I just started seeing comments this past week on my WordPress blog that appear to be created by AI – is anyone else seeing this?

Today I gave the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress another try, and was successful! First, I upgraded to the latest version (from 9.0.2 to 9.3.1). I accepted the default settings, so my new ActivityPub account based on my settings would be alsylves@andysylvester.com. Next, I logged into mastodon.social (https://mastodon.social/@AndySylvester), pasted my new account in the search box, […]

Test post for ActivityPub plugin version 9.3.1

After reading Will Bunch cringing about Trump’s address to the UN last week and China summit, and yet another Natalie Harp expose on the Daily Beast, my thought is “how can we get out of this mess?”.

As part of migrating my main website and other sites to a new hosting service, I have also been working to create backups of sites hosted elsewhere. One of those sites was a weblog I created using Drummer (created by Dave Winer) and using the oldSchool blogging template/tool. As part of other updates made by […]

I decided I wanted to experiment with my linkblog again, which uses the Hugo SSG tool. However, I upgraded my Hugo installation sometime in the last 3 months, so I had a feeling there was going to be some breakage, and I was correct. When I tried to rebuild the site as-is, I got this […]

Recently, I wanted to get information on the voting record of my representative in the Oregon House of Representatives. Oregon does have an online portal (Oregon Legislative Information System) to allow people to investigate legislation and voting records. From review of the online interface, it was easy to search for bills by bill number, and […]

I saw this post (via Dave Winer) about issues with the ability of feed readers to read feeds from websites hosted by or using Cloudflare. I ran into this problem in trying to access feeds from the Seattle Times website (eventually had to use Playwright to act as a web browser to download the files). […]

I recently got a pizza steel and tried it out last night following this recipe, the result was pretty good!

I did not think THIS would ever happen – the Commodore 64 computer is now available again (it was the first computer I ever owned!)! What a nostalgic trip!

I pushed out some updates to my OPML viewer app to add a toggle for expand/collapse for the outline – check out this demo, and download from Github to try it out!

Today, Dave Winer talks about “working together”, and how he wants to work with other people. The bug in this statement is that Dave Winer deletes things from sites he provides for others to try out his tools, talks about “spam” posts (which is his word for someone trying to make use of his “flow” […]

Saw this at Walmart today – loved it!

Hillel Wayne explains why formal methods like TLA+ matter, how they help build reliable software, and whether AI will finally bring formal verification into the mainstream. I enjoyed listening to this, I am planning to watch the video since Hillel Wayne shows some tool demos. I have not used formal methods in my career, but […]

Recently, I was doing some work to make sure that the OPML files I created using Drummer and available via Drummer were available from my site instead of drummer.scripting.com. My initial effort was using code from the outlineBrowser2 and opmlPackage repos from Dave Winer. After reviewing the code, I felt that I could focus more on using the […]

LinkedIn: Wisk CEO Sebastian Vigneron announces deal Archer Aviation: Press release LinkedIn: Thomas Wagenberg comments, noting this was a “no-cash” deal LinkedIn: Ken Morris sees this consolidation as strengthening the urban air mobility sector CNBC: Boeing sells eVTOL subsidiaries, takes stake in Archer CNBC: Archer Aviation shares jump 10% on news of Boeing deal The […]

For a long time, I resisted subscribing to news services. After all, pretty much all the news was available somewhere for free… For years, my go-to news hub was CNN. I still check it more often than any other news site. In the past year or two, though, CNN has gone from unlimited access to […]

I have been working on a tool to access the sitemap of a news website to try to create feeds when the site does not provide feeds. The tool starts by reading the robots.txt file, which usually has a list of things that are “disallowed”. On one of the sites, it specifically included “Claude Code” […]

I migrated all of my websites from Bluehost to Opalstack this summer. I am on the Single Stack plan, which provides shared hosting with 1 GB of RAM. When I was on Bluehost, I never worried about how much memory was being used when a site was accessed. Since moving to Opalstack, I noticed that […]

I am continuing work on my Feed News Archive project, adding feeds from US newspaper websites. There is a combination of sites that do not offer feeds, sites with difficult ways to access feeds, some WordPress VIP sites that block access to their feeds (?!) and one (Seattle Times) that seems to only allow access […]

Dave Winer talks about how to create a standard in 2026, but offers RSS.chat as the standard being described. I don’t buy it. Is this project leading to developing a standard for chat networks? I don’t think so….can anyone help me out here?

This story about a pop-up restaurant in Woodstock NY (via Daveverse) is puzzling. My takeaway is that they did not have enough staff – did people not want to work in Woodstock?

When Dave Winer first released the rss.chat application, he stated that the rss.chat instance would be restricted to a small number of participants. He later created the demo.rss.chat instance for anyone to try out. In his initial post, he said he did not “want to get into moderation”. Soon, however, he posted comment guidelines, which […]

Second WP test post using different email/account

Test post from my WordPress site (andysylvester.com) to my rss.chat instance (rsschat.andysylvester.com)

Ricardo Mendes has been doing some interesting development inspired by rss.chat, his application is called Really Simple Conversations (see his instance and Github repo) – check it out!

Updated my install of rss.chat (rsschat.andysylvester.com) to the latest server code to pick up a security patch, everything seems to be running smoothly. It is open to all!

I created a local viewer for my OPML Zettlekasten file that I created in 2022 and updated posts. The code uses a combination of the outlineBrowser2 and opmlPackage repos from Dave Winer. I will add a repo in my account soon with the setup that I used.

Tropical Storm Bertha is making landfall. What is not happening is any mention of the phrase “Gulf of Mexico”. (NBC, CBS, CNN) – just “Gulf” or “Gulf Coast”. Hmph!

Tried out another NYT Cooking recipe: Orzo with Summer Squash and Pesto. Result: another hit – 4 for 4!