FeedCity

We used to have great multi-cross-blog debates. That's the kind of distance that makes discourse civilized. I post in my space, you post in yours, and link the two when appropriate.

Turns out we can influence the RSS feed we emit from a WordPress site by editing its theme, so it appears we should be able to get WordLand to work for linkblogs without resorting to a special feed.

We've forgotten how important links are. Let's find some linguists to write about the role linking plays in language. It's a language element that didn't exist before the web. And thanks to social media apps it's been mostly removed from our language. I aim to get it growing again.

I'm not an inventor, I'm a gardener, of media types. I had to learn to be a developer for this to work, but soon it won't be necessary. We've been stuck in a rut of online sameness for a couple of decades now. One benefit of AI is the exclusivity that programmers have had, for all of history, is being broken. Thank goodness. It's way past time. (I hope.) It's also possible we're in the process of inventing The Matrix. Ooops. That's what makes life so interesting, you don't know if the future is boring or exciting. But in my experience it's always largely unforeseen.

Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been safely stored on GitHub along with the rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing.

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

Sponsored by:

• Clic for Sonos: No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.
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Oregon, November 2025.

From the video Stuck in my car during a storm (& answering your questions).

A bad storm comes to the Oregon Coast and I'm stuck. A good chance to answer some of your questions about the way I travel for photography.

What Frontier is about -- from 2021.

Someday everyone will have a blogroll like this, and a blog.

Podcast: Boastful story of Frontier and how it relates to today.

Hypothetically, if someone were building a headless version of Frontier with help from ChatGPT, they might be thinking about how to build a web app that was a really good shell to start with. If such a person asked what I thought, I would say without a doubt that would be Dru...

I get asked this question very often: why only black and white? Aren't you tempted to capture those beautiful fall colors?

I love getting comments like this. The issue I posted about yesterday turns out to be a bug, and apparently it's going to be fixed. So I can go ahead without worrying about a workaround. This is the best outcome. Usually with most vendors if there's a bug, they don't acknowledge, and then they might get around to looking at it someday. This is what I call working together. Scott Hanson found the thread where they were discussing the feature in question, starting in 2011. I added an update from 2025. This stuff feels like time travel, and it's also incredibly reassuring to find that solutions to issues that were relevant 14 years ago are still relevant today. That's the stability that platforms require in order for developers to build with confidence. This is something that many big tech companies (cough Apple cough) either don't understand or don't care about.

Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.

And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.

Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.

There are plenty of opportunities to invite people to your product ahead of the formal launch. Alpha, beta, etc.My preference is only right at the end. Typically a week or two before we go live. When the product is in the very last throes of beta, barely beta. Essentially ...

I've assumed that all WordPress sites hosted on wordpress.com or running JetPack would have data about the site id, and for each item, the post id. It turns out it's not that simple?

A couple of examples:

• daveverse.org/feed/ -- has these elements
• scripting5.wordpress.com/feed/ -- doesn't have them

I have of course asked ChatGPT, and got a lot of wrong answers.

It's important because this data is used to connect blog posts to the editor, for posts you can edit. It's really important that editing is accomplished by at most a single click, when you're viewing it in a reader app.

I should be able to click on an edit icon from the viewer to open it in the editor, assuming it's my post.

It also figures heavily in the discourse feature.

I've created a place on GitHub for comments.