How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill, and they focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received.

Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to turn Bluesky into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design.

WordLand v0.5.17 -- Two changes with linkblog support.

Looking forward to putting linkblogs in WordLand to bed, I don't think too many people other than myself will use the feature, but I wanted to get it right and then move on.

BTW, this is where we're going with WordLand. I think we can have a simpler social web that builds on simple open formats. That's the plan. I will make an instance of this to show it can be done, both sides, reading and writing. They will work wonderfully with each other. You can write a nice reader and/or writer and it will work with this simple network. Think of the MacWrite and MacPaint of the open social web. Enough to get the ball rolling.

WordLand 0.5.16 -- Rounding out the linkblogging features.

Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, and give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness.

More feedback on the design of Bluesky's API.

Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's one of an agonizer. We have to stop believing these people. They've all been vetted thoroughly, they play their parts. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is and how cold and heartless they are.

Here's the address of the feed for my linkblog: dave.linkblog.org. I think it's kind of interesting to have the top page of a site be a feed. I don't hide the XML-ness of it. I never supported the obfuscation, it's confusing, makes people not trust RSS, imho. I think the f...

The archived source for June 2025.

Advice from a longtime developer. If you think "I should do a backup," do it. Now, don't wait. Make it really easy to do a backup. Choose a menu item that's always available when you're working. The reason is karma. God hears all your thoughts. When that thought pops int...

If the Dems were competitive they would run ads now with Senator Tillis talking about the damage the new Repub bill will do to Americans, emphasizing this is a Republican speaking, taking one for the country.

Advice from a longtime developer. 1. If you think "I should do a backup," do it. Now, don't wait. 2. Make it really easy to do a backup. Choose a menu item that's always available when you're working.

I needed a tiny feed reader for an app I was working on.

When I was having trouble getting into my AWS account last week, I ordered a Yubikey, which everyone says is the best way to go. I thought I'd set it up first thing Monday morning (ie now) but it turns out it's a major undertaking? Why does this have to be so hard? I guess I'll find out, but not today. I want to make some progress on my development project first. Maybe later.

Another criticism of the Bluesky API. They make each developer do the support for Open Graph metadata, when it would be much more efficient for them to support it on their end. I would be happy to give them the code. It's not that complicated. But translating the OG format, which for crying out loud is a huge standard, into their arcane format which is only supported by Bluesky, is going in the wrong direction, and frankly is ridiculously arrogant. Show a little humility. Facebook is huge, and the format isn't just used by Facebook, everyone uses it.

Benjamin Wittes: "It’s remarkable how many non-New Yorkers seem to care who the mayor of New York City is." They do and they're right to, the same way we were concerned how the Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles would react to the invasion of the Marines and hi...

A case study in APIs. Creating a new post via Bluesky's API.

Developers, consider this example.

First, here's the packet of information I'm sending to Bluesky to get it to post something.

• {
• "title": "",
• "description": "Room for One More on Mount Rushmore?",
• "mailaddress": "",
• "password": "",
• "urlsite": "https://bsky.social/",
• "link": "https://politicalwire.com/2025/06/29/room-for-one-more-on-mount-rushmore/"
• }

And here's what comes back.

• {
• "uri": "at://did:plc:zxb2lwpxo4axkkkgjwqand24/app.bsky.feed.post/3lsqtoowg2h2h",
• "cid": "bafyreifhet2772xmic24qr4xbui4l5lllvgek2a7kmmchojwwkufvzalci",
• "commit": {
• "cid": "bafyreicjjsd4ixlezubezaxzfaqxxpwlvoxdqwyxblnme5uh6ehklxth3a",
• "rev": "3lsqtoowpsx2h"
• }
• }

Now that we know the outcome of the 2024 election, not just in numbers but in what it's doing to our beloved country and the rest of the world, it's interesting to revisit the campaign that journalism ran last year to force President Biden to step aside. That's one of the fu...

With any luck this will be the final test. Hahaha.

It's possible this is the last test post. (It worked, so it is the last.)

There are probably going to be a few more of these.

You hear the term Open Social Web used in places where things that are social are neither open or web. They aren't that far, and here today I'm going to give you a fast and easy recipe for linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness ope...

We live in interesting times. Never a dull moment! 😄

I'm communicating more with people in the WordPress community. There's so much to the story, we have to make up for 20 years or so since we turned in the direction of silos. There's a lot of catching up to do. I hope at some point people figure out that a lot of interop can be attained very inexpensively and quickly by hooking the input and output of each distinct network up to other networks that don't currently interop. Neither ActivityPub or AT Proto is suited for that. Too complicated and honestly too strange. RSS has has 20+ years to burn in. Lots of familiarity there, and lots of working code. When people get really serious about interop, and are willing to sacrifice a little personal glory, there's a very good compromise available. We've been here before. This isn't a new idea in tech at all.

I've been looking for hard-hitting stories about yesterday's Supreme Court decision that gives Trump far more power than any American president has ever had. And unlike military power, which they are clearly not very good at using, the people running the show in the White House, are very much prepared for how they will use the new power, which appears to be unlimited.

I'm working on the next part of linkblogging in WordLand. I want to really switch over to the new routine. There was a question of whether I wanted to push the links to the social sites, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. I've decided I do, but for the moment only to push to Bluesky. It's the only one with a simple enough-enough API or feels worth the effort to me. I'm basically focusing my politics on Bluesky these days. Also seems there are people there who are interested in the development I do. I have far more "followers" on Twitter, but at this point I think most of them are gone. And Threads just dropped off my radar a while back. I'm just not interested. For me now it's mostly Bluesky and Facebook.

Net-net: I would pay money to hear a podcast with Frum and Stewart interviewing each other. That would be very powerful stuff imho.