Writing is so important it deserves its own web.

There's a recursive effect of the election on the voters. We didn't know there would be so many of us. Ask us again what we want done with this power now that we understand how much more united we are than we thought.

This is where the new Substack mail list lives. It'll be faster and more immediate than the nightly email. No guarantee it'll work forever. Expect a mix of new features, interop with other products, stylesheets and plugins, great new applications of the tech, and lots of writing, because friends, that's what it's about. Writing is so important it deserves its own web.

BTW if you open that Markdown file in BonBon you get the rendering not the source. I have to get used to that, there are two webs, one for Markdown and one for HTML. I think some people are offering Markdown versions of HTML files. We're going to this too, and have a website that'll be a perfect test case -- this.how. What's good about it is that it is a rendering of OPML files, so we don't have to work with the HTML at all, we can and will create and OPML to Markdown converter. And then when we want to put it on a domain for BonBon's use, just add ?format=markdown to the URL. It doesn't work yet but it will.

We're trying to get things nice and clean so we can rep the features of the product, but I have to say I am quite confused myself. It's okay, I like the feeling.

I know this is a productive direction and that the 35 year old web is waiting to be unlocked from the horrors Netscape, Microsoft and Google inflicted on it. It's getting so safe, but then life itself isn't safe. Falling in love is definitely not safe but how could you deny it when it comes. Think of BonBon as being like that, like love. And basically trust that text with simple features, is safe enough to use with confidence.

The test -- do inline images render properly in BonBon.

This is what a blog post looks like in Markdown, and the HTML version which Google objects to. Every post has one of these. 16K+ posts since May 2017. That's all, just wanted to show you the A-B. You can also see what we're being influenced by in the front matter department. Having Claude helping with this I can get good insight into the defacto standards already established. Gives us a chance for more interop.

I just had one of those ideas. Key fact: Last time I looked Substack didn't have an API for posting a message. They seem to want you to use their editor, or at least copy/paste the text from another source. I am not here at midnight to copy the text of Scripting News an...

The speaker doesn't have to be a member of the House. I was thinking Pete Buttigieg would be excellent. Really smart, very good presenter and advocate, and has been in the exec branch himself for four years so might better understand where the pressure points are. And R...

We're doing a demo site for BonBon, as part of the docs, and as I was planning it out I remembered we did one for a "newly hired senior evangelist" at a ficitious Silicon Valley startup. This is what I love about AI tools. I couldn't remember her name. So I ...

For reference, some links: Kim Parker's blog home, and the github repo for the project, which uses HTML. It's been 13 years since it was updated. I can only imagine what the superstar tech evangelist Kim Parker is doing now.

Yesterday's braintrust query got lots of responses on Mastodon, and some interesting combinations of products. But none of them streamlined for writers who want to publish.

The founders of tech companies, no matter how rich they get, are still human with human limits, issues and fantasies. Which is great until they get it into their heads that they are our bosses and get to run our lives instead of focusing on their own.

I was in Silicon Valley for 31 freaking years. And saw it go round and round, and no one ever answered the question -- what the fuck am I supposed to do with all this money?

The better path, imho, which I chose, is to accept your good fortune, but never assume it's because you are a better human than the rest of humanity. There is no such thing.

Braintrust query: If you're a writer, but not a techie, do you like Markdown? If so, what do you use to write your MD text? Is any of it public? If so how do you get it on the web? Where do you store it? How much does it cost, if anything?

Whoever leads the Democratic majority in the Senate must have the support of Bernie Sanders.

At the beginning of Sanders' running for president, I didn't like him. I thought HRC was a much better choice.

Maybe the electorate wasn't ready for him. I sure wasn't. But now, last week's election was his validation.

This is our second chance to get past the toxic combination of the Repub leadership and the Dem leadership. If we're going to have a war it has to come from our strength. Ideally there will be no war because the American people, believe it or not, are willing to give Bernie a chance now.

We all voted for that. Schumer thinks we voted for him.

Two old Jewish men, one who defined our future and one who history has passed by, who doesn't know it yet.

Google's web is falling apart in front of us. It's objecting to sites that support HTTPS as if they were those oldfashioned HTTP pages. I'm sorry I wrote them so long ago, but some of them are funny, like the one I wrote on my birthday in 2005, a story about the TV show The West Wing. By 2005 we were ready to live in that world instead of the one we lived in. We've been back there dreaming of the West Wing ever since. Anyway if Google is going to desert the web I hope they don't mind if we rebuild it? And if I have to fix my archives up, let's do it up really well. Anyway here's a link to the original story, good luck reading it through Google, and here's story in Markdown, where you can read it in BonBonWeb.

President Bartlet is the president we all wish we could have but can't. He's a rich chocolate cake with ice cream and hot fudge topped with whipped cream and nuts and a cherry. A cookie on the side. He sees a Republican consultant on a political show clean the clock ...

Next frontier in AI? Communicate with eyes. So Claude would know I haven't finished asking questions or providing instructions. If I can turn on my camera and have that be part of the conversation, and if the software was well tuned, it could be great.

I am working on a new bit of functionality in BonBonWeb. If all goes well we'll have something to show for it later today or tomorrow.

Same thing has been happening in tech for decades. Technology gets captured by a bigco, they kill all the inspiration, in order to lock it down it for ROI. There are developers inside these companies who believe in open systems, as lawyers believe in the rule of law, and if w...

What they don’t say about corruption, when you take a payoff you’re selling out the people.

How to follow this blog in BonBon-land and more.

John Palfrey, a friend and former colleague from Berkman wrote a fantastic post about people at the lawfirms who caved to Trump. Same thing has been happening in tech for decades. Technology gets captured by a bigco, and they kill all the inspiration to monetize it for their...

This is a test. How HTML links are supposed to work in BonBon -- they open the link in your current browser, based on the OS. What they are actually doing, as reported, is show it as a broken URL. We never intended this to reach users, it was a loose-end, but we might not have tested it in the Demo version of BB. I am now going to link to an HTML page, and open it over on the other side, and see what it does with it.

The Markdown version of my blog is getting more traffic than the HTML version. So much so that I'm getting complaints about all the political stuff. I love this, and I even love that some people are saying what they used to say, they didn't come to my blog for the politics. That probably will influence me a little, but it still is my main way I talk to the world, so I'm not likely to back off too often.

To Phil Windley: "We both remember what the web was like before it became a CSS and JavaScript platform." But most young users and developers have no memory of how powerful it was to make interop so damned easy.

Urgent note to Dems. Keep your campaign websites going. This is the mistake Dems always make. When you have news to get out, the MSM will mangle or ignore it. Go direct to your supporters, not just the people who voted for you, the people you represent. Let us help support ...

The sound on my TV is a fraction of a second faster than the picture. Just enough of a delay so I know a shot is going in before I see it go in.

A while back I must have read a review of JBL Tune Flex earbuds and bought a pair. The sound was awful, almost no bass, flat, low volume. I have always been looking for earbuds that get loud, for I like a strong beat, good for singing along. So I put them away and forgot I had them, still looking for one that did what I wanted. A few years later, I was looking around in a drawer, pulled them out when I had some time to mess around and I found out the problem had something to do with how I placed them in my ears. Properly placed the volume was ample and the bass was inspiring. Just took a walk with them on and I love them. I wonder which other buds I tried and gave up on too quickly?

John Gruber: "Markdown is my sole creation. Aaron Swartz was my best, by far, beta tester and the first person other than me to get excited about it." I am glad to get a concise statement about this from Gruber. And from what I recall of Aaron that sounds about right too.

And this is what my long-form Markdown-based posts look like.