These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.

New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄

Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.

Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. And my favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places.

Me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner.

Note that the terminal I was using had uppercase and lowercase letters. This was a big innovation!

I was using a PDP-11/45 to write in C.

See the comment thread from 2014 on Facebook.

I lived in a big house with 10 roommates. And as weird as it must seem from the point of view of 2025, I was the only one who used a computer. I would tell them all the time that we'd all use computers someday. They rolled their eyes and smiled. "There goes Dave again." The reason I was so sure was email and writing tools.

I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS, basically because WordPress does. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS.

WordLand is simply an editor for writers who publish to WordPress.

I'm interested in knowing what browsers people who use WordLand are using, so I asked ChatGPT to write code that makes sense of them in some human-readable way. This is what it came up with. Interested in knowing what people think? I imagine there are packages that do this but I haven't looked yet.

An email arrived from the Social Security Administration entitled Help Us Slam the Scam. Explains how not to get scammed by people who want our checks. Wonder if they realized it applies equally to Elon Musk, richest man in the world, who wants to eat old people's cupcakes because, well I can't explain it.

People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that open web is more important, to me at least.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a death panel as described by Republican lawmakers as they fought the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised it was willing to do it.

According to the bot: "The concept of 'death panels' was a widely debunked political talking point used by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. It falsely suggested that government-run committees would decide whether individuals—especially the elderly or disabled—would receive life-saving care.

"I can generate an image depicting a grim, dystopian bureaucratic setting where a group of shadowy officials in suits are sitting at a long, dark table, stamping papers while an elderly patient looks on with concern. The room would have a cold, sterile look, with a looming clock symbolizing bureaucratic power over life and death."

For all kinds of marketing materials..

This is what the page looks like when published.

I posted something sad on Bluesky last night. It was short, but the thinking behind it wasn't. Here's the quote: It might be the last minute but we can still legally remove Trump, and objectively it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I got two responses from Karoli Kun...

WordLand user: "Does it make a difference if I can just dash off a short note without all the other bullshit that goes with publishing online." Yes, it should be as easy to take a note in WordPress as it is in Bluesky. I didn't buy that assumption that WordPress has to be heavy machinery for writers. What if I just want to write something quickly and get back to the other thing I was working on. Also the edit box in WordLand starts out the size of a tiny little text box, but grows as you add more words. You are allowed to keep going. No character limit.

Just saw a report that styling isn't working in WordLand in latest versions of Safari. We're using MediumEditor to do the editing. Did a quick query in Claude.ai and there do appear to be some compatibility issues with Safari. A request that people actually report these problems in the repo, via the Support link in the main menu, otherwise it's hit or miss. Thanks.

Since Bluesky gave us the ability to limit responses to people I follow, the amount of spam/abuse has been reduced to a trickle. People can still comment, by quoting my post. But they want to troll, to gain exposure to my followers. Helping promote my ideas is not their idea of fun.

Would have preferred if, when replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people are. The drumbeat: Enough is enough.

Aziz Poonawalla wrote a review of WordLand. I'd like to respond. First, I'd like to say I put a lot of thought into this product, so it is the way it is for good reason. I'm trying to escape from the limits of twitter-like systems. I want a writing world where we get the fea...

This started out as a post on the support group, but it became a post that needed to be on the blog. The groundrules here are -- if you see a problem in the support group and you can help with it, please give it a try and speak up. It's important to develop a community her...

We should be declaring independence from both political parties. We have to get together with other citizens whose lives are going to be torn apart by what's happening, and the Dems are not at this time representing us. This is our government that is being overthrown.

WordLand is where we start to boot up a simple social net using only RSS as the protocol connecting users. Rather than wait for ActivityPub and AT Proto to get their acts together. I think we can do it with feeds and start off with immediate interop without the complexity of federation. I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke, although it may incite a smile and a giggle. And that's ok.

WordLand opened for everyone to use yesterday. There was a deal-stopping bug reported last night, fixed provisionally immediately, then for real this morning. Prevented new users from getting started. Really embarassing. If you have trouble, please report. There's a link for Support in the main menu in the app.

Jay Rosen started a list of journalism sources on Bluesky. John Spurlock wrote an app that generates an OPML subscription list using Bluesky's API. It will enable us to recreate a world that Jay put together, outside of Bluesky. From AT Proto to OPML and RSS.

We aren't prepared for what's coming.

WordLand is now open for anyone to sign up. Here we go! :-)

A note to designers of Bluesky as a platform.

I've been playing with adding metadata to posts in a thread.

As you can see the metadata, in the screen shot below, overwhelms the content in the post.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a set of templates to choose from, post types? Let designers be part of the platform.

Journalism is as usual writing news they could have written last year and should have if they weren't dreaming that somehow we'd escape End of Democracy 2.0 (spoiler: we didn't). Who is Elon Musk? Until I read his Wikipedia profile last week, I only had a vague idea. I want...

Something you hear from Democratic politicians and MSNBC hosts. "We know why Musk is cutting so much, it's to fund a huge tax cut for billionaires." They don't actually know that and I doubt it's true. Show me another example where Musk did anything to benefit anyone but himself? Why should he share the loot he's grabbing with other rich folk? What did they do to help? Nah I think it's all for him, with a taste going to the Trump and Putin families. He's going to use his new power to buy something else. The question is what? What else could he want? I imagine he wants all the money in the world not just the most.

Can you imagine how livid developers of other AI platforms are that Musk gets exclusive access to all the private information stored in US government databases.

Imagine Bezos calling Trump.

"Hey I thought we were friends. I can send you another billion. 2 billion? 100 billion?"

"Call Elon, if he says it's OK I'll sign the order."

Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, OpenAI, etc etc.

I'm starting to use the rewrite of my thread publisher on Bluesky. Here's an example. And here's the version of the thread without being broken up into 300-character chunks (you can get it by clicking in the metadata box below the text of the post). I don't like it. The software is as good as it can be, given the extreme limits of the twitter-like environment. I went all the way with this, but I'm not sure I'm going to release it. But I'm going to keep using it, and maybe I'll think of something that makes it fun or worthwhile, or maybe I'll just chalk it up to another learning experience.