The great thing about the OG Web was that you could have an idea one day, have it deployed two days later, with a really ugly table-based UI, and everyone would know about it within a few hours. Then the reviews would come out, and a few hours later we'd know if it stuck or didn't.

As all our former allies pay homage to Xi in Beijing, I was thinking well at the least the whole world speaks our language, and that'll take a few generations to change, but then I realized I bet the Chinese have been preparing for this, and of course they have.

You know you're on the right track when all the questions have answers.

More important than code is the right place for the code.

I've learned a new self-management strategy. At the beginning of a day's programming work I set a specific goal that I feel I should be able to accomplish very quickly, in an hour, perhaps -- but probably less. If I get it done by the end of the day I will feel like I really ...

Zeldman found the Google and HTTP post I wrote many years ago. Thankfully they haven't completely broken HTTP yet. I like to think they can't because so much of the web would break if they did. People might not notice the Not Secure message they post in Chrome for sites that...

"There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky." I put that at the end of a post the other day and as they say in journalism, he buried the lede. "Only works in" means silo. And it always results in stagnation because big organizations suck at shipping new ideas. For that you need a lot of people with laptops and a net connection and lot sof spare time to be able to replace small pieces, and join them up to the network, try out new ideas. When you're in a silo the owners place severe limits on what you can do. If you think you found a benevolent one, the exception -- there is no such thing. You're waiting for a "some day" that will never come.

An idea I read in this blog post is one I hadn't considered, is super important. AI is going to be part of programming forever. There's no way to go back. This has made StackExchange obsolete, because it basically aggregates everything that was there, and it was worth it beca...

DNS fix: pagepark.scripting.com now redirects to the GitHub repo for PagePark. Somehow I lost the pagepark.io domain, but I don't really want it, so it's kind of ok. But there are some broken links. I recall there was a nice site with menus and stuff that was built from the GitHub repo but archive.org isn't able to find it for some reason. Moral of the story, don't buy so many domain names thinking you're really clever. But of course I still do. Someday they'll all be gone, of course. Will they have a ceremony for the last domain to be turned off, kind of like the last Blockbuster was. Does anyone remember Blockbuster.

Toby Ziegler: "They'll like us when we win."

Interesting thread between Jake and Ted Howard about Frontier.

I was looking at some of the first posts in in 1998 in discuss.userland.com and came across this post that talked about my decision to stop doing the Mail Pages, now that we had the discussion group.

A lot of online discourse is us vs them. If you find yourself doing that, that's a sure sign that you're not working on the web.

If you make a product for discourse, yet your own product can't be used for discourse because of some major limit, then you have a feature to add, and get busy. No product does everything everyone wants, but when there's a consensus among users, then you have something worth doing.

Jim Ray responded to my Saturday post about AT Proto. Thanks for that, most of the time I write about this stuff people involved don't respond. I think that's because I'm not actually missing anything -- and I would rather continue to develop on RSS because it's not a silo, ...

I'm interested in the movie Darkest Hour. Specifically the scene where Churchill is surprised by a visit from the king, who we learned earlier is pissed off, while Churchill is morose and undecided on what to do. The King wants Churchill to know that he wants to fight, and t...

Good morning. I am wiped out from the storm that just went through. Did a bunch of shoveling this morning, still have more to do. About two feet of snow, some drifts much higher. The snow is light, but it packs down from the weight of snow that falls on top, so shoveling is ...

They should host games on ChatGPT.

They couldn't have chosen a more ideal liberal state to own. I don't think any of this is an accident. Next time they will kill two, American citizens of course. And we'll protest. And then 25. It's starting to sink in that this is not just a bad dream and it's not going to end.

Michelle Obama was wrong when she said "when they go low we go high." There is a difference. We always try to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is pretty damn low.

Nominated for best picture of 2025, ranked by Metacritic rating.

• One Battle After Another. 95
• The Secret Agent. 91
• Marty Supreme. 89
• Train Dreams. 88
• Sentimental Value. 86
• Hamnet. 84
• Sinners. 84
• Frankenstein. 78
• Bugonia. 72
• F1: The Movie. 68

Random ramblings with past experience dealing with tech bullying. As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, so I did a podcast, and found some real gaps in my memory....

As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, so I did a podcast, and there were some real gaps in my memor. Then just a minute ago as I was browsing around the discuss.us...

BTW, promising to support the W3C version of your work in 1998 was what you did when the BigCo's said they're gunning for you. One thing you can be sure of is it'll take more time for them than it did for you. Also it'll be more complex, and take more work to support. And y...

Another BTW, I think perhaps just for fun we should create an XML-RPC implementation of the wpcom API. I have just the thing to base it on.

At some point we're going to want to make it as easy to set up a WordPress site as it is to create a new Bluesky account, because the two things will be basically the same thing. Either one will get you access to a network of bloggers.

A new home page for the Scripting News podcast. Nice to get this one off the big todo list.

I've been following Bluesky since inception, even tried developing for it and found it was nothing new with its 300 character limit, no links, titles, etc. Basically you can build the same apps for Bluesky that we were able to develop for Twitter. I've also been following Le...

My first rule of platforms: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." I thought that rule was pretty new, but it actually appears in a 1996 blog post.

Just watched Darkest Hour, a biopic of Winston Churchill, as he became prime minister and had to decide whether to surrender or fight Mr Hitler as they called him. I had seen it of course when it came out, but it's especially appropriate to our times. I'm glad the NATO's are resisting the US. We have to all work together to keep democracy alive, not just in our own countries, but around the world. If ever there was a time when working together mattered more than it does today, I sure can't think of it.