2001: "Like a boat, a human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary."

If you're psyched about what the polls say about the midterms, remember that Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite to win in 2016, based on polling.

I like the way AI is evolving, with Mush from Meta and 00s from OpenAI. Even the main programs are starting to provide real world services that the providers should be providing. They could possibly take over commerce the way Amazon has taken over shopping. There's room to improve in everything about the way we do business. And it seems like they've been researching this and experimenting (of course) and this is what they've come up with. Haven't tried them yet, but it's a good direction to go. It really should be Apple and Google doing this, btw. Also ChatGPT can help you understand your credit score. That's something I'd seriously like to ask some questions about.

After running the first Bloggercon at Harvard in 2003 a famous tech company had a meetup to talk about the same stuff at a private invite-only session in the Bay Area. The invitations went to all the discussion leaders at Bloggercon. People I chose. I was not invited. Only o...

I keep thinking of cheesy ways I could switch over to https for new posts on Scripting News, esp now that Google is getting more militant in trying to sweep all the history of the web into the trash. I know people think it would be a snap to do the conversion, honestly, so...

The problem with regulating AI is that no one knows where to begin. Yes it can do things that make you question your sanity for letting it have write access to your online work and private info. But if it is behaving itself you can do things you otherwise couldn't come close...

When designing your RSS feeds, the top level title should be the title of the user's account. So if Bluesky had a feed for each user, the channel-level <title> element of the feed would be

• <title>Bluesky: Mark Cuban</title>

Why? Well because readers need context. And it's easy.

And feeds are showing up in places where there isn't much room for the titles, so you have to make your characters count.

Bluesky shows the user's address, imho it should be the string the user chooses for their presence on the site, usually simply their name.

September in OPML. First monthly rollover in the new system.

Yesterday I posted a note about the problem with the nightly email service. The problem was that Claude Code wrote over a code file that the app includes and needs. This is one of those things they're talking about in the press. Maybe it was a glitch, one of those "AI makes ...

Robert Eickmann: A Go implementation of RSS Chat — distributed social networking over RSS feeds, with real-time WebSocket updates.

Programming note: Fixed a bug in our nightly email service. If you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing please try again.

My long-overdue review of Don't Look Up. I know people say it's a bad movie, but I love it so much and it's so incredibly watchable. I could watch the whole thing from beginning to end for the fifth time and still find it entertaining. So many good jokes, and it's got the best actors and acting and best of all Jennifer Lawrence is one of the stars, and she plays a very unlikely JL character, but then she can play any character. Here's she's a totally nerdy PhD student who gets a comet named after her. She has a boyfriend who dreams of being an influencer. They laugh at everything that's so stupid about our civilization, and its downfall, and near the end of the movie Leonardo gets the line that makes it so sad. We did have everything and we keep blowing it, over and over. We haven't evolved enough to use the greatness we inherited.

You only have one mortal body. There’s only so much one body can use. After a certain point you either realize this and adjust as best you can, or you make a big mess of everything.

Today is the day we on the web remember Om Malik. September 29 is his birthday. Om died on June 24 at the ridiculous age of 59. I knew Om for many years, he was an early blogger, a user of our software who stayed close, and gave us great advice about where to take it. Lat...

I didn't follow baseball this year, I couldn't get it up for the Mets while I was trying to process what the Knicks did for NY in June. The Mets did something like that, but they never could unite the city the same way the Knicks did, because the Mets have always been the se...

Rootfiles in Frontier, a new collection starts with docserver.root, the code and content for docserver.userland.com. Claude also wrote a Node app that extracts all the data from a root file.

I was browsing around the WordPress blogs and found a new one in German that pointed to something new in blogrolls. It's Matthias Pfefferle, of course -- this time connecting up with the world Manton and I were working on a couple of years ago. Read about it here. He works at Automattic and has done pretty much all the work to connect WordPress to everything he can find, including ActivityPub and AT Proto. I have to swing back to FeedLand and RSS.chat asap, so we can start building together. Not going to miss his window on this stuff.

The bottom line is that tech companies have rarely understood that developers can be major influencers. We give a platform new meaning. It's a good deal to invest in the people doing the work, who often are doing it for love more than money. That grew into the blogosphere. There was no telling where Frontier would take us, and it would have cost them so little to help insure it had a future, but the did the opposite.

As I go through porting Frontier, there's a sad note. What if Apple had made it a goal that Frontier move along with their OS. That it was a unique advantage of the Mac and should be promoted as such. Don't laugh, because Apple did do that for ThinkTank and MORE. We spent a ...

Sometimes I forget how much fun I have making software tricks that people don't even notice but contribute to the "it thinks like I do" feeling a of crafted UI. I think of it like walking on the Highline in NYC. You're just walking, right? But you're above it, in a city where a lot of what's going on is above you. And it's comfortable. Why? You don't need to know, it just is. But someone made it that way.

When I started this project, I had a goal in mind that has been achieved. It was part of a project I named daveMigrates. The goal was to use new hardware and system software to do the work I was doing in Frontier. At first we got a portion of Frontier working, planning to u...

Milestone. We were able to get the DocServer site for Frontier to build. Here's the page for the file verbs. It worked the first time, but there were errors. Fixed them and while the site looks dated, of course -- it was created in the 90s, I think, we got past this one. We will update the CSS to be more like the DocServer site for Drummer, which was done a couple of years ago. Almost everyone on the team contributed to this site, Wes Felter, Andre Radke and of course Jake Savin and Brent Simmons, and myself. I see that a lot and it makes me happy to see this group effort preserved.

The bigco's really think they own the web: "XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart from the old version frozen into browsers. This lack of advancement, coupled with the rise of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that offer more flexible and powerful DOM manipulation, has led to a significant decline in the use of client-side XSLT. Its role within the web browser has been largely superseded by JavaScript-based technologies such as JSON+React." In other words we don't need these features for our sites so fuck off.

This is what bluesky.buildRss creates. You can subscribe if you want, it will be updated every night at 11PM Eastern, murphy-willing.

Screen shot of the Apps table in Frontier. Most of the apps are very old, but we added two new ones this week, for Mastodon (shown) and Bluesky, added today. There's a lot of information in the screen shots, and when I see something like that in my travels, I'll try to call it out on the new site.

Atlantis update. We found docserver.root and the static site builds. As you can see from the screen shot it needs moderizing, luckily we have a much more beautiful design already deployed for Drummer.

Toni Schneider, CEO of Bluesky, responded to my advice, and I responded to that. Someday I hope that thread will be browsable in either app, and could be written in either app (Bluesky or RSS.chat) or any other compatible app, which basically means supporting RSS 2.0 with some new elements to get us to the next level of discourse with just a few little standards, like podcasting, but for text.

I'm contemplating a couple of additions to Frontier in the Atlantis release. Two new formats, JSON and Markdown, have come along and become popular since I last worked on Frontier. Two fantastic open formats, in wide use on the web. From many years of working in JavaScript, I...

HTTPS is bugging me again. Now that my main desktop is finally a modern Mac, I can see how ugly Google is getting about my poor old blog that goes back to 1994. I think they should make exceptions for historic sites. Go ahead and have your AI do a scan and see that there are ...