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.

1996: Nerd's Guide to Frontier.

Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing...

Screen shot of system.verbs.apps as it appeared in my frontier.root frozen sometime in the early 00s.

I have an array built into every app I do, on server or in the browser, called snarkySlogans. When I need a bit of text to test with I just choose a random snarky slogan. They are little truths that have occurred to me over the years. You're free to steal this code, they do come in handy at times. There's a snarky slogan to cover that -- "Only steal from the best." Another one I really like: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."

Why did we need all those programming languages?

Imagine building blocks to assemble your own social web app. A toolkit you could plug into your bot.

I was surprised to find that nirvana.userland.com, a site that was new in 1998, is still running.

January is archived, as is 2025. On to the future! :-)

Next year I have to go to FOSDEM. This year's conference going on right now, in Brussels. If you're there and reading this -- say a hello for me. I realize the piece I wrote yesterday about the future of the social web is equally relevant now for FOSDEM. My prescription: car...

Added a note to the storage docs page for wpIdentity, explaining that while most files we serve are private, there are examples of files we manage that are public. It had been a while since I reviewed this page. I also see now that we have to have a way to identify the app that created an object, and for that we'll need a way to identify apps. I knew that was coming sooner or later.

February 4 is the midpoint of winter. So we're almost half-way there.

The FediForum home page says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on March 2, a little ...

Yesterday I wrote the idea "small pieces loosely joined" was central to what we mean by the web. Now I'd like to add another criteria. "All parts are replaceable." I think it's self-evident what it means. And of course there is no such thing, but the internet itself comes v...

Yesterday I reported that I had remapped pagepark.scripting.com to the github repo for pagepark. But then later in the day it stopped doing that. Why? I have no clue. I moved it to another server and now it works.

The best description for the web I've ever heard is small pieces loosely joined. That really gets to the essence of it. The pieces stand on their own, up to a point, when they are joined to other pieces. And you can un-join and re-join them. I see a lot of things that say they're part of the web than can't do the arbitrary joining that's central to what the web is.

The great thing about the OG Web was that you could have an idea one day, have it deployed two days later, with a really ugly table-based UI, and everyone would know about it within a few hours. Then the reviews would come out, and a few hours later we'd know if it stuck or didn't.

As all our former allies pay homage to Xi in Beijing, I was thinking well at the least the whole world speaks our language, and that'll take a few generations to change, but then I realized I bet the Chinese have been preparing for this, and of course they have.

You know you're on the right track when all the questions have answers.

More important than code is the right place for the code.

I've learned a new self-management strategy. At the beginning of a day's programming work I set a specific goal that I feel I should be able to accomplish very quickly, in an hour, perhaps -- but probably less. If I get it done by the end of the day I will feel like I really ...

Zeldman found the Google and HTTP post I wrote many years ago. Thankfully they haven't completely broken HTTP yet. I like to think they can't because so much of the web would break if they did. People might not notice the Not Secure message they post in Chrome for sites that...

"There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky." I put that at the end of a post the other day and as they say in journalism, he buried the lede. "Only works in" means silo. And it always results in stagnation because big organizations suck at shipping new ideas. For that you need a lot of people with laptops and a net connection and lot sof spare time to be able to replace small pieces, and join them up to the network, try out new ideas. When you're in a silo the owners place severe limits on what you can do. If you think you found a benevolent one, the exception -- there is no such thing. You're waiting for a "some day" that will never come.

An idea I read in this blog post is one I hadn't considered, is super important. AI is going to be part of programming forever. There's no way to go back. This has made StackExchange obsolete, because it basically aggregates everything that was there, and it was worth it beca...

DNS fix: pagepark.scripting.com now redirects to the GitHub repo for PagePark. Somehow I lost the pagepark.io domain, but I don't really want it, so it's kind of ok. But there are some broken links. I recall there was a nice site with menus and stuff that was built from the GitHub repo but archive.org isn't able to find it for some reason. Moral of the story, don't buy so many domain names thinking you're really clever. But of course I still do. Someday they'll all be gone, of course. Will they have a ceremony for the last domain to be turned off, kind of like the last Blockbuster was. Does anyone remember Blockbuster.

Toby Ziegler: "They'll like us when we win."

Interesting thread between Jake and Ted Howard about Frontier.

I was looking at some of the first posts in in 1998 in discuss.userland.com and came across this post that talked about my decision to stop doing the Mail Pages, now that we had the discussion group.

A lot of online discourse is us vs them. If you find yourself doing that, that's a sure sign that you're not working on the web.

If you make a product for discourse, yet your own product can't be used for discourse because of some major limit, then you have a feature to add, and get busy. No product does everything everyone wants, but when there's a consensus among users, then you have something worth doing.