I wonder if people understand what a sanctuary city is. In a sanctuary city the local government accepts the fact that there are people living in the city who are not there legally. They want these people to be able to call the police without fear of being turned into the...

Isn't it funny how the two political forces we thought we completely defeated in the 90s are coming back for their revenge.

Hegseth's job is to stay out of the way while the Heritage Foundation separates the military into those who take loyalty seriously and those who are retiring.

For that job being an alcoholic is a plus. 😀

They're interviewing for who wants to be his replacement.

His job is to keep the seat warm.

Our best hope is that the factions within MAGA fight each other. We're assuming they have a way to keep everyone in line, but the more power they capture, the harder that's going to be.

It's been over 24 hours, and my viral post from yesterday is still getting lots of RTs and likes. An observation -- it's made my Bluesky account virtually unusable. Anything else I publish there is swamped by the viral post. I'm also working on a new version of the software that turns Bluesky into a feed reader. It will be able to manage multiple rivers, where the first version could only do one. The next reader will be all the posts from me on all the various services I post to that have outbound RSS feeds. After that, I have ideas for special feeds for specific publications. I want to help our friends in the blogging and news world, using the best communication tools available. I find now that people are much more open to ideas. This is good. But we should never be complacent. Learn from the competition. They were getting ready for this moment, we weren't.

I kept this screenshot assuming someday we might be asked to forget. Back when the NYT tried sometimes to report the news as it actually happened.

Objectively, January 6, 2021 was even more of a "day which will live in infamy" than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was more insidious because while Hawaii was an American territory, January 6 was an attack on the actual center of our government. Had the mob prevailed, the US would have been defeated, right there and then.

The Capitol police were our last line of defense, they received no help from military.

The Supreme Court should count their blessings too, because their building is just behind the Capitol.

BTW, Bluesky, for me, is already a greater flow generator than Twitter ever was. My post about never forgetting Trump's coup attempt has already been RT'd 2.8K times, about three hours after it was posted. In all my years of using the social web I've never gotten that much attention. I have 11.7K followers, far fewer than I have on Twitter.

Basically we have to bring politics to the people.

The W3C should've gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They're controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere. BTW, I figure if Matt can openly discuss what's undermining WordPress as an open standard (which it is) no reason I can't tell the truth why the social web is not a web. It's all a big corporate con. Everywhere you look, ripping us off and selling us out.

To answer Mark Cuban's question of what could we do now to make things better. I forgot that I have two ready-made answers. First, get the Democrats or whatever its successor is called, on the air 365 days a year, every year, not just in election years, and have it do many t...

It's a no-blogging Wednesday, will return tomorrow.

Another idea. One of Tesla's competitors could offer a trade-in, where they commit to recycling all the parts of your Tesla, so you are actually taking a Tesla off the road. And for a few extra dollars they can send you a scrapbook of your old Tesla being lovingly taken apart suitable for RT'ing.

Wouldn't it be smart for Kia or Rivian or some other EV competitor of Tesla's to name their car Bluesky and have it only come in blue?

The most depressing moment of Trump 1.0, for me, was leaving the local supermarket, after seeing the kind of empty shelves you see in third world countries with broken or non-existent economic systems. This was when it sunk in how far the United States had fallen. But someh...

I spent a few days designing and implementing the protocol that allows WordLand to be the writing tool for Bingeworthy, thus giving it a real writing and publishing function, instead of the usual ridiculous tiny little textbox. Today I'm going to make it work for writing and...

Please -- to the people in charge at Bluesky, add a setting that allows me to restrict who can reply to posts.

Choices:

1. Anyone can reply.
2. People who follow me can reply.
3. People I follow can reply.
4. No one can reply.

For all posts, not on a post-by-post basis.

Defaults to #3.

In the last days of Trump's first term, I had a nice little web app that told you how much time remained in his term. It was a one-line change to make it work again, which, sigh, is necessary now.

BTW, actually the term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too much. Or edit too much. Or be too emphatic. It's worse than Disneyfied -- at least at Disneyland you get actors, and color and rides, and bland food with tons of sugar and fat. But there is some fun and nutrition. In the social web, it's just memes and slogans. Not even much room for a metaphor. There's so much more to say about being human.

I just wrote a review for Industry in Bingeworthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy when the user publishes. So the text is on both BW and WP. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of unexplored interop. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked.

There's a great scene in No Country For Old Men, where a character is facing imminent death, but he's arguing with the character who will kill him, who asks if all your great ideas led to this (his death) how good were the ideas (paraphrasing).

Along those lines.. If Twitter was such a great idea but it led to the death of democracy (for now at least) maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Maybe when we try to reboot we should try something realllly different.

As they say -- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness. I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managi...

A few random observations posted on Bluesky in the early morning hours.

5:09AM: "Biden had one job to do, and he didn’t do it."

5:17AM: "The NYT had one job to do, and they didn’t do it."

5:21AM: "The NYT is the saddest excuse for the leading news org of the most significant democracy in human history. They flushed it down the fucking toilet. They, like the Washington Post, deserve to die in darkness."

7:39AM: "Being impartial about last year’s election was not an option for the NYT. It was democracy’s Pearl Harbor. We will never forget or forgive what they did."

Editor's note: Soon, I will do all my writing in one place, and these kinds of snapshots will be easier to assemble.

Steve Jobs: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

When I put an image in the margin of a post I often pause and think about what I want to convey with the image as it relates to the writing that it's next to. In the previous piece the idea was interop. I tried to think of what images I've used in the past, then I thought why don't I just look. I switched into Daytona, entered interop, and found one I loved, but then kept scanning, and found another that I liked even more. Tools are important. Web writers haven't gotten any new tools in a long time. All the tool development has been for other stuff. Let's make tools for users again, as we did in the olden times. Craftwork in software. Playin in the band!

How easy would it be to create a twitter-like app using RSS, and in what ways would it differ from other twitter-like apps. Here's the deal. You need a place to write a posts and a way to read a timeline of posts. That's the basic functionality. To do that with RSS you would start with a blogging app like WordPress, and a feed reader like FeedLand or NetNewsWire. Manton has integrated the two into a single user interface at micro.blog. I'm going to approach it in a somewhat differently, not sure yet how it will work, but I'm getting there. And I will offer a way for people to hook in any feed reader they want, thus opening up innovation to tech-curious users. The take-away is that you need to handle inbound and outbound feeds. That's the basics of being twitter-like.

There's more to the story, but this is already a lot to ask you to digest. I'll get a demo together soon. 😄

Anyway, today I hooked up BingeWorthy to WordLand. Bingeworthy doesn't have a text editor, and it doesn't need one, because when it wants to offer a user a chance to explain their rating, like "seasons 1 and 2 were great, but season 3 sucked, but I gave it a high rating anyway," they can use WordLand which loves writers and strives to serve them better and better. Why should I put a bullshit editor in a product (Bingeworthy) that isn't about writing. Its job is very different from WordLand's. Let them work together. That's the big idea, that's why you bother having interop, so you can use more than one tool on the same data.

Then, I got a response from Nick Weaver and the Madison story continues: "Here’s a roundabout Madison connection for you. I started working at UW 28 years ago today as the World Wide Web Editor in the Office of News and Public Affairs. My first project was to implement Userla...