A fair number of people make a stop at news.scripting.com every day. I want to make some improvements, I think it can be made a bit faster. And I want to make it easier for anyone to create a site like that, for others to use. I think every news org should have one of those, to tell your readers who you read. Work together, we need it as we reboot the news industry. This is will be an alternative to twitter-style news readers, which took over the leading-edge from RSS feed readers, twenty freaking years ago. I think there should be a new paradigm every few decade, don't you? Long overdue.

Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous episodes.

Today's song: Eyes of the World.

Podcast: It occurred to me yesterday that there are a lot of parallels with Frontier on the Mac in the early 90s and WordLand and WordPress in the 2020s. So I told the story in a podcast and I think it came out really well. I did some editing at the beginning and end, and as usual my audio editing is pretty crude, but otherwise the story is exactly as I told it. I also asked Claude.ai to do a third-person summary of the podcast, as I did with the previous three shows, and it's getting better. I thought it's summary was great except it added it's opinion of how much I deserved a vacation, and it was right, I did, but how did it know I deserved it? Anyway, I encourage anyone who's involved in the WordPress community to listen. I think WP has a bigger role to play in the web than it currently has, which imho is saying a lot. 15 minutes.

Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of my blog, you won't get through because it can't open the http files in the head of the template. This is something users can fix because you get to change your template. So I'm going to stay focused on my current work.

Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of Twitter, campaigns have been every day of every year. The Dems have been AWOL. We never should have gotten to the summer of 2024 where people have no idea of who the freaking vice president is. When are they going to see how swept under the old ways of relating to voters are. We are the government of the United States. Get behind us and let us work our magic.

The tech press did their part in giving control of the public internet to the people who are selling us out.

if i ran firefox, this is what i would say wrt AI in firefox in 2026.

• 1. ai is exciting!
• 2. it's also in its infancy.
• 3. we don't know yet how or if it connects to the web.
• 4. the web is 100% our #1 priority.
• 5. so we're going to wait.
• 6. for now firefox is a no-ai browser.
• 7. we won't include ai until we know why.
• 8. and then it will be opt-in.
• 9. and we will continue to make firefox the best web browser.

sincerely,

the developers of firefox

Most of the attempts of humor in replies to twitter-like posts are of the "you had to be there" variety, as in it might have made sense when you typed it, but I don't get it. And it's even worse, I am irony-deprived, I often don't get jokes, something about how my mind works...

Highly recommend the HBO two-part interview with and profile of Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of comedy as art. So many things to say. Why is physical humor the funniest? And the funniest part of all the excerpts was the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. Humans are so damned simple.

My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it.

BTW, this is what Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web?

I would love to see a standard model for community news orgs, starting with the city of Washington DC, with some of the reporters who were recently laid off. But the community would be very much a part of this. No more news without community involvement. Let's make it commun...

Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team and (probably) wasn't tanking, though trading their star young player for bupkis (it turns out) -- maybe they were. But the numbers didn't really entitle them to an early pick. And they got a player who looks to be a great star (you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star).

An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real.

Om Malik says the internet is the greatest invention of his life, and since we're roughly the same age, that would be my life's greatest invention too. I think it would be if it weren't such a tragic invention, one whose growth was cut off by the very thing he quotes John Do...

Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy.

I've been watching Jake do the Headless Frontier work with two different AI bots -- ChatGPT and Claude.ai. And as he's doing that, I'm slogging away the same way I've always done it, working on the top level user interface of WordLand. I don't see a way around it, because I h...

Another example of ChatGPT utility. Asked this question: "I have a function named viewFeedItem. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls viewFeedItem to view the parent of the item. But I don't want it to call viewFeedItem directly because that leaves the previous instance of viewFeedItem around. In javascript what's the best way to defer the call to divFeedItem so that the two instances are unrelated, and the first instance goes away." I was pretty sure as I wrote this that setTimeout was the answer, but ChatGPT offered it as the first choice, and explained why it was the best. It's like having a code consulant, you're the surgeon and it's ready to help. And it really does help to know it parsed it the same way I did.

Good morning sports fans! Boy are we getting some fancy sports action. The Olympics have already started, with Milan as the host city. The opening ceremony is tonight. My longtime friend the brilliant and beautiful Anna Masera will be attending. I don't know if I can boast ...

I still love my Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn.

News from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. Writeup is here.

Here's a news page with stories from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. A brilliant idea. All I did was give each item a category, and shortened the URL. The brief writeup is here.

I'm going to WordCamp Europe in June in Poland. Can't wait.

No one else can see this message. You are the only real person. The rest of us are alien robots sent here to test you.

I wrote an app that implements Inbound RSS for WordPress sites. Three months ago, a few little glitches but remarkably reliable. Open source. That's how I have scripting.com output hooked up to daveverse.org input. It stopped working this morning, not sure why. This is actually a test to see if this works. (Postscript: It did work. But I have two earlier posts today that did not get through.)

Automattic shipped a WordPress plugin that adds a source:markdown element to a WordPress feed. This is very cool. We're going to add this to the feed for daveverse site.

We need a short name for ChatGPT-like product. If I want to make a general statement about products in the category, there is, as far as I know, no word to use. Same with Twitter and tweet, so I call them twitter-like products and use tweet for posts to any twitter-like product. The whole idea of a different name (like toot, skeet) for each service is linguistic travesty. Anyway, ChatGPT-like is also an unacceptable term. If it had a fun name like OurMind -- then OurMind-like would work. If only William Safire were here.

for developers who don't use ai -- here's the kind of question i ask chatgpt. "i have a div that contains icons that are either svg's or font-awesome i's. if it were text, i'd use font-size to control the size of the icons, which won't work here. what's the right way to do it?"

apple is a company, very good at selling itself as a lifestyle. but there's only one person, who's been gone for 15 years, who could keep that reality distortion field inflated.