FeedCity

There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.

As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when needed is the way to go.

WordPress and GitHub fit into similar niches, but one is for writers and the other for developers.

For this Labor Day: Continuing our centennial series, Joseph McCartin, professor of history and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and the author of several books and co-author with Melvyn Dubofsky of Lab...

The problem with Mastodon is its protocol is underspecified, therefore interop is really hard, and ultimately the standard, if any emerges, will be decided by the big tech companies and will be ridiculously complex. I think Bluesky has a better chance of being a solid stand...

Random thought. In hindsight Medium chose the wrong business model. They could have done what Automattic has done with WordPress. It's a private company so I don't know how much it's growing or how profitable it is, but from outside it's growing, and generates lots of cash. Basically, charge writers for the service. I think they would have done well. And open source the Medium editor, and offer it to Google to bundle with Chrome, and upgrade the whole web while you're at it. With billions of windfall from the success of Twitter, why argue over nickels and dimes. Ev had the ability to change the course of the industry, and make the same kind of money Google and Microsoft make. And yes, I did urge him to do this at the time, publicly (didn't have access to him privately, if you can believe that).

Here's the show notes page for the podcast from Sept 1, 2004.

September 2004 was the month when podcasting became a real community thing. Twenty years ago. I did eight podcasts that month. The mail list, which Adam started, was going strong. This is the month where podcasting got its name, thanks to some brilliant creativity from Dannie Gregoire. Until then we were calling them "audio blog posts" or some variant thereof. You can see it in this Google Trends graph. I started a special feed to echo my programs from 2004, I even got it registered in Apple's podcast database. There will be two podcasts in the feed today because I missed the one from yesterday. Still diggin!

I often only finally get into a book at the end of a loan in Libby, hopelessly nowhere near finished with it. Wish there was a “just give me one extra day” button. For Kindle, turning off wifi works, but no good option for audiobooks.

Drove by a couple fire trucks protecting the shoulder for a car and a Cybertruck stopped on the side of the road. Probably a fender bender, didn’t look serious. But… two fire trucks? Maybe drama follows all Cybertrucks.

The networks should put Trump on time delay and when he says you can legally murder babies in some states, that should be treated as if he said fuck or shit. Put up a screen that explains why he was cut off, then go to commercial, esp during the debate on Sep 10.

Dear NY Times, before we get rid of the penny, let’s open up your op-ed page to include criticism of the NYT. You can handle a little pushback, you need it desperately.

There’s a good analysis in Last Week in Fediverse about Twitter X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Just a small part:

…if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere.

And for some companies, the founder of a company they acquire might make the best CEO when the founder of the original company isn't available. Again Apple is a great example. Steve Jobs ultimately replaced Gil Amelio, after Apple bought NeXT.

Wordle Kitty is watching TV along with 80 other convicted house pets serving life sentences at Attica high security prison. They’re watching a mushy political psycho drama starring Wordle Kitty herself, the cutest most adorable kitten known to mankind. The NYT headline reads “Cushy kitty crushes mushy melodrama in prison laugh riot.”

Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn't an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy water. Who but Steve Jobs would have thought that an iPod was a proper product for a company that made PCs. I think he himself wanted it, and that's what made something an Apple product. It's probably why post-Jobs Apple is pretty much stuck selling only the products Jobs created for them. He told Cook to innovate on his own vision and timetable, probably knowing full-well that nobody would be able to do it. 😄

Another rule for whoever runs a tech company, they must themselves be a fanatical user of the company's product. They must love it the way a founder loves it. They must think the users are the smartest people in the world because they love the best product in the world. As a founder, I could not visualize the day I left the company for the last time. In hindsight I felt that was the one factor most responsible for the success of the company.

Paul Graham wrote a very useful piece about "Founder Mode." As a founder myself, I think I can tell you why founders have a central role to play as the company grows. They're the only ones who know how the company was built, and what works and what doesn't and how to keep it ...

Manuel Moreale blogs about a more intentional, personal web:

I’m talking about liberating yourself from all sorts of algorithmic grouping and filtering and getting back to experiencing and using the web in a much more deliberate and mindful way.

I think it’s okay that “social web” or IndieWeb mean slightly different things to different people. All of those definitions still share in common a goal of openness and standards, not silos.

Just sad hearing about the news of 6 more hostages dead in Gaza. The closer we get to 1 year since the attack by Hamas, the more heartbreaking that there’s no deal.