FeedCity

How this stuff fits in? 1. RSS blew a big open hole in the distribution of news and ideas. 2. Now we want to blow the equivalent hole in the writer's web.

Another idea that we continued to push in 2024 is textcasting. It was what I needed to build WordLand, it defines its objective, to form an open social web with all the basic features writers need. Titles, links, simple styling, ability to edit, no character limit, these are basic features we will drive the adoption of. Defining a new network where if you want to play you'll need to start thinking about writers, their power, and interop. You can't be on the open web and be a silo. And some of the most insidious silo-like features seem innocuous, like character limits. Whatever forces you into copying and pasting into tiny little text boxes, that's how you know you're in a silo. If you can use any writing tool to post to a network, then it is on the web. Pretty simple. Right now -- none of the popular ones qualify. None.

Talking with a friend about the listening lists idea and realized if it takes off it will turn podcasting into its own loosely-coupled social network. Really low tech, like the web. And not possible for one company to control. All it will take is one popular podcast client to get the pump primed. The second and third apps should be much easier to convince. This is how it worked with podcasting. Steady mission broadcasting, keep beating the drum, and if it's the right idea and when it's the right time, eventually, it happens. It will be that way too for this layer of the network, but at this time I don't own a podcast client, and that's the most basic ingredient in this bootstrap, so we wait, and keep beating the drum.

Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again.

If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you.

PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were one of those readers who took a chance on Due, thank you.

Instead of having the Dems redefine the Dems, how about the people who vote for Dems redefining the Dems. Agree on what the Dems are, and just as important, are not. Ending arguments about whether the Dems are this color or that, this gender or that, this age or some other. Draw a circle of common interest and leave out everything else. Draw the biggest circle possible.

I wrote this piece in WordLand yesterday morning over breakfast. Started writing it as a Bluesky post, quickly ran out of space so I switched over to my own TLTB, and it's very conducive to writing flow, which is its purpose. Then I did the same thing this morning. Sorry to keep talking about the product without it being in general release yet. I want to get it right before opening it up. Still a bunch of things I want to add/fix.

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired thi...

Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski: I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious spo...

BTW Twitter is innovating in ways that it never has. People not staying on Twitter would have no way of knowing. Another reason why, for software developers, quitting Twitter is stupid. As quitting Facebook was ten years ago. Great, now you have no idea what features your users are learning how to use. Eventually your software will be in a dead end while a new coral reef has been forming. Where are you going to get fresh ideas from. Not using these systems would be like not listening to the Beatles in the 60s,. You would have missed all that followed. And not just popular music. Same with Twitter in the 2020s. That story is far from over.

I love writing my morning missives in WordLand. It really fits.

What we need, now, is a system to compete with Twitter. The only thing that can counteract the new direction we're going in, is a system as capable as Twitter. It has to be privately held by a group that can be trusted not to interfere with democratic use of the system. This can't be guaranteed, it has to be based on trust. It needs to scale very quickly. And it has to have a vision to represent democracy. And it has to be simple, clean and quickly understood as a replacement for Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of what's needed, but its ownership is not clear. But it more like Twitter than Twitter is today.

Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee: To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Ri...

I like to share posts from Threads on Bluesky and Mastodon to illustrate the incompatibility, the ignorance of one to the other. These guys should all be using the same protocol. It's a travesty that each of them considers their product to define the social web -- they don't...

Programming work: I was trying to work out a feature for WordLand that isn't cooperating, having to do with the clipboard and the MediumEditor package, which does all these nice things for us with the clipboard, but it isn't willing to share custody, or perhaps more accurate...

BTW, we could use a few more testers with good experience with bug reporting who use WordPress. I'm sure there are more bugs we haven't gotten reports on yet.

Bezos can still be a hero in this story. But his only move is to sell.

One more thing. I love taking the time to craft a delicious piece of software. I have never really done that in the 50 years I've been doing this. This time I decided there's no rush. I'm going to wait until people want what I've created. We're not there yet. 😄

Amazing that the tech industry hasn't tried to retrieve its reputation from the ones who are repping us in DC nowadays. Software doesn't have to treat their users like nobodies. Quite the opposite. I come from the school that says our users are the smartest most powerful people in the world and it's our privilege to create tools for them.