the truth is as long as our representatives don't impeach and remove him, he absolutely does represent us. There aren't two definitions of represent.

The very last message in the DG is, now, 25 years later, basically the design of the network I'm building -- with WordLand as the frontend and WordPress as the backend. The issue is the same. When people post only to get attention, forget about anything useful getting done t...

I did a restoration of discuss.userland.com, the discussion group for scripting.com between 1998 and 2001. I think now finally it works. If you find anything interesting in the archive, send me a link. A lot of the early blogs started from discussions there, heated at times. But a lot of good stuff came from it.

A question came up about the RSS feeds that WordLand maintains, so I wrote it up on the support site. Net-net: Unless you're developing a component of the textcasting vision, you should probably use the WordPress-maintained feed for your site.

I am hereby changing the name of "Republicans" to "Fucking Republicans" because that's what they do and what we're going to do to them. Today's issue is Medicare, which hits home to me, a person who planned for health care and depends on Medicare. I need my Medicare. It's my...

I'm not a paid subscriber to anything on Substack. But I do read a few of their newsletters when they come out, including Paul Krugman's. Almost always must-read stuff. But he also writes on the "other side of the paywall." When he announced it, he said he doesn't need the ...

Praise from David, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, is the best. He picked up WordLand overnight, and he loves it, for the right reasons. WordLand is an editor for "small pieces," maybe the first. Most of the really easy editors have...

David Weinberger on WordLand. "It's a web page that clears out all of WordPress's cruft and gives you an interface that's so simple that it's actually enjoyable."

I updated the screen shot on the WordLand docs page. It was really out of date. WordLand is the best editor for people to write in WordPress. I've been developing it over the last couple of years. I wanted to get a really nice editor into this slot. I felt WordPress deserved one. It's designed to feel like the editor in twitter-like services, but without the limits. I've been writing about this on my blog, while I was doing that, I was developing WordLand in the background. We have ignored the needs of writers for too long. It's time to remove the limits. People believed the formula Twitter arrived at was the right one. It is far too limited for writers. WordLand is the answer, in software.

The United States is Russia's 51st state, sad to say. Let's get it back for the people of the United States. We don't like Putin. Sorry.