Friday, March 27, 2026
RSS 2.0 as a network#
Yesterday I hatched an idea of a demo program that turns RSS 2.0 feeds with rssCloud into a WhatsApp-type communicator. I called it rss.network, and asked ChatGPT to draw a prototype. #
How I did it. I pasted a screen shot ...
Thursday, March 26, 2026
rss.network sounds nice. What would it be?#
This piece explains the tragedy of how we've set up communication using our networks, all based on exclusive products, rather than standards which mean you can use whatever software you want for more and...
WordPress can now connect via MCP for both reading and writing. This sounds like a possible alternative for the wpcom api that we're building on in WordLand. Sometimes it feels like everything is being reinvented. If the world would just stand still for a moment we might be able to do some building. I wonder how the advent of AI is affecting how WordPress is being developed. I know it's changing everything here. #
Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC, betty.userland.com, to another server, so this page now works again. #
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
You can't really use Claude to do research. It always assumes you're trying to do something. If you don't tell it what you're trying to do it guesses, and then starts telling you what to do. Its guesses are always wildly wrong. How do you tell it to ...
Monday, March 23, 2026
Video demo: Using categories in FeedLand for dynamic OPML lists. #
Happy to report there are FeedLand users who want to edit OPML lists there so they can subscribe to them in another feed reader that has support for dynamic OPML lists. I am happy be...
A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026. #
Saturday, March 21, 2026
Andy Baio noted that it was 20 years ago today that Jack Dorsey posted his first tweet. He also noted it was the day that Ze Frank did his first YouTube video. It got me looking around my own world to see what happened on Mar 21, 2006. Nothing eart...
Friday, March 20, 2026
Quick note on Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management ...
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Bluesky raised $100 million last April, just announcing it now. No doubt part of Toni Schneider's cleanup, new CEO, need to get this out in public now. It was a mistake to keep it hidden. #
Thinking about linkblogging, my blogroll software doesn't...
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Today's song: You Never Can Tell. #
Podcast: A one-line comment on Brent Simmons' blog got me started on a 10-minute ramble about suspension of disbelief, in software. Also a story about meeting Ted Nelson at the West Coast Computer Faire in SF i...
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
I asked Claude: "What is OpenClaw useful for? Do you think I could use it in my programming work, based on what you know about what I do?" Basically it's for non-programmers. Then I asked: "I wonder if I could make software that would be useful to pe...
Monday, March 16, 2026
Thinking about the SAVE Act, 60 Minutes should do a segment on what you have to go through to get a birth certificate in any random state. It's a lot of work, I've had to do it twice in the last few years. You'd have to be a pretty committed voter to ...
They've been having intelligent and clear-thinking guests on CNN and MSNOW on the coverage of the Iran War, unusually good discourse. But the best coverage I've heard has been from Frontiline podcasts. There's a new one out, haven't listened to it yet, but the one I heard yesterday was very informative and probably a better briefing than our president has been getting (or paying attention to). #
Saturday, March 14, 2026
The thing that we all missed is that WordPress is the best candidate for a standard for what an individual social network message is. #
An example. This isn't all the data that WordPress keeps for each post, it's just the stuff that WordLand uses....
Friday, March 13, 2026
Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling...
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Substack would be the web's printer, if they supported inbound RSS. #
Bluesky is actually pretty close to being on the web. The biggest missing piece is inbound RSS. They already support outbound, it could use a review and tuneup, but that half is...
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Trump’s naive attacks or threats against Iran, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Cuba and lack of support for Ukraine guarantee that every country that doesn’t have nukes is going to be working overtime to get them. Assuming they don’t already have the...
Tuesday, March 10, 2026
The Guardian is the coolest news org, paywall-wise. Why don't they innovate, and create a EZ-Pass for news, and run it for other high quality, reader centered pubs. We pay $1 per article read. That's how I as a reader want to do it. I don't like subs...
Monday, March 9, 2026
Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we ...
Saturday, March 7, 2026
Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users. #
I was looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters ...
Friday, March 6, 2026
Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news?#
Remember when, just weeks ago, the Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congr...
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was goi...
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser." Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other ce...
Monday, March 2, 2026
Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I...
Sunday, March 1, 2026
If you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a grea...
Saturday, February 28, 2026
Podcast: Why men hate the Dems. I tell my perspective of MeToo, and how that imho created enough anti-Dem energy to push Trump over the top. Polls won't tell you how the Dems got the rep of being the party run by women to cancel men, but I'm sure...
Friday, February 27, 2026
When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs, the original and only copy of the writing appears on mine. A truly distributed system.#
Maybe it's time to give awards ...
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Recommended: When ICE buys a warehouse in your town.#
Also: New Yorker interview of Conan O'Brien. I love that both O'Brien and Remnick agree that podcasting liberated them as artists. That was the point! When you think about decentralization, ...
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
How many Jeffrey Epstein’s do you think there are? #
New header graphic, the entirely delightful and inspiring Alysa Liu. She's made me a better programmer in the short time she's been on our minds and in our hearts. I do this work because it'...
A bit of history. Read this post from 20 years ago by Phil Jones. That's what I was trying to do back then, just as Twitter came online. I didn't know it then but was the moment when the web stopped growing. When the VCs took over, and monetized the hell out of it. What we got in the end was Trump and Musk. We would have been smart, as a civilization, to hedge against the monopolies. If we get another chance what are we going to do with it? Will we work together this time? It's worth one more shot. My comments on the Jones piece in 2006 and 2026. #
