Earlier this year, I migrated my WordPress websites from Bluehost to Opalstack. The Bluehost model was “managed hosting”, and I was able to create new sites through a Bluehost dashboard with “one click”. The Opalstack model had a dashboard setup for WordPress, but it was a little more complicated, and some of it was overwritten […]

Last year, I wrote about my efforts to get a link in a podcast feed fixed for an old podcast. It took some effort, but someone was able to correct the error in the feed. This year, I noticed a broken link in a site at the University of Texas at Austin about the alma […]

While cleaning up some email, I saw a “note to self” about Dave Winer’s demo of his WordLand application for WordPress. This demo occurred in October 2025 at WordCamp Canada. I reviewed my postings and did not see a link to this event, so wanted to make a post to capture this: WordLand is still […]

Doomsday Pack: 90 days of food, water and basics for a small apartment (site list supplies and provides Amazon links for purchase (via ReaderJohn on micro.blog)). Interesting!

Mississippi Free Press: Liveblog of the Mississippi 2026 US Senate race – fascinating coverage of county updates and background articles.

Election Law Blog: After a Few Days of Accepting Reality, Donald Trump Back to Calling Election Results into Question, Saying Dan Sullivan Won Alaska – screen caps of Truth Social posts – a counterpoint to Election Day comments from Trump

Anchorage Daily News: Like in past elections, Alaska is still counting ballots. When will we know who won? (via Election Law Blog) – more results should be available this week…

Pluralistic/Cory Doctorow: America cannot undo Trumpism – “If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world’s cop, banker, ISP, IT department and consumer of first resort.” – sounds a lot like Season 4 of “The Diplomat” tv series….

Josh Bernoff: The midterm election winners were the best communicators – Democrats articulated their message better than Republicans (sidenote: Lauren Kapp worked with James Talarico (more background here on Lauren).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a one year subscription to be able to get access to NYT Cooking. Here are some recent recipes I have made (all were excellent! (gift links below)): Also, here are some recent collections I am looking through:

Wired: Election Deniers Aren’t Contesting Their Massive Losses

Overall, the Democratic Party had overwhelming success across the nation, taking control of the House and Senate in Congress. In addition, the federal government did not interfere in Election Day activities. Election Law Blog has several posts on this topic, suggesting that the preparation of state and local election leaders helped create an environment that […]

Possibly the earliest possible results from Maine:

The Emacs text editor is now 50 years old! See coverage in MIT Technology Review and The Register (via Emacs News).

It’s interesting that the Atlantis version of Dave Winer’s Frontier application is available in a repo called helloFrontier – and that he does not link to the repo…

I recently recorded a podcast with my friend John Philpin, where we talked about our projects on the IndieWeb and the current state of AI – give it a listen!

modeorg.org: a human guide to Org mode (via Emacs News) – a 30 day guide to learning the Org Mode feature within Emacs – I will give this a try to see how it compares to my site Org Mode for Beginners.

There are a number of important elections happening around the world. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro in their presidential election this past weekend. This past Tuesday, Israel held national parliamentary elections, which will determine if Benjamin Netanyahu will continue as prime minister. In the United States, early voting and mail […]

I have been retired now for several months, and thought it was a good time to reflect on how things have changed for me. When I started my retirement, I would start each day with a written list of to-dos on my computer, and work to complete all the things on the list. After about […]

This week, it was announced that Margaret Hamilton had died. From the MIT News article announcing her death: “Hamilton worked first on the software for the uncrewed Apollo missions and then was promoted into leading the team developing the on-board flight software for the crewed missions. By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of […]

I am 2/3 of the way listening to this podcast, and it is giving me some insight into the (visual) design of software. In my career in the aerospace industry, this was not a topic that was included in most of the software I worked on. Maggie Appleton talks about the importance of the human […]

I have resumed using my linkblog. Following John Johnston’s example, I am linking to my latest collection of links – enjoy!

Recently, I mentioned that I worked with Claude Code to add scripts and changes to the drummerCms Github repo to be able to build a local copy of an oldSchool blog from a Drummer OPML file. In conversation with Frank McPherson, he asked if the web-based outliner from Dave Winer that I modified this year […]

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 […]