One advantage of using GitHub for questions tied into a blog is that you get a great archive of all the questions you asked and how people answered or contributed, going back to 2016.

BTW, I've started using Mastodon in place of GitHub for comments on posts like the one below. GitHub has a better model for text with comments, supports full Markdown the way it was meant to work. I have an instance of Masto that I can use that supports Markdown but they do an unacceptable rendering of links. Example post. I want a simple, widely accepted easy place to comment, on the social web, not Discourse or GitHub, that isn't controlled by one vendor (so ActivityPub for now is probably the best approach) and supports plain old Markdown without any weird embellishments. I don't work in the Mastodon world, I'm already committed to the projects I'm doing. But we could really use something nice, designed to plug into blogs. This is a good use-case, and it's pretty close.

I wrote rules for standards-makers and it caught on, and has been used by a few open source projects. I hope that the new rules for journalism, which is just getting started, will be similarly influential. If existing journalism is going to start working again, they're going to have to have some rules. Comments welcome on Mastodon.

Podcast: 11 minutes. I see happy talk all over the place that Twitter is done, Musk is killing it, blah blah blah. It's bullshit. In the next few months Twitter is going to morph into the political system that Barack Obama could have and should have built. It turns out crea...

August 15, 2004: My audio blog post from NYC, from my Podcast0 feed. Had just listened to an Adam Curry podcast and one from the Gillmor Gang. Played a bit of music, described how a podcatcher would work, pretty close to the way they work today. Shortly after the feature would be in Radio UserLand. It was the only episode I did in August 2004. The next one is on September 1 and there are a total of nine shows in September, including the first Trade Secrets which is a podcast Adam and I did together. Here's the archive for this blog in August 2004.

Let's stay organized after the election.

In today's installment of the Adventures of Wordle Kitty, the world's cutest and most adorable kitten was sentenced to life at Attica.

The stupidest thing about all the pundits remarking on Kamala's rise in the polls is they are completely missing the story.

Here's the headline.

• "Thank god the Trump nightmare is almost over."

If you want an illustration, it's the flip side of this New Yorker cover.

I am addicted to buying domains. Latest example. Ideally it would be a news site with all the latest videos from the Land of Kamala aka the United States of America.

So what are we doing on Threads and why does Facebook (aka Meta) want to get the best minds of Twitter using their software. I am not a lawyer and I haven't read the user agreement, but that said, I bet it has something to do with building out their AI model so they can compete with OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.

The best journalism is coming from the candidate.

I asked ChatGPT to put the Statue of Liberty on a $100 bill.

If you don't buy the new rules for journalism because the liars will tell lies about you, the journalist -- well, you get that either way, no matter what you do, so I don't see the problem. And if you want people to trust you, you've got to tell the truth. Your reputation gets destroyed by their lies if you pass them through. Might not seem fair, but if you can't be trusted you don't really have a job, do you. Maybe as a PR person, but not as a journalist. Doctors can tell you to stop smoking to save your life and the tobacco companies will accuse them of lying or whatever and some people (such as myself, earlier in life) will continue to smoke. You still have to do what's right if you want people to trust you.

I am so impressed with how well the new Democratic Party is running this campaign. Latest innovation, they're going to do at least one public rally during the convention, so everyone can be part of the celebration, and I plan to watch every minute of it. What I don't want to...

I ordered a Pixel Pro 9 today for delivery in September. Look forward to seeing what makes it so AI.

I started a this.how page for the new rules for journalism. Common-sense rules for reporters that they violate regularly, so now it's time to write them down.

There's a second new rule. Journalists do not make demands.

Just got a message from Slack that should serve as a warning to people who use other free services, expecting their archive to be maintained over time. It was too good to be true before. Now you need to ask vendors if that's true on their system.

The new rule for journalists on Threads is big.

How big is it?

So big I got my first Fediverse reply, ever.

I had another morning of driving around so I listened to a bunch of podcasts about how the campaign is going, all good news for Democrats which of course makes me happy. The last podcast I listened to was Ezra Klein's interview with Nate Silver. I only listened to the first ...

The new rule for journalists is sweeping Threads and Mastodon. People have power we don’t use but could. We could turn off the interview after the first egregious lie, even if the reporters don't.

The new rule is getting a great response on Threads, Mastodon.

When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day.

Speaking of which, I must've converted DocServer some time ago and didn't test it well enough. It didn't even load. Oy. It works now.

I listened to a bunch of podcasts this morning about how freaked out Trump is. I wonder if they realize that if a president freaks out over something like this, how would he handle a Cuban Missile Crisis? He'll panic. Remember the phone call that comes at 3AM? We saw what he did with COVID, he froze, like he's freezing now.

A new rule for journalists. End the interview on the first egregious lie. Turn the lights out, switch off the recorder, get up and leave. And your report should state clearly that this is why the interview was terminated. It never should have been tolerated in the first place.

When Google tells you it's easy to convert a site to HTTPS they're wrong. It's an insurmountable job for scripting.com. 30 years of writing is on that domain, lots of different runtimes on lots of different domains which would also have to be converted. Images in all the pages. All that breaks when you flip the switch, which would be easy. I can't walk away from a big part of my life's work. Sorry, not for Google. Every time someone assumes I'm to blame for this situation, that's how Google has tricked you. I followed the rules. They broke them.

A lot of people are thinking that Threads is the new "nice" version of The Original Twitter, but folks, that's pure bullshit -- remember who owns Threads and ask yourself if you want that dude to be in charge of our political organizing network. We need something better.

Idea for a neat product from Automattic or really anyone: Configure WordPress for writing a book, hook it up to an AI service that can always turn that site into prose, reorganized into chapters, however you'd like, on demand, in an instant. You could use an outliner to arrange the table of contents and it could automatically generate a back of the book index. Technologically I think today's AI is ready to do this, just needs to be packaged. Charge a fair price for the service, esp at the beginning it would totally be worth it. Who knows where it would lead. I bet a lot of writers would use it, I certainly would.