In yesterday's piece I suggested people start by creating a free site on wordpress.com to be their home on the open social web. Pro tip: If you're wondering how to do that, ask your favorite AI tool. I often forget I can do that.

Yesterday I wrote about preserving freedom by using replaceable parts to form a social web out of the web itself. Outside the silos. I'm getting comments on it. Nice to see other people thinking likewise. That's what we need to get a bootstrap going. People. And I think a good slogan -- "let the web be the web."

New motto: Let the web be the web.

Someday soon you're going to read a post here, have something quick you want to say, click on a little icon, the editor opens, you write, post, and it's on your blog. I get a pointer. I can read it, and if I want, I can attach it to my post. The writing stays in your space, so you have an archive of all your writing. We let the web be the web.

I have a problem in the development version of WordLand. Sometimes when I bring it to the front, there's an error deep in jQuery, an event has fired and the handler is pointing to a string or number, not a function. It dies, with no stack crawl, because it was responding to a focus event or blur or something like that. Something got overwritten. I have no idea where or how it happened, but once found it will be obvious. I've been trying to figure it out with Claude and ChatGPT and I can see it's going to take a few hours of concentration and learning to figure it out. But then I realized hey -- I bet I could use the Chrome debugger to find this problem. It has Gemini built in. It has access to the running code. I don't have to act as an intermediary, gathering data, pasting stuff into the AI bot. Now I'm looking forward to doing this.

Normal hats don't fit. Not even close. So I buy my caps from BigHatStore.com. In prep for my trip to Ottawa later this month for WordCamp Canada, my first trip out of the country in a long time, I wanted to get a new hat. They don't have a big selection of NBA hats, so ther...

I don’t like the Democratic leaders in Congress, but that doesn’t matter. People say what they’re doing won’t work. I agree. But the elected Democrats swore an oath, to uphold the Constitution. With that constraint there isn’t much they can do other than try to force the Rep...

Latest news from WordPress. Always looking for more sources. 😀

One of the things we can do to preserve freedom, is to resume using the open internet to communicate instead of the silos of Zuck and Musk et al. When you use the web instead of a silo you are helping build community outside, where free speech is the default. The more of us w...

Listening to today's David Frum podcast, from a journalist who says he reps the facts-only brand of journalism. He says his guest invented podcasting in 2014, about 14 years after we started it. He then says that anyone in tech in the late 1990s made hundreds of millions of...

I was having a conversation with Dan Knauss from the WordCamp Canada team. He said that people in the WordPress world don't think of it as a blogging community. I can see why they resist that, blogging has gotten a lot of bad PR in the last 19 years. The same bad PR that RSS...

All the September posts in an OPML file.

I started this site to hold some of the essays John Palfrey posts on Facebook, where they are out of reach of the tools of the open web. John is a longtime friend, for over 20 years, and we did some great stuff together in the early days of the blogosphere. I will happily turn the site over to JP any time he wants to take over, and provide personal support if there are problems. I want him in my online web family, and Facebook simply does not make that possible, it's a silo, as we know and that means it's basically a world unto itself. If we want to solve the problems of the world, we have to step out into the open space where what we write is not so local or controlled.

A picture of the blogger's room at Dean For America in January 2004. A big chunk of political history happened in this room. I was there, in the runup to the Iowa caucus and on the night of the famous Dean Scream. The picture is so tiny because that was the resolution of my digital camera in 2004. It wasn't cheap and as we know it was futuristic.

One thing journalism could do for us is sponsor polls to find out how many people are scared about what's coming next and how scared are they?

The stock market is doing really well, still. But a really important part of our workforce is being attacked by the government. I have no idea what's going on among the immigrant workers in the US. Maybe this is something one of the news orgs could look at. But it seems we must already be short on labor to do the things that keep our lives and businesses functioning. If so, why isn't that showing up in the market?

WordLand is not a blogging platform, it builds on a blogging platform.

People are not symbols.

I watched Alien: Earth to the end, didn't like it, it was Noah Hawley, got great ratings. But I was wary going in. I don't like horror. I don't like seeing human bodies opened up, esp brains and guts. For those reasons I have never been a fan of the original Alien movie, I w...

"It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together." I didn't want to let that pass without notice. As the early blogosphere is co...

Please read Stephanie Booth's three-part report Rebooting the Blogosphere. She's doing great work organizing the ideas around what can we do better in the new blogosphere.

I think there should be a Hall of Fame for open software, formats and protocols that have stood the test of time, esp those that have taken a beating from commercializers. Not for the people who did it, that could be a separate thing, so there are no fights about who gets credit for what, but for the thing itself. It would be a way for the industry to say "Hey sorry we didn't accept you at first, and we just want to acknowledge that, after X years of doing something hard, it worked, we're all using it now." To which the open format would say, "Hey thanks for the call out, and let us know if you did something cool with it."

I now have a feed in the new WordPress News site that went up last week.

The stuff I'm posting on the Daveverse site isn't getting into my Daytona search engine. I'm writing some real stuff there that should be included. I write on Daveverse using WordLand, it's proof that it's working as a comfortable writing tool and helps me think of features I'd like it to have. I do most of my Daveverse writing on my iPad. Test posts are done on my desktop while I'm working on it, but sometimes they contain stuff that could be indexed as well. With enough time I could easily do this, but that's the problem, not enough time.

The OPML version of this blog, according to archive.org, goes back to Dec 28, 2005. It appears that it hasn't updated since June 8, 2010.

I'm writing reports about problems with WordLand using WordLand and I'm liking it. That's a good sign btw. And also I think it looks pretty great viewed in WordPress and in Mastodon.

Automattic shipped a new product called Telex that's a ChatGPT for designing blocks in WordPress designs. Blocks are a simple result of design and programming. Having seen a demo, it looks really useful and is a nice small programming space, where a lot of users could actually control the process, and get something useful quickly. I've gotten pretty adept at teasing images out of ChatGPT, and at some point I'm probably going to need a commerce site, to allocate subdomains for people's feeds in WordLand. Still have to figure out how that works.

I put out a request for WordPress-related blogs on Masto, Bluesky and Twitter this morning. Got enough feeds to start wordpress.feedland.org. If you have a site that should be included, please post the URL in one of those places and I'll add it to the subscription list for the site.

This came up in a thread on Mastodon about "social network" vs "social media." I also think social web should be used sparingly. Because imho there is such a thing as the social web but we haven't developed very much of it, i think because we were intimidated by the silos. I'm not intimidated any more, I'm fed up and going ahead without them.