I'm working with Claude today to finish Gutenberg Land. Figuring it out as we go along. It can run the app itself because it's browser-based. I look forward to a project that runs on a server so it can run it locally and we can really make things hum. This, if I guess correctly, is how Jake is working with Headless Frontier. He just got the debugger working. Why? I asked, given that we have bigger more immediate priorities, like getting Manila running on Digital Ocean (what a trip that will be) -- he explained that's because he wants the AI bot to use the freaking debugger. #
Friday, April 10, 2026
Deshittifying the web, day 2#
The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about making WordPress boom with new apps for writers that run in the web ecosystem, not as plug-ins, in JS running in the browser, or on the de...
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Let's make WordPress boom#
New ways to write with WordPress as the back-end.#
Build an API that combines what wpcom does and storage.#
Recruit devs to create products for this environment.#
Gutenberg will be one of these editors.#
I will...
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
We are all Good Germans now#
I don't know about you but I thought there was a pretty good chance Trump would detonate a nuke somewhere yesterday, and the fact that we did not get him out of there in time to prevent it, says we went along with it...
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Hacker News isn't a software masterpiece. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen.#
This would make quite a movie#
The president of the United States is spinning around acting like a NYC real estate jumbo who accid...
Monday, April 6, 2026
Vibe coding is still an unknown#
I recommend this post on vibe coding.#
There's a lot more to development than coding. #
I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what ...
Sunday, April 5, 2026
The discourse about WordPress#
I love all the new discourse about WordPress. #
It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.#
I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've b...
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not pa...
Friday, April 3, 2026
WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces...
Thursday, April 2, 2026
Please follow me at my new Twitter address: bullmancuso. Whatever anyone thinks of the company the product is still unique, there are people and communities there that I need to communicate with, and I just don't have that kind of network anywhere el...
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
BTW, suggestion to web-based companies that send out notices via email. It's good to do that, but make sure somewhere there's a link to exactly the same material on the web. It can only build traffic for your ideas, earned media.#
Archived Scripti...
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
It's peeve time. I've just listened to a song that inspires me on Amazon Music. A song I've been humming and singing in my head all morning. After it's done, the voice of Alexa comes on and says "BTW, you have two new messages. Would you like to hear...
Monday, March 30, 2026
I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."#
Yesterday I ran a podca...
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Podcast: Jen and I often exchange voicemails. Yesterday I sent one about how she, who is not a programmer, should try creating software with Claude or ChatGPT. I think the hardest part is figuring out how to get it to give you a file that you can run ...
Saturday, March 28, 2026
I'd like an AI bot that could do this. I open my browser to a page on netflix.com. It scans the page, figures out what movies are there, then it searches metacritic for each and presents me a list of all shows with a rating above a certain score. I ...
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...
A bit of history. Read this