FeedCity

House of Dynamite is a fantastic movie, it deserved the great reviews it's getting, and I found it easy to watch, though a lot of reviewers said it wasn't. It's exactly the kind of movie I like -- political thriller with ideas rich with intrigue. Great acting and writing. It...

I changed the header graphic on Scripting News today to raise a question with NYC voters. Bill de Blasio was mayor. He was elected with great vision, but the politics of NY are not in sync with the ambitions of dreamers. The police union didn't like him. I'm sure they would ...

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels: Apple silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the days since Apple announced the M5, I’ve seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected: This is just another boring incremental ...

My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Vercel.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider: There are really two separate issues at hand: Should users be allowed to make fetish content of any woman who is stupid enough (like me) to allow anyone to make cameos of her? And how do you stop people from making fetish co...

South Dakota, September 2025.

From the video Living in my car for photography.

I see that the WordPress world is getting interested in adding AI features. I had some ideas a few years ago, about how I would like AI to be hooked up to blogging, and the ideas have developed a bit in the years since. As a writer I want most is every bit of writing I’ve p...

The story behind a piece of art can be as important, if not more, than the piece itself. How we make art matters, a lot.

Great to see Les Orchard reading my site again. We did some great stuff together a long time ago in Frontier. He converted code from Perl (I think) to Frontier so I could use S3 for storage for users. I still use his code to this day. He's been writing of his memories of great feed reading tools of 20+ years ago, and I keep trying to tell my friend Les that the system we have now makes those products look primitive, as it should because so many years have passed. In 2022, I decided to give RSS another try. First I did a top to bottom review of RSS, and then I built FeedLand. If you loved feeds and mourn the day the music died, I have good news, it didn't die, you all just stopped believing it could happen.

We've had a performance issue in FeedLand that we finally think we have tracked down. I'm working slowly and carefully on a new version that incorporates the new thinking. If it works, I'll tell you more about what worked and how it affecs the software (obviously for the bet...

Eric Hal Schwarz, reporting for TechRadar: Meta is closing the door on third-party AI assistants inside WhatsApp. Starting January 15, 2026, no general-purpose AI chatbot, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others, will be allowed to operate on the platform. The change i...

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video Backpacking for the best view in Oregon.

At the bottom of their “Use Cases” page, SerpApi lists the following companies and organizations as customers (“They trust us. You are in good company. Join them.”):

• Airbnb
• Nvidia
• Meta
• Shopify
• Perplexity
• KPMG
• Ahrefs
• Grubhub
• Samsung
• AI21labs
• United Nations (!)
• Thomson Reuters
• BrightLocal
• Experian

From an August 21, 2025 report in The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, alas), however:

OpenAI also isn’t the only Google rival to use SerpApi data. SerpApi’s website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari — a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix.

Was Apple removed from the list because they’re no longer (or never were?) a customer, or because they remain a customer but don’t want to be listed?

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times: Eight years ago, SerpApi, a start-up in Austin, Texas, dived headlong into the byzantine world of using robots to “scrape” Google’s search algorithms, so it could collect information to help customers appear higher in search ...

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter: The Savant, which originally had a Sept. 26 premiere date, was yanked in the weeks following the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk. Language on the landing page for the series has since vacillated fr...

Also after last week's conference we're starting to get help from the open source developer community around WordPress. Really friendly people, excited about what we can all do together.

I'm really happy with the way WordPress News is shaping up. Every community should have a news site like this.

For those in the Driftwood Trackers subgroup of the Pacific Wave Appreciation Society, here’s Biggish Log yet another 50 ft. closer to the dunes after another day of sneaker wave alert-level surf. 🌊🌊🌊

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video How to make great photography inevitable.

Yesterday I did some research into how weblogs.com, in 1999, tracked changes in the blogs it was following. This was a precursor to feed readers. There was a main output file called changes.xml, a reverse chronological list of sites, not feeds, feeds didn't exist yet. From...