I did a video demo of pngWriter in December 2016. I wish I had just done a Hello World demo instead of a freaking tutorial. I do better demos these days. I broke every rule of my own tutorial for software demos.

Reason #29812 you know our current writing system is broken. When you want to post something that has more than the maximum characters they post an image instead of the text. I once wasted a few months making a writing tool for those kinds of posts, hoping that if it caught on we could have a shadow network that moved the actual text around the net between users. Users weren't so imaginative then.

I've used this phrase a few times recently: "Before we were so rudely interrupted."

Or, "the big interruption."

I'm referring to 2006, when web writing was downgraded, to be 140 characters with no styling, no links, without the ability to edit.

That's when writing on the web started going in the toilet.

So when I say it again I may link to this post, because out here on the web, linking is always allowed.

In 2014 I wrote a manifesto about web writing. A decade later later, I'm still trying to get writing on the web to work again.

It had been broken since Sept 14.

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Still breaking things! ;-)

Bluesky post: "The idea is to build a social network entirely out of replaceable parts. No silos, no centralization. Just the web."

I test drove three different EVs today at an event at SUNY Ulster today. VW ID.Buzz, Rivian R1T, Kia EV9. I was surprised the one I liked best was the VW. It handled well, the others were sloppy, drive like the big cars they are. The Rivian had the best computer system, looked even nicer at first look than the Tesla. The Kia EV9 had a standard Kia computer system, far behind that of Rivian or Tesla. VW's computer was halfway between, it appeared they thought overall about the controls, but I was so impressed by the ride, and size, and the whole concept of it, and I always liked vans. I'm seriously thinking about swapping my Tesla for the VW. There are other disadvantages, I'm going to start reading up on it, until today I never gave it any thought, didn't think it would be a car for me. But I realllly liked it.

Some day they will have AI actors delivering the nightly news and no one will notice.

With all respect to the tech industry -- why is the traffic in the Bay Area so awful. Why haven't they done anything about it. Wouldn't that be a good test run before running the whole world? As programmer myself, I wouldn't trust the algorithm without a lot of QA. Seriousl...

With the advent of AI code development tools, maybe we should embark on a project to merge all programming languages into one syntax. To undo all the chaos and make humans more competitive with machines. The fact that there are so many development bubbles is a huge waste of resources. Makes us all net-net more stupid.

Yesterday I wrote about preserving freedom by using replaceable parts to form a social web out of the web itself. Outside the silos. I'm getting comments on it. Nice to see other people thinking likewise. That's what we need to get a bootstrap going. People. And I think a good slogan -- "let the web be the web."

I was thinking I might have coined "let the web be the web" as an obvious ripoff of The West Wing slogan for the new President Bartlet. But a search reveals that it was used, but all in very good ways, so that's cool. However a Google Trends search shows up nothing. I'm going to look at this in a year or two and see if that has changed. 😀

It's such a sexy idea, I had to get ChatGPT to generate it. Something it's very good at.

Another slogan -- the social web is the web. It's just that simple.

People are surprised that I'm trying to build the for-real social web as opposed to the aspirational social web. It does require a lot of chutzpah. I feel that. Sometimes I put off doing things because while the coding is simple and straightforward, the immensity of it overwhelms me a bit. I don't remember feeling that way the first time around, possibly because we were doing it all step by step over approx ten years. Now it's all compressed into weeks. I know how to do it, and I've got or built the pieces I needed. But it just doesn't somehow feel right that the idea is actually becoming a thing. "This can't be happening." But we live in that kind of time. Who knows what monsters lie within. We may find out. Heh. Maybe that's where the goosebumps come from.

BTW, I was thinking I might have coined "let the web be the web" as an obvious ripoff of The West Wing slogan for the new President Bartlett. But a search reveals that it was used, but all in very good ways, so that's cool. However a Google Trends search shows up nothing. I'm going to look at this in a year or two and see if that has changed. 😀

In yesterday's piece I suggested people start by creating a free site on wordpress.com to be their home on the open social web. Pro tip: If you're wondering how to do that, ask your favorite AI tool. I often forget I can do that.

Yesterday I wrote about preserving freedom by using replaceable parts to form a social web out of the web itself. Outside the silos. I'm getting comments on it. Nice to see other people thinking likewise. That's what we need to get a bootstrap going. People. And I think a good slogan -- "let the web be the web."

New motto: Let the web be the web.

Someday soon you're going to read a post here, have something quick you want to say, click on a little icon, the editor opens, you write, post, and it's on your blog. I get a pointer. I can read it, and if I want, I can attach it to my post. The writing stays in your space, so you have an archive of all your writing. We let the web be the web.

I have a problem in the development version of WordLand. Sometimes when I bring it to the front, there's an error deep in jQuery, an event has fired and the handler is pointing to a string or number, not a function. It dies, with no stack crawl, because it was responding to a focus event or blur or something like that. Something got overwritten. I have no idea where or how it happened, but once found it will be obvious. I've been trying to figure it out with Claude and ChatGPT and I can see it's going to take a few hours of concentration and learning to figure it out. But then I realized hey -- I bet I could use the Chrome debugger to find this problem. It has Gemini built in. It has access to the running code. I don't have to act as an intermediary, gathering data, pasting stuff into the AI bot. Now I'm looking forward to doing this.

Normal hats don't fit. Not even close. So I buy my caps from BigHatStore.com. In prep for my trip to Ottawa later this month for WordCamp Canada, my first trip out of the country in a long time, I wanted to get a new hat. They don't have a big selection of NBA hats, so ther...

I don’t like the Democratic leaders in Congress, but that doesn’t matter. People say what they’re doing won’t work. I agree. But the elected Democrats swore an oath, to uphold the Constitution. With that constraint there isn’t much they can do other than try to force the Rep...

Latest news from WordPress. Always looking for more sources. 😀

One of the things we can do to preserve freedom, is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us w...

Listening to today's David Frum podcast, from a journalist who says he reps the facts-only brand of journalism. He says his guest invented podcasting in 2014, about 14 years after we started it. He then says that anyone in tech in the late 1990s made hundreds of millions of...

I was having a conversation with Dan Knauss from the WordCamp Canada team. He said that people in the WordPress world don't think of it as a blogging community. I can see why they resist that, blogging has gotten a lot of bad PR in the last 19 years. The same bad PR that RSS...

All the September posts in an OPML file.

I started this site to hold some of the essays John Palfrey posts on Facebook, where they are out of reach of the tools of the open web. John is a longtime friend, for over 20 years, and we did some great stuff together in the early days of the blogosphere. I will happily turn the site over to JP any time he wants to take over, and provide personal support if there are problems. I want him in my online web family, and Facebook simply does not make that possible, it's a silo, as we know and that means it's basically a world unto itself. If we want to solve the problems of the world, we have to step out into the open space where what we write is not so local or controlled.

A picture of the blogger's room at Dean For America in January 2004. A big chunk of political history happened in this room. I was there, in the runup to the Iowa caucus and on the night of the famous Dean Scream. The picture is so tiny because that was the resolution of my digital camera in 2004. It wasn't cheap and as we know it was futuristic.

One thing journalism could do for us is sponsor polls to find out how many people are scared about what's coming next and how scared are they?

The stock market is doing really well, still. But a really important part of our workforce is being attacked by the government. I have no idea what's going on among the immigrant workers in the US. Maybe this is something one of the news orgs could look at. But it seems we must already be short on labor to do the things that keep our lives and businesses functioning. If so, why isn't that showing up in the market?