The unique thing about neighbors is you can try to divorce them, but no matter what you do they will still be neighbors. There are few relationships as permanent as neighbor. They don't have to listen to you. But you should listen anyway, and try to figure out how they look at the neighborhood. Probably very differently from the way you view it.

Wonder if you noticed that the main difference between social media and chat is which way the new messages flow and where the tiny little text box is, at the top or the bottom.

Good morning everyone. We're getting feedland.com back in shape. About a week ago we sorted out a long-standing performance issue. Once that was fixed, another problem cropped up, we weren't able to sign off and back on. We got that one too, this morning, and now it looks like feedland.com is finally performing well across the board. It's always been pretty stable, just churning away on feeds, reading lists, and pumping news over websockets, and all the other 3.0 type feed stuff. It feels like it's time to depend on it, even so we'll be careful, praise Murphy. The cool thing about feedland.com compared to all the other servers I've run stuff on over the years is that it scales automatically. It's on the VIP network run by Automattic.

Every OS should have a Help system that you can ask "How do I do this" and it understands what you're saying. The Mac OS tries to take you to a manual with a freaking table of contents! What do I look like, a robot? Come on it's 2025. Get with it. Maybe OpenAI should buy Apple.

At the same time I heard from people at Automattic that they had successfully installed the new version of the FeedLand software on feedland.com which runs on their VIP system, so theoretically should scale as well as anything on the net. There was a serious performance problem, that, with the help of Ryan Neudorf who I met in Ottawa, and Scott Hanson, longtime contributor here, was fixed. It was a daring move, it meant that all the timeline-generating code in FeedLand had to be rewritten. It was worth it. If you've ever felt that FeedLand was too slow at displaying news, please try again, I think you'll be pleased.

Just heard from Brent that the next version of NetNewsWire will support the Markdown in RSS. I wrote it up on my daveverse site, which I edit with WordLand, which means it has a special feed that contains source:markdown elements. You can be one of the first people with markdown-support in your feed, and in doing so, help the bootstrap. I'm pretty sure it's going to work at this point. If you have questions about this, you can post a comment here.

Since many of us now program with AI chatbot assistance, it seems it's time to think about higher level languages we can use to specify what we're doing, new kinds of computers because we now have bigger more capable minds at work.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a holiday once a year where each of us had a virtual awards show for people we know who have special qualities that make them excellent people or friends. We put all our focus on a few personalities who have obvious defects. And we don't exp...

Apparently last night's email didn't go out, so I re-sent them. Hopefully people didn't receive two emails.

Before it’s too late there should be a rule that AI chatbots should not be allowed in any way to impersonate humans. We will come to see that as our biggest mistake, not stopping this before it got out of control.

My new WordPress News page is faster and looks better on phones. Also, lots of new sources thanks to suggestions from readers.

I checked out Elon Musk's answer to Wikipedia by going to the pages on his site that Wikipedia mangles the most. It looks like they basically copied Wikipedia, so it's no better or worse. They'll probably be able to improve it, because ChatGPT tells a much closer to actual-events story. Getting the story right, is more important imho than keeping democracy open to trolls.

The trip to Canada really changed my perspective. Spending more time thinking than developing new stuff. One thing is for sure, we're going to depend on FeedLand more as we go two-way in WordLand. I've been here before. Have to let my mind mull things over before the movement resumes.

Made good progress on a FeedLand performance issue. The new version is running on feedland.org. We're getting ready to try it on other systems. On the way I hit a problem with the wpcom package that implements the WordPress API in Node.js. Apparently the new version depends on babel/runtime, but it isn't listed as a dependency in their package.json file. I worked around the problem by adding that dependency in wpidentity's package.json file, and that fixed the problem. Had trouble getting this report in their issues section.

House of Dynamite is a fantastic movie, it deserved the great reviews it's getting, and I found it easy to watch, though a lot of reviewers said it wasn't. It's exactly the kind of movie I like -- political thriller with ideas rich with intrigue. Great acting and writing. It...

I changed the header graphic on Scripting News today to raise a question with NYC voters. Bill de Blasio was mayor. He was elected with great vision, but the politics of NY are not in sync with the ambitions of dreamers. The police union didn't like him. I'm sure they would ...

I see that the WordPress world is getting interested in adding AI features. I had some ideas a few years ago, about how I would like AI to be hooked up to blogging, and the ideas have developed a bit in the years since. As a writer I want most is every bit of writing I’ve p...

Great to see Les Orchard reading my site again. We did some great stuff together a long time ago in Frontier. He converted code from Perl (I think) to Frontier so I could use S3 for storage for users. I still use his code to this day. He's been writing of his memories of great feed reading tools of 20+ years ago, and I keep trying to tell my friend Les that the system we have now makes those products look primitive, as it should because so many years have passed. In 2022, I decided to give RSS another try. First I did a top to bottom review of RSS, and then I built FeedLand. If you loved feeds and mourn the day the music died, I have good news, it didn't die, you all just stopped believing it could happen.

We've had a performance issue in FeedLand that we finally think we have tracked down. I'm working slowly and carefully on a new version that incorporates the new thinking. If it works, I'll tell you more about what worked and how it affecs the software (obviously for the bet...

Also after last week's conference we're starting to get help from the open source developer community around WordPress. Really friendly people, excited about what we can all do together.

I'm really happy with the way WordPress News is shaping up. Every community should have a news site like this.

Yesterday I did some research into how weblogs.com, in 1999, tracked changes in the blogs it was following. This was a precursor to feed readers. There was a main output file called changes.xml, a reverse chronological list of sites, not feeds, feeds didn't exist yet. From...

Tell the people who make AI's -- I want a way to have apps run in your browser that has direct connections to the AI engine, and it connects via the user's credentials, not the app devs (though you are entitled to know who the developer is). When I explored the idea of makin...

You know how the AI companies are all doing browsers. Why don't they have a local url that I could put into an <a> element that pops up the result of a question asked of the chatbot. Something like this. When you click on the link you find out what the Mets did.

Still looking for more great WordPress news sites.

I'm okay with Trump destroying the White House step by step. We're going to need a lot of new things once he's done. There's going to be a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing. Feces covered monuments. Probably a new cemetary somewhere for his victims. But you know how when...

Journalists report conventional wisdom thread on Bluesky.

Question came up on TPM as to whether the blogosphere might reboot in Substack. The author concluded it can't, and I agree. Here's why. "One thing the blogosphere had that Substack can’t have is all parts were replaceable. You could use any blogging tool, and any feed reader and still be part of the world. Substack is a single company that has raised VC money. Vastly different incentives." And this has been tested. You have to use their editor to publish in their enviroment. They're unable to let you see their product as part of a toolset, it has to be the whole thing.

This is a product i created a few years back but it went off the air when Twitter exploded for app devs, now it's back and still lovely.

On my drive to Ottawa and back, I never had to wait for a charger, and it never took more than 1/2 hour to fill the battery to 80%. The chargers are often in places with restaurants or supermarkets. And it's good for my legs to get out of the car and walk for a bit.