Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this.

New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook up to FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. Impossible to read at times, but there's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the next month.

Two videos every US resident should watch to prepare for what might be coming. 1. The Lives of Others. A drama set in the eastern part of post-war Germany before the wall came down. People lived their lives, but their relationship with the government and the military would s...

There's a new version of FeedLand, v0.7.0.

Here's the thread where we discussed the testing of the new release. It worked everywhere we installed it, so it seems fair to open it up to people running their own FeedLand instances.

You don't have to do this yet, the only features it has are ones that are needed to use it with the new version of WordLand, coming soon now. But if you have the time, it requires an update to the database, so it's not the usual thing. It explains at the beginning of the thread what the change is to the database.

Here are the instructions for doing the upgrade.

If you're installing a new instance, the instructions are the same as always.

If you have trouble, post a note on the thread.

Thanks to Scott Hanson for validating the new version. It's always important to have someone to check my work.

Yesterday's note on scripting.com about feedland.org was not the whole story. In the end I thought it made more sense to start the database over from the start. There were a lot of users who subscribed to feeds that were constantly updating, and they never came back to use...

I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. Also, the server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-)

AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.

ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don'...

Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, is that I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be for an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, and didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, will affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have very low regard for the amateur writing on the web. They only respect commercial writing.

BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).

Podcast: Last chance for the open web.

I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs.

If all the people who love RSS and make software for it, feed readers, editors, blogging software, put our heads together, we could make a great network for people to write on, that would be so exciting, it would pull a lot of interest from the silos. If momentum builds, they will eventually add RSS as an inbound and outbound format because they will want to be on this network.

We, as writers, shouldn't have to live with the compromises that come from having to make 5 versions of everything, and still you don't have a way to share a lot of the interesting stuff people write.

If we choose to work together, even just a few of us, we could make big change.

General note: When I say RSS, I recognize that there are other feed formats, but I don't want to confuse things. The software makes all that transparent, so let's make it transparent for the users too, ok?

How you know you’re reallllly old. You tell Alexa to play songs by Elton John and you find yourself singing along with Crocodile Rock with tears streaming down your face. Then they play Philadelphia Freedom. Mama mia. The thing about Crocodile Rock is that it's twice-nostalg...

CSS Grid where have you been all my life? Very rational, simple.

A motto for WordLand. "All the tools you need right where you write."

A new kind of spam or phishing email. Appears to be a challenge by Twitter of one of my posts there as a copyright infringement, which it most definitely is not. You have to look closely at the URL it takes you to, which is on this domain. assents-x.com. Hmm at first looks legit, but look more closely.

I've been watching a lot of baseball recently. Over the years I've developed as a programmer, and they've radically changed the way baseball is played. Pitchers used to try to pitch a complete game, but now that never happens. Sometimes they take a pitcher out in the first in...

I want my blog on the same network as my social media.

AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.

Today's song: Jambalaya on the Bayou.

Mea culpa: Unfortunately I misquoted Joni, she said "paved" not "took." I'm going to leave the mistake in the piece.

There are two quotes that make me laugh in the Think Different piece from last week. One of them is here: "They took paradise and.." At first, if you're roughly my age, you read "They took paradise and..." and recognize it as the beginning of a famous line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi. The other is a subtle touch of sarcasm, that I usually try not to indulge in, but let pass through as I edited this piece. See if you can find it.

If you want to get an idea of how well WordPress has been bridged to ActivityPub, check this out. It's time for Mastodon to adopt these features across the board, so when writing in Masto you can use linking, style, titles, 10K character limit. Raise the bar. Let's bring more of the web into social media. Esp linking.

A podcast from post-Katrina New Orleans, Dec 2005.

The great thing about MLB as compared to the NBA is that the teams play a game pretty much every day. And the Mets, my team since 1962, are really exciting right now, after a month of being lost. They have great rookie pitchers who are full of youthful enthusiasm and they kic...

Short excerpt of the ICE commercial which aired several times on WPIX during yesterday's Mets game. There aren't that many drug trafficker, predatory gang members in the US for ICE to deport. And they completely misrepresent what a sanctuary city is. The commercial is paid for by the taxpayers of the United States. Shameful.

One of life's lessons is if someone does something evil to you, and you decide to let it go, they are sure to do it again and again until you stop letting them do it.

Everything Trump is doing to steal the next election is proof of why Colorado was right to deny him a place on the 2024 ballot. The Supremes gave him four years to prepare, to learn from his mistakes, now he'll do it from the top seat. It seems certain to work.