FeedCity

Rewrite of WebSockets functionality in the server side of WordLand.

Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test? According to ChatGPT, yes.

One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML.

Good morning and welcome to May 2025.

It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline.

Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.

I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writ...

Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I ...

Jay Peters, The Verge, under the headline “Epic Says Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS in the US”: Following a court order that blocks Apple from taking a commission on purchases made outside the App Store, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says on X that the company plans to brin...

Are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s App Store business? I don’t think so at all. Gonzales Rogers is demanding that Apple ... do what Phil Schiller recommended they do all along. But are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s reputation and credibility? It sure seems like it.

We could follow the clues in the TrumpLand with more gusto. They know their numbers are bad and likely to get worse, they did the things that made it the numbers bad. And at the same time they don't seem to care? If this were a mystery show, like Dallas or Succession or Severance, Lost perhaps, what would you think?

Craig Mod returns to the show to discuss his splendid new book, Things Become Other Things. Other topics include creating with AI tools (including programming), social media permanence vs. ephemerality, and more.

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Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company:

Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis — a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church — requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). Vatican News goes as far as to position this stone, not the most premium, as “the people’s stone.”

It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what — due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning — reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”

Fast Company’s headline reads “The Kerning on the Pope’s Tomb Is a Travesty”, but travesty is not the right word. The right word is sin.

Here's a prototype of what a story page might look like on our baseline site for WordLand. I did this off on the side as input for the WordPress theme. I find it easier to work on style in a standalone page without much tech that can get in the way of fast iteration.

Three years ago, when I abandoned FogBugz after having used it for nearly 20 years, I landed on Help Scout, a fantastic support system offered by a company that seems to have a positive spirit and, cherry on top, is based locally to me in Boston. There are few companies I’ve been as happy to […]

We're working on the "baseline" theme for WordLand, the default -- the one that shows the user's writing in a WordPress context. I did a survey of news sites and blogs to see how they show their titles: Gothamist puts the name in the upper left corner, leaving room for som...

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): To boost the popularity of these souped-up chatbots, Meta has cut deals for up to seven-figures with celebrities like actresses Kristen Bell and Judi Dench and wrestler-turned-actor John Cena for the right...

Fact-checking is a ChatGPT use-case for reporters. Feed a draft of your story into ChatGPT and ask if it spots any factual errors. There may be some false positives, so you can ask another AI chatbot, or investigate yourself elsewhere. And it may miss some. But it couldn't hurt and it might save your ass.

New podcast: Building a billionaire's network.

RSS defines a network of services and readers. Each one can go down, but the whole network stays up. That's all that Bluesky has promised, and that's why a layer of RSS on top of Bluesky would deliver a huge portion of the stability it would need to survive a disaster. It could be done in a matter of weeks, if they decided to do it. I would help.

Bluesky was down this morning. Usually I don't criticize a service when it's down, because I can relate. We like to help each other when there are outages. But Bluesky is special, because they claim to be decentralized. If it were, it wouldn't go down unless the internet its...