The logic of Cory Doctorow's enshittification model applies to government too. Both parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money. The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have a...

BTW one thing you haven't heard is that as you get deeper into the AI environment the user gets smarter. Not just better informed, that's what the web has been doing for us. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the people we want working for us.

The demo for Gutenberg is at demo.gutenberg.land. Easy to remember, and makes the point. If you want Gutenberg instead of WordLand, you can have it. Hopefully this reinforces what my goals are here. I do not want to favor any one kind of editor. I want every kind of editor here. I want there to be a web of great editors that runs on the web.

BTW, when playing around with Gutenberg, I wonder why it doesn't allow me to move blocks around, as if it were an outliner? Or maybe it does and I don't know the UI for that?

I've now done two projects with Claude Code, I added a feature to the server running behind WordLand, and adapted wpEditorDemo to work have a second example, using Gutenberg as the editing user interface. Haven't released the Gutenberg app yet, that should happen today, Murp...

I'm working with Claude today to finish Gutenberg Land. Figuring it out as we go along. It can run the app itself because it's browser-based. I look forward to a project that runs on a server so it can run it locally and we can really make things hum. This, if I guess correctly, is how Jake is working with Headless Frontier. He just got the debugger working. Why? I asked, given that we have bigger more immediate priorities, like getting Manila running on Digital Ocean (what a trip that will be) -- he explained that's because he wants the AI bot to use the freaking debugger.

The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about making WordPress boom with new apps for writers that run in the web ecosystem, not as plug-ins, in JS running in the browser, or on the desktop, any desktop, that would work too. Probably would be...

New ways to write with WordPress as the back-end. Build an API that combines what wpcom does and storage. Recruit devs to create products for this environment. Anything that might require text editing is a good idea. Gutenberg will be one of these editors. I will provide W...

I don't know about you but I thought there was a pretty good chance Trump would detonate a nuke somewhere yesterday, and the fact that we did not get him out of there in time to prevent it, says we went along with it. You can decide what that means. I've had several friends...

Hacker News isn't a software masterpiece. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen. As with Craig's List, Markdown, HTML, WordPress, RSS 2.0, Lotus 1-2-3 and of course these are just some of the building blocks of the tech stack we use today many years later. A press release does not count as validation.

The president of the United States is spinning around acting like a NYC real estate jumbo who accidentally was elected president and after only five years in office has realized a whole new level of trolling. It started with cable news, then went to Twitter, then masked Amer...

I recommend this post on vibe coding.

There's a lot more to development than coding.

I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.

I think people find it amazing that they can create code, not just that the machine can create it. I know what that's like because I get a rush from creating images, something I never had a skill for, so all of a sudden being able to express myself with drawings was a breakthrough for me. ;-)

I've spent a few decades making commercial quality software in a variety of contexts, and so far I wouldn't rush to get rid of my dev teams based on the idea that the bots can do their work.

I think more realistically we have powerful new tools that we as yet have not learned how to use, but it's pretty exciting to see what may be possible.

I love all the new discourse about WordPress. It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape. I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you c...

Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.

Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close to saying it. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn...

WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.

Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page.

Does EmDash have a feed reader built in??

Suggestion for feed reader devs. Put a Check Now button on the page for a single feed. It shouldn't overburden your system because it's just doing an HTTP read and a little parsing. Not much more work than reloading a page in the browser. The benefit is you can see a current view of the news according to a specific feed without waiting. Makes the web roughly instantaneous for every feed, even ones that don't support rssCloud. FeedLand has such a button.

Things are changing a lot. Huge flow of ideas, and some catching up to do. Mind bombs in every direction.

Last night while watching sports I learned via ChatGPT about MCP.

Here's what it can do and people *are* using it for this

You could turn ChatGPT into an easy editor for WordPress posts.

Just as I have developed the habit of getting it to create a handoff.md file when I'm done with a session, I could write something with ChatGPT helping, I don't ever do that myself but i might, if it were easy. and when I'm ready to publish, I'd say "Please publish this on my daveverse site now." I might specify a category or two, or set defaults, it's good at that stuff. I've taught Claude to write code in my style, so I can maintain it (to answer Aral Balkan's question on Mastodon).

We create little hierarchies everywhere we go. So many places. I have no room for new ones, yet I have to make room because there are people there I want to work with. Now I have to manage it. If an alien came to Earth and asked why we don't just create a way for a little...

This is something we can and should research.

Let's give one of the ai apps a fairly good idea for an app we want to use, and help it -- not by coding, just by answering questions about how it will work, and Iterating over the product until it works like we want it. Sometihng simple, like perhaps a text editor for Mastodon. Something that isn't squished in a tiny little text box, and has icons for bold, underline, links, etc. It could be useful.

Then let's look at the code with an open mind. I think i've given it enough examples of good maintainable code that I could get it to produce maintainable code.

This was in reply to a Mastodon post by Aral Balkan.

Please follow me at my new Twitter address: bullmancuso. Whatever anyone thinks of the company the product is still unique, there are people and communities there that I need to communicate with, and I just don't have that kind of network anywhere else.

My first real post in the New Dave On Twitter, or N-DOT.

When I think of "Slack" my brain immediately translates it to "AOL." I'm not kidding.

Yesterday I wrote about AI introducing doubt with something as fundamental as how software is created now with the advent of AI software that can be used effectively to write software. Behind that I wondered if the open source developers of WordPress had changed their methodo...

Continuing, isn't it a shame that CloudFlare didn't take a different approach? What if they had created a fantastic WordPress runtime, which seems to be where most of their effort went, and that's where their expertise lies, not in crafting new user experiences. A service yo...

BTW, suggestion to web-based companies that send out notices via email. It's good to do that, but make sure somewhere there's a link to exactly the same material on the web. It can only build traffic for your ideas, earned media.

Got an email from Automattic about MCP support in WordPress, which is now available on their servers. With this new interface you can write prompts in Claude etc that do things in your WordPress workspace. Kind of like a scripting language, but English, like this -- "In Word...

There's so much bullshit, why deliberately add more -- in hope of being either funny or memorable -- and only succede at annoying.