I have a longtime friend from tech who is a San Antonio Spurs fan. I am from New York, and thus am a lifelong Knicks fan. Until tonight's game starts at the Garden between the Knicks and the Sixers with their new acquisitions from Boston and the Lakers, share the hopes of man...

Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US.

Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet.

That's all that's going on there.

All of the feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate.

In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time.

Anyway -- I figured out what I want to do. I want to go back to the point where CSS and JavaScript were added to the web. Everything is a document. It's a writer's web. The reader owns the look of the pages. The writer has no say in colors, or arrangements, it's just writing. No character limits. Simple styling. Full fidelity text. Reading and writing, and then the developers can come up with a million different ways to read, and everyone gets to use their favorite editor, always, and store all their writing where they live, and let everyone read it where ever they read. Any structure they can think of, but all the rendering code is with the reader. I think we can take what we've learned since the web got corporatized, and bring it back to the basic platform we had then. And btw, no HTML, just Markdown. :-)

Postscript: Of course the blame for the wasted time this morning goes to me. Claude tries to do what it thought I wanted. If I calm down, figure out what the confusion really means, and reconsider the path I chose and pull back, we get much further. And I think the way I was trying to go was a mistake. I think film editing is a lot like this. Anyway we got past the problem, and today was a very productive day in the end.

About XSLT -- I remembered that I thought it was a bad idea. Let XML look like XML. Trying to make it look like an HTML page, how does that make any sense. Like opening the hood of a car and seeing a big picture of the outside of the car. People aren't really that dumb, but some people like to complain a lot. The rule of the web is if you don't like what you see, that's what the freaking back button is there for. Probably just a troll anyway. Show them your JSON and RSS. If it's done nicely it can be quite illumifying.

I would like to have one day when Claude Code doesn't fuck everything up by doing things it is explicitly prohibited from doing. I find things that were changed in critical parts of the program, that were indefensible. One of the things we're doing is trying to establish a language for frontmatter for Markdown files that are meant to be displayed by a browser. It just invented one, gave it wrong default. I have to find these things on my own. And what happens when it wipes out a site without checking with me first. It has done this, this year. The journalists are being led by the nose by the industry to the dramatic problems, without any detail. But this must be plaguing every shop that uses the AIs to make software that depends on no one fucking with it. And that is basically every piece of software ever written.

The healthcare system in the US is grossly inefficient, incredibly bad and getting info to and from patients.

Teach everyone in healthcare to try to use their portals as their first resort of communicating with patients.

They waste so much of their time and our time playing phone tag.

I don't know if it's this way in other countries, but it is universally a phone-voice-based comm system in the US.

I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about texcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it.

Anyway, what this means is we're building a site of files that live in Markdown-Land while what you're reading right now is in HTML-land (although someday soon you will read them in Markdown too, confusing right). Chrome is the authority of HTML. It owns the web. We give up. If this were Westeros I would probably be joining the Night's Watch. We have work to do and it might be related to what the Other Web wants to do, but it probably (hopefully) doesn't. I will continue to publish in HTML, and it's up to Google and the EFF if the quality of my writing is suitable for their web. I have no say in it, they have not shown up to negotiate or even discuss. They are silent. Somewhat like the maesters of the Citadel? There must be a bigger plan! :-)

Try going to web.org in a recent version of Chrome.

I didn't notice it at the time, but in the all the work we did about blogging, we had open channels of communiation, meant to make everyone feel like they had a stake. Big mistake, because they took this too literally and the way many people communicated was through orders, d...

Realization: There are two webs, one created by TBL that flourished until about 2006, and the VC-web that appealed to the masses, and grew like a weed -- and they called it the web. The confusion -- you could read it in a web browser, but that didn't make it of the web. My r...

Tried a Wirecutter podcast about the state of sound bars. I thought, wow if they could really cover this I might try buying one again. But it was one of those all giggles shows and people saying how they didn't know anything about soundbars except that they suck. The person t...

Worth repeating: Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs.

Reminder, Atlantis is the codename for the new Frontier that runs in Electron. As I work on other projects now, it's not on my front burner, but in a way it is, because I'm using it constantly as I work on FeedLand and the other project. We just released a new set of parts t...

Google just warned me about a stories.scripting.com blog post from 2007. Perfectly safe archive. Want to know how we started doing code distribution via RSS? Google thinks it's a dangerous site. I'm getting so angry at their condescension. Not a good look for a tech giant try...

Thread: "Imagine rock and roll without the Beatles."

Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US. Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet. That's all that's going on there. All of the journalistic feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate. In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time.

Someday all the pieces will be interchangeable. Then there won't be different brands of social networks, just different brands of the software. All parts replaceable. It won't have all the chaos of the web. And that will be a good thing.

firstSentence, a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to display for an untitled post. It's always been a klooge, but this time with Claude's help we're using a new API in JavaScript, and supposedly it really works. I'm using it in one of my apps, and you might find it useful too, and let me know if it works for you.

The browser and the web it defines is a hairball in a hairball in a hairball in a hairball in a hairball.

The hairballs are named Chrome, Firefox, MSIE, Netscape, Mosaic.

Each in turn has had their way with the web.

The stack of hair defines a "web" that is far far away from the web we started with.

It was going pretty good for a while, if you could live with the all the modal popovers and paywalls, but now the current owners are excluding old sites, and imho when you do that, it's not the web any longer.

I'm a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was Yosemite or something like that (will check). In this version, Tahoe, it's entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to the top of the screen you get the menubar, but unfortunately there is no obvious command in the menu for undoing the mistake. I still don't know which gesture does this. And btw, the longtime Mac bug where some keystroke moves the dock to another window, that's still here. I can tell as I'm clicking the mouse, too late to stop, that this is one of those times. I've memorized a finger macro to get it back, but it used to piss me off a lot, but now it's kind of a gentle reassurance that someone is remembering how we got here.

Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They're acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren't doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn't. It killed the web as a writer's platform. If you want to compete with Twitter, drop your proprietary protocols, hook up to the web standards, and peer with your competitors. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter joined you. They have the same kind of competitive spirit that big companies have. It's time for their competitors to not win users through guilt, rather by providing a better service.

I like the web for people, sites that live and grow, like people. 100 years from now you should feel the people who lived there.

I'm still on my sabatical from working with Claude re Frontier, but have now started working with Claude on FeedLand, and another project, not yet named, experimental, might never see the light of day. Yesterday I worked on FeedLand and have a fix for the problem that showed up in signing on to feedland.com. It's been sitting there for quite a while. I have some mostly small fixes in mind for FeedLand, that will allow it to hook into other apps more easily, esp via WebSockets, the mostly unexplored developer superpower. The difference is I'm going slowly and carefully. Everything in my system now is new. New computer, screen, and my main writing tool for code and docs -- Frontier. And I know the heavy lifting can be done by Claude. That is Claude's superpower.

In Manhattan, I lived on 57th St and Eighth Ave. Best location. The Columbus Circle subway station was under the building. Whole Foods one block away. Three Starbucks one block or less from the house (one was on 58th on the same block). Central Park has a six mile bike-only ...

Automattic has created a Stewart Brand website to honor one of the most creative and respected people of my generation of the web. Chronicling his work is time well spent. "I'm envious," I wrote in response. "The tech industry is gradually disconnecting the early web, pre-htt...

Basic lesson for people who use Claude Code -- it's your time that's valuable, not the bot's. If you find you're lost in the weeds supporting Claude for whatever reason, find a good stopping point for yourself, and pick up another project, that doesn't use AI to do your code-writing. If you have a question ask ChatGPT browser version, but only for the kind of stuff you'd ask it in 2025. You're not co-developing. You're doing it yourself. It's very important to be clear about your coding, not Claude's output. Here's the key point -- it's your time that's limited, that has all the value. You can get Claude to develop something, but if you don't have time to use it, to nurture it, nothing will come of the work.

Today I did something different. I wrote a little Node app, without Claude's help. It was a revelation. It's been most of a year since I actually started even a test app and wrote it from beginning to end. I used to do this routinely. Nothing routine about it anymore. What this app does, it generates a Markdown-only version of scripting.com for testing. I want to see what such a site looks like. It'll be a start.

Twitter: "Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs."