If you want to read something good, go with yesterday's piece about the web and evolution. A lot of things came together for me there.

And if you want to listen to something good, pick up the latest podcast. It has two purposes. 1. To tell the story of how I lost my Twitter/X account, hoping it makes its way to someone at the company who can turn my account back on. 2. To illustrate how we could use AI to make customer service work much better than it does. It's a real killer app. As if you thought of Craig's List when Craig did. This is not anything I can do, but I would love to use it. Right now the tech industry reputation is getting worse all the time. Do something that visibly makes people's lives better now. People are pretty nervous about AI. And so far you have to be a scientist of some kind to really appreciate it. But the internet as a place of business, education and health care is a big global mess.

The killer app of AI is customer service. A podcast about just that.

When I designed podcasting, I could have invented a better way to record and play radio shows, but MP3 already existed, as did recording and playback hardware and software, so it was the no-brainer choice. No one ever asked why we are using MP3. TBL did it when he designed ...

New podcast episode where I explain how I lost my Twitter account and how this is exactly the kind of thing that AI can do economically, esp for people who pay actual money for your service. I can't buy anything from you if I can't use my account.

Poll: Do you have a blog?

Query: I have not done any vibe coding and have a question for those who have. Suppose you request a change in an app you've been working on with the AI for a while, adding features, changing things around based on learning and testing, which is generally what happens after you've been working on something new. Here's the question. What happens when you ask for a change that requires the codebase to be reorganized. How did that go? Do the AIs even know that's possible or do they just pile on special cases?

What happened to polling? I had a poll app for a while, then Twitter came out with one and I switched to that. I don't know if Twitter still has it, but it would be bad form to require something at Twitter to engage with me here. How do you do polling, or do you?

I just remembered why I love the United States of America.

I am going to try again to open up the editing side of OPML. It's gotten pretty famous in RSS-land, but people don't know there are editors for OPML, and some which work pretty well with subscription lists, and could be made to work even better. Drummer can run scripts in JavaScript, so users can customize. I'm going to make an effort myself to start using Drummer to edit subscription lists and see what comes up.

I'd like to have an OPML subscription list with feeds with news about specific feed-based products. I started a thread on the reallysimple repo for people to post links to such feeds. Once I have enough feeds, I'll publish the URL of the subscription list. We should, in this community, of all communities, a good way to communicate about developments. Too many good ideas get lost without this.

I've taught ChatGPT and Claude.ai how to properly indent code so I can paste it into my outliner, and it will represent the structure correctly. I just got it to do the same thing with HTML code I copied from the Chrome debugger. Pasted it into the outline. Have a look.

If you're using OPML for your blogroll, here's an unofficial place to let us know what you're doing.

I think the really big money in AI will be helping all the commerce sites get competitive again, their sites are breaking, and are anemic compared to what you can do with AI. I think the WordPress community is in great position to get a huge amount of business here because many of these people are your customers. If you're a WordPress developer I'd love to hear what you think.

A new updated version of FeedLand via Docker. It's now possible to run FeedLand on a local machine in a private network. Thanks to John Johnston and Frank McPherson for their help.

President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up.

It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).

They all say podcasting‘s open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.

Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple.

I would like to have an OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing.

Just noted that Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continu...

I wrote a this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards.

I saw a product announcement from Jake Spurlock -- a new feed reader called Today. From the description sounds well-thought-out. He explains -- "Google killed Reader in 2013. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. So I built it." I also know someone named John Spurloc...

New account on Twitter: DWiner43240. The old one dating back to the dawn of time is disabled, so at least the new owners can't post anything there, if I understand correctly.

Update. I've been able to create an account on Twitter, but it's not @davewiner. If you're on Twitter, it would help if you'd RT the post. Thanks!

BTW, people make the same mistake with AI that we make with every new tech. We focus on the creators not the users. As users we are learning a new skill, how to specify our needs precisely. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.

Back when I ran a software company I'd help the team understand why they should be very very nice to our customers. "They have our money in their pockets." It generally got a laugh partially because I was their boss, but I like to think also because it's the truth.

Yesterday, I had to ship an envelope to the UK and got caught in dead ends at the Fedex and DHL sites. One of them said my zip code wasn't in the town I live in. How do you get past that?? These companies are losing business because their systems are broken. Maybe they worked at one time. I used ChatGPT as I often do to get help on one of these antiquated sites. And while ChatGPT has the technology and the Fedex has the info, they just have to get together and upgrade the user experience, and eventually of course is the AI version of the UI becomes the real one.

Paywalls that require you to subscribe to an Atlanta news org when you don’t live in Atlanta prob don’t generate much revenue. Why not instead charge per article. Like a toll you pay on a road you drive on once every few years. I wouldn't even have an exception for Atlanta residents. If they start spending more money than a subscription costs, you could offer a subscription then, as a way to save money. Kind of the way Amazon lets you buy a certain amount of coffee beans without requiring you to sign up for monthly delivery. They do tell you how much you'd save if you subscribed. Everyone appreciates a chance to save money, but still might not want the commitment. And asking someone from upstate NY to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a total bullshit. An insult to both our intelligences.