This blog has been running for: 29 years, 11 months, 22 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes, 55 seconds. Still diggin!

BTW, I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm working on the reading interface for my blog. What you see when you go to scripting.com. I'm putting the same kind of attention into it that I did for the blogroll earlier this year. And there are a few unreleased products that use the same approach. There are many new things in this work -- the way we read the web hasn't been worked on in a long time. We've settled for a pretty awful way of reading. I want to fix writing too, and have plans for this, but I thought I should do some work on reading as well. I wish I could show you all the new ideas, but I'm saving that for a big reveal at some point. I've changed the way I develop, again. For the better, I believe.

I've fallen behind on my Podcast0 feed. This is the episode for Sept 27, 2004. And there were two podcasts on the next day, the 28th, and I'm going to re-release those over the next couple of days. Today's episode is a review of an RSS reader that Yahoo came out with. I wasn't happy with it. The next one actually kind of historic, it's about the open source release of Frontier. It's still out there, and I really want it running on Linux if anyone is interested. More later.

I should put a dollar in a jar every time ChatGPT saves my ass. I thought I had boxed myself into a corner regarding the hash value for a web page, then I asked a question I wasn't sure there was an answer to. "In JS in the browser, I have the name of an anchor element and I want the browser to vertically scroll to it," to which it said: "Here's an example." I would definitely pay $1 for that. :-)

Molly White wrote a great piece on the problem we're all facing now that so many of us are trying to maintain a presence on a few different social web sites. She describes a situation I've been writing about since the mid-late 00s, with the inception of Twitter and Google Re...

Guy Kawasaki sent a summary of my career created by his new chatbot. Very flattering. :-)

I've had the same thought as Dan Froomkin, of course -- esp given how much voodoo is in weighting various things, the polls are junk. But, she could be winning much bigger than the polls say. And wouldn't that be nice. ❤️ But do you remember part of the 2016 postmortem was...

When markets have dominant products, evolution freezes. Google search, for example. I should have great search for my blog by now, powered by Google. It has been here for 26 years. They should have been doing R&D on how they can be part of a better reading environment on...

An idea for a news org. I want a for-pay site where I can ask a question about the news and get the most up-to-date answer. I'd like to link to that page from a blog post, and have it either be frozen, to document where we were on that day, or dynamic, so that it changes over time. I'm sure this product will be here soon, so obvious.

Why do I care about what social web means? Because I plan to add functionality to this space. I'm tired of all the stupid limits these products have. Titles or no titles. 300 character limits. No links, etc etc and on and on. Where did they get the idea that taking features out of writing was something they could do. What a wrong turn we took there. And now that once we have a chance to erase the limits, maybe -- none of the companies running their products are doing it. I don't want the way they do it to be the only way, the products are deliberately incompatible. Social web is the best name for what I'm working on. So I need to reserve this space. They didn't ask for my opinion, the first I heard of it was a press release. When I ship my thing I want to point back at this and say look -- I did tell you this was going to be a problem.

The question came up on Threads as to whether the ActivityPub support in Ghost will be a full two-way presence in the fedisphere, and apparently the answer is yes. They are working on a feed reader that also hooks into AP. That's how I would have done it. Really feeds and tw...

Another test post.

When I'm working on new stuff I often use Scripting News, my blog, as the test case for an experiment. This is one of those times. I will post this and then delete it and see what happens. You can safely ignore this message. We apologize for any inconvenience. 😄

oursocialweb.org: You don't have to give it any money or come to any meetings. Just know that someone else believes in users and developers. And let's work together to make it great, as soon as we can, without waiting for the big companies.

I started using the term "social web" on my blog a few months ago. I liked it because it was broad, and it inherited all the qualities of the web, most important that no one owned it, so that it could be a space for independent developers that worked for the benefit of users...

Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.

I keep thinking of this cartoon, which explains it so well.

Now that ActivityPub is claiming to be the Social Web, I feel like Lloyd Bentsen at the debate with Dan Quayle. ActivityPub is not the web any more than Dan Quayle was Jack Kennedy. The web is simple. That was hard to do. Very little since then lives up to that standard of simplicity, definitely not ActivityPub. The web is the web is the web is the web etc. Pick another more humble name. If it ever does achieve the utility of the web does we can take another look.

First, a couple of examples/case studies. 1. About ten years ago I was trying to figure out how to get started with Node.js. I knew a little JavaScript, but nothing I read about Node made it click. It's server software, so there must be a way to write a server? From there, I...

Imagine no doctor would treat you for a serious illness until it was on the verge of killing you. That's the situation women with troubled pregnancy, if she lives in the wrong state, is in, in the United States, now. Imagine the frustration of people in the medical system. I...

It would be great if we could make voting a party, a celebration, something to look forward to, not something you have to make time for. That would probably do more to improve the lives of all Americans than any other single thing. It's like the SuperBowl, the NBA Finals, Coachella or the Oscars, only better -- because we are the stars.

I wish my father had lived to use ChatGPT. He would have been so thrilled. My uncle would have lost his shit.

This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Google Pixel 9 Pro. It was shipped on Sept 6, at this point that's 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money....

BTW, to be clear, I have no interest in working on twitter-like systems.

It's been like a prison to writers, we're stuck with this huge divide, with crap on both sides.

These things exist, they have a jumble of APIs and ways to integrate.

And we've been playing by the rules laid down by Twitter (ev, biz and jack) for 18 freaking years. That's enough.

This will never get sorted out until people realize it needs sorting out.

Not expecting much more to happen there.

Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made.

It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January.

Social networks are criticized when they carry lies from race-haters and fascists, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards.

To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0.

Since I'm about to turn 70 (next May), and because my body is getting old in ways it never has before (of course) -- I've become a more active participant in the health care system. One thing I've learned is it can be hard to get the attention of the doctors. And once you s...