I like reading Joost's blog. I'm subscribed and it's in my blogroll.

Yesterday I threw a question out there. "If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?" I left out specifics, because any specifics I provide might cut off interesting answers. There are three elements in the question: web, platform and writers. The answer must say something about all three. Another way of saying the same thing -- "You're using the web to make the platform to serve the writers."

BTW the "open" web has a chance to come back around the AI rewrite of all our software that's underway now. If we build the new systems entirely around web connections, with each part replaceable, we can have as much "open" as we want. Products like Bluesky will look like they bet on the wrong horse if we all have choice everywhere. It's not as strange as you think. Opportunities come along every time things change as radically as they are changing now.

I gave the new ChatGPT image maker a whirl, it's supposed to be more thoughtful and realistic.

The prompt: “A turkey in plastic with supermarket label with text and fine print. The branding is Really Simple brand Turkey. The motto, ‘turkey for simple people.‘“

If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?

I applied to speak at WebCamp Europe but didn't make the cut. I did see that Jonathan Desrosiers is giving a talk about the web, and his pitch is right on. Please go listen to him if you're in Kraków in June. I have been developing software around the ideas of building the web, software that runs on top of WordPress, which imho should be playing a much bigger role in the web. I have a track record here of actually founding new tech ecosystems, but as time goes by people forget how this stuff is made, I think. I'll probably try again with WordCamp US and of course Canada again, I had such a good time there last year.

How do you subscribe to a feed in Feedly? Had to ask Google. Click on Follow Sources in the sidebar. It never occurred to me that Subscribe would become Follow. The screen that comes up when you click doesn't offer a clue of how to subscribe to the URL I have on the clipboard. I did enter the URL of the site's feed but that didn't work, and it brought up a screen where they want money. I think I understand what happened here.

I asked ChatGPT if the term glass palace had been used to talk about pre-PC computer data centers. Yes.

I'm creating new software in ways I never would have conceived of last year. I see solutions to one of the most significant code management problems we used to have, our inability to remember how our code works unless the app is very small and they never seem to be. This is ...

A format like RSS needs to be loved.

I'm doing a programming project with Claude and it's great, like a puzzle, finding out what works for me and building something I normally wouldn't have time to maintain, but -- Claude has nothing but time for stuff like that. I'm building it to pass off, a common code structure that we both understand and I know how to evolve because I design my code for evolution. And it's going well. But then I realized it's the same Claude I ask general questions of so I tried this. "I would love to pass off wpIdentity to an open source development organization. The ideal would be the WordPress's community. Is there any precedent for this, one community acquiring a new product?" You can try typing that prompt in yourself and see what you get. One thing I learned is that the Apache Foundation was set up for this. And Claude is pretty firm that WordPress is not set up for that.

A few months ago, some guys from Netscape came out with a way to get AI to pay called Really Simple Licensing or RSL. I was really put off by the way they took the name that everyone knows came from me with no help from anyone. Maybe I could have done something about it, in...

Last week I released a new toolkit that includes docs for your AI programming partner. Ask it to read the docs, and then tell it about the editor you want. It works with WordPress sites via the wpcom API via the wpIdentity server. A new frontier. ;-)

The people who call themselves Mets fans who are sad when the Mets don't make the playoffs are really Yankees fans.

If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would find exciting and worth talking about. Then do it again. Ideally it would be something that reporters would like, that they could see themselves using. As you know, my Big Idea is give people choice of editors, for writers. But I just thought of a technical thing they could do and might make no sense, but how about running Claude skills. So anything a Claude app can do a WordPress plugin can do. I just built my first skill, and they can be Node.js apps. That's a pretty broad range of features you can support inside WordPress. Also ask users to tell you what would turn them on. Couldn't hurt, sometimes they have ideas that you as a developer never would think of. I made a few million dollars from an idea a user gave me once. Not kidding.

Scott Hanson who works with me on all my projects is doing his WordPress development using Codex. Here's a plug-in they wrote. Loving this. So we're all turning this corner. There are so many things I want to do, but I keep hitting bumps. I recover and come back again, so far. And I go slowly. The bot wants to run at a breakneck pace, which I know from tons of experience gets you a worthless result. One of the byproducts of my current project is a /opml skill that reads and writes .opml files in a way that's compatible with all the apps that use OPML. Pretty sure of that since I published the first OPML file in 2000 or so. Not sure how I'm going to release the skill, but I want everyone to have it.

WordPress has remained mostly constant for its whole life, at least from the point of view of this outsider. But now the world its embedded in is turning upside down and WordPress must change, but no one really knows how that change will manifest.

I've been designing and developing software like WordPress for over thirty years. I have stong opinions about where the product should have gone, but mostly I've not been talking about that, because I don't want to interfere with what Matt is doing. I've known him since he ...

The opmlProjectEditor explainer needed a light edit. It should make a lot more sense now if you're a newcomer. Perhaps the most important thing is that it now includes an example that you can open in Drummer to see how it works in an outline editor. OPML has become a really important format for apps that use RSS, but it's far more broadly adaptable. It's a good package for a whole app, and you can teach your tools to use the common structure to make it easier to share it with others, including Claude, to keep a repo current, and to deploy the resulting code.

Today the work with Claude is much better, though when we got started it was even worse than yesterday. The key to getting on track was to figure out why it worked so well in previous projects and fell apart with this one. In each of the others, I passed off an existing proj...

A glitch in the matrix. The app that keeps daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com has been offline since Friday, so I'm republishing all the posts since then. They will all appear to have been posted today on daveverse. As they say -- still diggin!

I updated sally.scripting.com to support https, and updated it with posts from scripting.com in 2023-2026. I was using it as an example of prior art of user interface for Claude. I figured restoring this app on my own would be penance for believing that Claude was anywhere near as smart as I am. Not even close. Not today at least. Grrr.

I've come to the conclusion, perhaps temporarily, that Claude can't work on a programming project with an experienced developer. It doesn't check its work, it'll think it's found the problem, makes a change, or worse causes you to do a lot of work so it can make a change. It ...

Written in Gutenberg: With great respect for Claude.

We reached a milestone this morning, we completed the project to add a Gutenberg version of the wpEditorDemo app. Claude did the programming on the new version. It required changes to the server app, which I made. It took 2.5 days to do the work, which was more than I thought it would. A lot of was learned. Now I'm figuring out what my next project will be.

Screenshot of the Gutenberg demo app.

Heard a report on NPR re why the Dems might win the mid-terms in November. They mentioned gas prices but not concentration camps for immigrants. They mentioned inflation but not the military occupation of Minneapolis and DC. They also forgot to mention that he keeps threatening to nuke Iran.

The logic of Cory Doctorow's enshittification model applies to government too. Both parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money. The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have a...

BTW one thing you haven't heard is that as you get deeper into the AI environment the user gets smarter. Not just better informed, that's what the web has been doing for us. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the people we want working for us.

The demo for Gutenberg is at demo.gutenberg.land. Easy to remember, and makes the point. If you want Gutenberg instead of WordLand, you can have it. Hopefully this reinforces what my goals are here. I do not want to favor any one kind of editor. I want every kind of editor here. I want there to be a web of great editors that runs on the web.