WordLand v0.5.6: You can customize the menu that pops up when you select text. and we now handle sites with large category lists, the previous limit was 100.

It would be nice to have ChatGPT available in the terminal app on the Mac. I could use it as a stenographer.

I've got Crazy Fingers in my brain. Can't stop humming it.

I'm rebuilding my nightly email-sending code from the bottom up. Something I never properly understood is that most mail clients don't include your CSS files, so people were seeing the writing and images with no style. What an embarassment. As often is the case in 2025, I have ChatGPT to guide me through getting this right. The secret is inline styles. And there's no simple way to do the conversion, except element by element. Seems like an OS could do this for us somewhere along the line. Now I have to think about how to test it without trying to just switch it over, trying to avoid breaking everyone at once. But the nightly email might start looking a lot better for some real soon, and for others, only slight almost no noticeable difference.

We should demand that the new owner of Chrome must respect the open web as something it does not have the power to change. Google never got this and we're losing the archive function of the web because of this. Please read and pass on -- now -- we're in a unique position to fix this.

There's a company that I have an account with because they're the only ones who provide the service I need, so I have to stay with them. They have made my telephone unusable, they call me all the time from varying phone numbers, wanting me to do things, or with a "courtesy r...

One of the nice things about WordLand is that titles are optional because some posts are too short and simple to require a title. In a sense they are their own title. We know the benefits well, having used Twitter for a long time. There's no reason this simple idea shouldn't work in RSS feeds and blogging, in fact RSS doesn't require titles for items. And there's no requirement in WordPress either. So we support them, with gusto. I want this network to do what Twitter does, and everything Twitter doesn't do that writers want. #writersweb

Start with the dark imagery of the Ridley Scott commercial for Apple in 1984. A woman athlete is running toward a screen carrying a big hammer, getting ready to hurl it at a huge screen with Big Brother's head, lecturing a huge hall filled with lifeless people listening. He has dead eyes. The runner represents life and freedom. The overall image is dreary and lifeless but she is a bright light of hope for the future. Inspire me with this image. I want to be inspired.

Good morning from Oaxaca in Mexico. We are here with my sad and depressed programmer friend, back from his European tour of glee club train compartments, receptions and cheese races with Europeans named Gouda, happy and carefree while my programmer friend, pictured here, thinks about returning to the good old United Snakes of Americans. As he sits on the beach, admiring the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, he considers taking a job at a local Burger King. He enjoys their hamburgers even if he is not enjoying life at the moment. His eyes are tearing up as he remembers the tragedy that befell him and others in the Great Gouda Race of Luxembourg.

Yesterday I wrote a piece that summed up Twitter as an entrepreneurial project. "It would have been better if the founders had made less money, and opened the door for lots of competition right from the start. That's the philosophy of the web. Instead they captured the web, ...

It's crazy to even think of moving Chrome from Google to OpenAI. The web needs to not be owned by anyone, esp not owned by the tech industry. What Google tried to do to the web is obscene. I love ChatGPT, but let's keep Chrome out of their owner's greedy little hands. Set it up so it stands alone.

If you're a young person contemplating a career in tech, great! It's fun, and you can help people doing this. But please don't listen to the VCs and entrepreneurs who say it's all about changing the world. Instead think of it this way -- you're going to create tools for peopl...

Many good points in yesterday’s unusual Olbermann podcast, but the one that stuck with me is that at some point Republican incumbents will figure they don’t have a future in what Trump is trying to create and thus have everything to lose if he prevails. He thinks senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may already be there.

A video demo that shows how to set categories in WordLand, and I ramble through lots of philosophy and trivia. But the answer is right up front so you can skip all that michegas. ;-)

New docs: The role of Markdown in WordLand.

Silicon Valley encourages entrepreneurs to think in terms of changing the world. I was one of them when I arrived there in 1979 at the age of 24, with world-changing software ready to go (or so I thought). A few years later, I shipped a way of writing that was only possible ...

Zeldman tries WordLand: "For bloggers who mostly write, it’s a clean, distraction-free interface with strong basic features that lets you offload CMS duties to WordPress."

I find that moral judgement of other people is a waste of time. I have enough trouble sticking to my own values. I find I have to apologize far too often to judge other people. And you never can tell what struggles other people have that explain what they do, you don't always get the right answer, if you don't know what they're dealing with.

I know this is ancient history, but I was thinking the other day about how Tim O'Reilly kept saying he had nothing to do with the temporary takeover of the name RSS by RDF advocates. But it was an O'Reilly exec, Dale Dougherty, who drove it. I suppose perhaps Tim was saying,...

People who look down their noses at ChatGPT and its cousins tend to say it's not art. Hardly the most interesting thing, but as I've written, art lives mostly in the mind of the viewer, it's the effect it has on the viewer -- that imho is the art. BTW I can tell when people ...

My niece sent me a self-portrait, which I liked very much.

So I tried an experiment. I pasted her self-portrait and my head shot of myself and asked ChatGPT to render my photo in the style of her art.

“You gotta do what you gotta do.”

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Dave's not here."

I keep coming back to this -- ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I've been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you'll see its significance. You didn't write it, I didn't. Each of us may have contributed a little, and isn't that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn't get more meaningful than this.

One reason I want to bring blogging and social media together is so I don't have to think about where I will post stuff. This is really important. I want my blog to be a complete record of everything I write publicly. The way our online writing world has been siloized, basica...

I got a US Mail notice to answer a Census form, so being a good American I did. It was a .gov address, and looked like a government form. The initial questions were standard census questions, then they started getting into personal things that I didn't like answering. Then they asked if I was born in the US. That's a really shitty question to ask now. I was glad to see that I could just click Next without answering any question, and they got worse, more invasive, esp considering who the president is, and who he brought with him, so I just closed the page and wrote this post. I would, if I had it to do over again, not answered any of their questions, or maybe stopped at the standard Census questions from years past.

I'm working on a baseline theme for WordLand-authored sites. I want to show people how to get a good result with WordLand, even if they have plenty of experience with WordPress, but especially if they don't. I want people to look at a user's site and think "Hey I want one of those!" Not too fancy, just get out of the way and let the writer's writing stand out and look great. This is a replay of the work we did on Manila and then Radio. I hope we're able to start a designer community as vibrant and productive as the one we had a few years ago.

Today's song: Pump It Up.

Everyone has to communicate in plain language, directly to the people. The courts, universities, every institution that the president is defaming. Go direct, go around the media. Start communicating in the language we communicate in these days. Use the tools. The campaign never stops. Then we'll know what we have to do to protect the rule of law. And the Dems are starting to do that, some of them, thankfully. Best example so far -- AOC and Bernie. Elizabeth Warren. Chris Murphy, Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen. And lately some Repubs too. It's the same old thing the web does -- Sources Go Direct.