The common denominator between journalism, business and politics is that none of them have any respect for people. To rise in influence, money or power you have to give up imagination, and be ruled by cynicism. If you don’t believe this, show me a journalist who listens, a business that makes products for thinkers, or a politician who lets individual people lead them.

Cynicism isn’t always the right explanation. Sometimes people just want to share something good with you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re stupid, maybe they just like you.

Well we know who the Mets are facing, starting tomorrow, in the league championship series.

Last time we played them in the postseason we kicked their ass. And now they have the nerve to show up again. Geez some people never learn.

And we haven't forgotten how Chase Utley broke Rubin Tejada's leg, deliberately, basically ending his major league career. We thought he should have been arrested for that, no kidding -- it was a vicious un-baseball assault. He and the Dodgers showed no remorse.

BTW, the reason there's such a confluence of power between WordPress and Mastodon is this. WordPress has a complete, debugged, deployed, scaled and frozen API. It's been around since 2016 or so. In contrast Mastodon, while they're doing excellent work, is trying to wrangle a...

Summarizing the last 18 years on the web. Between Twitter and Google Reader, the web was cut into two, and they didn't get along. We may now be on the cusp of fixing that. Why? Because WordPress and Mastodon work with each other in unforeseen ways. We got lucky, because I don't think this was done consciously by the developers of either product.

I have a morning ritual which begins with breakfast and iced coffee, and my laptop, on the kitchen table, to review the news, sports, whatever. Write a few tweets or share a few links. Usually with WNYC playing in the background until I find something I want to read carefull...

A tweet that says something that's obviously true until you realize it's not. "No kid remembers their best day in front of the TV." In fact I have four memories from my youth, watching TV. I remember my father rolling around on the floor when the ball went through Buckner'...

I'm posting development notes on the wordland product in my wordpress/mastodon account. I'm starting to like using the new editor. Today I switched the format we save drafts in from HTML to Markdown. More consistent with my believe that Markdown is the ideal subset of web writing features for the social web.

Isn't it weird that businesses work hard to get better position on Google search, but fight the other way with AI to be excluded. At some point they will could realize that one of the approaches isn't correct.

Quick note about last night's Mets win over Philly. The series is over, the next game on Sunday will be against the winner in the west, either San Diego or Los Angeles. Last night's game was stressful, low scoring, until the Mets star shortstop hit a freaking grand slam home...

Thanks for all the good wishes re the 30th anniversary of the start of blogging here. It's not the same as it was at the beginning, but it's still pretty good. And to all the friends no longer with us, and there are plenty of them -- you are appreciated, respected and missed.

Summary of my posts about New Orleans in December 2005.

December 2005: Biloxi/Gulfport after Katrina.

After Katrina I went to New Orleans to see what was left, esp in the areas where there was a 15-25 foot storm surge in coastal Mississippi. If you went inland from the coast for a few miles there was nothing left. No trees, only a few skeletal all-concrete buildings where the beach used to be, otherwise everything destroyed. What you don't necessarily realize that it isn't just 15 feet of water, it's 15 feet of stormy ocean with cars and building debris being pushed around floating in the water. This video on Threads provides a visual illustration of what a 9 foot surge is like.

Podcast: I was able to write a post that appeared on Mastodon using ActivityPub. Via the WordPress API. Congrats to the ActivtyPub community, Automattic and Mastodon. "It just worked."

A quick podcast to explain what happened here.

BTW, it also supports HTML pretty well, but the title does not appear on the Mastodon version. That's going to be a problem. Actually the title is visible at the bottom. Let's call that an anachronism. Of course the title should/must be at the top.

Okay this is blowing my mind. My friends at Automattic showed me how to turn on ActivityPub on a test WordPress site I've been using. I wrote a test post in my simple WordPress editor, forgetting that it would be cross-posted to Mastodon. I'm following my WordPress site on my...

Guy Kawasaki and I have been going back and forth privately about what we want from our personal ChatGPT. Here's one thing for the list. When I go to Google and search for NBB, it should take me to this page on my blog. It shouldn't even require me to click on Feelin Lucky. ...

Guy Kawasaki and I have been going back and forth privately about what we want from our personal ChatGPT. Here's one thing for the list. When I go to Google and search for NBB, it should take me to this page on my blog. It shouldn't even require me to click on Feelin Lucky. That's the problem with Google. It's had a million years to get to know me, and it still thinks I might mean National Bank of Blacksburg. Google is clueless compared to what I've become accustomed to with ChatGPT. They and everyone else are completely missing the boat here. Folks, this is my blog, read it and use it when I ask a question. Also they don't have to even read my blog, NBB is defined in my glossary, which I make public and is used in rendering all my pages.

Om Malik a long-time friend, NBB and supporter chimes in: "The best version of Dave is the Hopeful Dave." I agree. That's certainly when I'm happiest. Because it means someone is working with someone else. That's the only source of hope in our world.

I'm really proud of what John Gruber said about me as a blogger in his Daring Fireball yesterday: "Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant."

I've mentioned the wpIdentity package a few times recently, and thought I should explain its purpose and history.

I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I'd add this. My blog started because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent emails on my Mac using Eudora, which was an early scriptable app and I had a nice scripting...

Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics. The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least a...

Interestingly, the clock at the bottom of the nightly emails does not agree with the clock on the home page of Scripting News. It's a hard thing to test in real life. And it's completely fitting, given the motto of the blog is "It's even worse than it appears," which could be the motto of programmers everywhere, and probably bloggers too. We always focus on the bad news, of course -- that's human nature -- but always remember, it could be worse. 😄

Today's the big day. Thanks to John Naughton's wonderful piece in the Guardian, I'm hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still there and it still does.

3 hours, 4 minutes, 49 seconds until this blog is 30.

1 day, 3 hours, 4 minutes, 49 seconds until this blog is 30.

I am reminded of 2015, when the Mets were so charmed -- they could be down 9-0 in the 8th inning and you would tune into the game to see how they'd win it. It's not the usual thing for the Mets, who pull defeat from the jaws of victory far more often than the other way. And...