FeedCity

Wyoming, September 2025.

From the video Living in my car for photography.

Slowly catching up on my RSS feed and I just read Dave's post “Why would anybody start a website?”. Obviously, Dave's post is right up my street but it reminded me of a random notes post on my phone that I wrote a while back.

Why build a website?

Why knit a jumper with your bare hands?

Why cook a homemade meal from scratch?

Why paint in a canvas?

Why fix a broken thing?

Why write a letter?

Why anything really?

We, humans, are driven to touch and craft with our body. Deep down we crave that. Website making is a digital craft.

There, I let out a draft from my phone and it is now in my blog. Why not?

Anyway, I love how the "no thought is original" is real. Turns out, one day before I started this draft on my blog, Jim Nielsen also did a similar comparison. They're smarter than me, listen to them!

Disney stock down 1.1% at 11:30AM Eastern, indicating that in the opinion of shareholders, the first amendment isn't that big a deal for a media company.

I've been getting ChatGPT to draw me product shots of all kinds of "really simple" things like ketchup, cola, cheese, baked beans (see below). Then I thought it might work pretty well as a line of books? I'll have my Python simple. Really simple. Who would want complicated baked beans?

Test post test post test post test post test post test post, my kingdom for a test post!

I got a few good error reports and that led to an easy fix. So if you had a problem creating a new post on WordLand could you please try again and report any problems, or success. Thanks!

When Paramount said firing Colbert was financial, I think they were telling the truth. Unless they dumped Colbert the $8 billion deal with the Ellisons wouldn't happen. So it was Colbert or $8 billion. They went for the money. Pretty sure it's the same thing with ABC and Kimmel.

I had a great talk/podcast interview yesterday with Matthias Pfefferle about everything I'm interested in re WordPress and networking, and our interests overlap almost 100 percent. I was telling him about WordLand and explaining how I wanted to see a whole market of editors....

This town, at the end of the Metro North line, looks like an ideal place to park yourself for easy access to the city, yet a fairly country experience.

Wyoming, September 2025.

From the video Living in my car for photography.

I'm back on the road! I drive across the country and do some photography in places as distant from each other as Lake Michigan, Devils Tower in Wyoming, and the Salt Flats in Utah. I also show how I live on the road, why I do it this way, and why it has been so beneficial for my photography.

I've heard some reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.

A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.

In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator here, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative. I wish other people would share the load. And definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)

It's really simpler than really simple.

Here's an idea. Why doesn't Apple make a laptop with a light shining out to highlight the user's face so they look better when they're on a Zoom call. I bet someone makes a device like this to clip on a laptop. Right??

When Really Simple isn't simple enough. 😄

Until we start working together and for each other it’s going to keep getting worse.

I've started calling ChatGPT boss as in OK boss.

ChatGPT is great at SVG. Describe the icon you want and in a few iterations you have it, even if it's not in Font Awesome. I would have killed to have this a few years ago, before FA came out. This is the best of both -- use FA if they have the right icon, design your own if they don't. It also makes me think that now perhaps SVG-based user interfaces are within the realm of possibility. CSS is no way to design UIs. I have a podcast in the pipe about this. If you want to know what I mean, look at the docs for QuickDraw.