I've gotten a lovely response to the Que Sera Sera post I linked to here. It's from 1996, I was reporting from a tech conference I was at where there were all angry men on stage threatening everyone else. They may not have known they were doing that, but it was awful. And so different from the web we were just beginning to understand at that time. I'm going to start going through the posts that I remember making a difference at the time. No better way for me to remember what the web is, going back to these memories when it was all fresh and new, before the leaders of tech realized what was going on. Google didn't ship for another two years. It probably wasn't even in development at the time. Yet I think the last section is a good anthem for the web, for those of us who think it's time to cut pop all the bullshit off the stack and get back to our roots.
# Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:36:19 GMT
## I had a flash last night during the Emmys. The Bloggers of Mastodon. I loved the concept right off the bat, so I wrote a blog post using in WordLand that went through WordPress and landed on Mastodon. It all works. Where are the other Bloggers of Mastodon? Let's start a club!
# Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:07:03 GMT
## feedland.org or feedland.com?
- This question has come up quite a bit lately.
People don't know that there are two places you can use FeedLand, feedland.org and feedland.com.
There's a lot of history here, and some uncertainty about the future, so there's not much I can do other than explain the situation.
First you're welcome to use either of them.
feedland.org is running on a simple small server on Digital Ocean, and feedland.com is on Automattic's VIP network.
If feedland.org gets overloaded, it gets slow.
if feedland.com gets overloaded, it adds more servers and should stay about the same at all times.
You should pick one and use it and not have two accounts, but people accidentally create them, because in some places we point to .com and in others we the default is .org. It's because we haven't gotten it together yet.
There are also performance issues on .com -- ones that we still need to address.
That's about all I can say at this point. At the same time I'm working on a whole other product while all this is happening, and I'm not that young, and really can only work so many hours a day before I have to stop. A fact.
And I'm really glad so many new people are trying FeedLand. I use it myself in so many ways. And it will be deeply integrated with WordLand in the next release. I'm not kidding.
# Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:33:24 GMT ## The Bloggers of Mastodon. # Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:55:36 GMT ## A very smart application of AI. Google could add it to the debugger. When my program crashes deep in jQuery code, with no stack crawl, it could suggest what the problem might be without me have to try to describe it for ChatGPT. The Google AI debugger would be able to look everywhere any anywhere in the virtual machine. Much faster than I can. As a programmer I hope they're working on this. Or maybe it's already out in testing form? # Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:36:16 GMT ##
A couple of days ago I saw a post from Evan Prodromou asking if I had seen a product announcement, and was wondering what I thought of the name. The name of the product was Really Simple Something. I said it was the first I heard of it. I did a little digging using ChatGPT and found they can do this, it’s not illegal or unethical. But it’s also true that you could invent a new format and call it HTML even if it isn’t what we think of as HTML today . The W3C would have no recourse. If you wanted to make a new CSS to compete with the existing CSS, no one can stop you, and you can call it CSS. Not a good way to run the internet imho. But that appears that's how it works. So as much as I didn't like what they did, esp the fact that the first I heard of it was a public announcement, and had no time to prepare or maybe even help them do something better, I guess we have to accept it. RSS has been through this before and came out okay. I just wish it would stop at some point. It's a useful thing, deserves love and support, not just from me, but from everyone, esp people who run companies that depend on it. You benefit as much as I do. End of sermon.
# Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:12:56 GMT
## Last night's email didn't go out. I found and fixed the bug, and the mails went out about 10.5 hours late.
# Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:45:25 GMT
## I've found new freedom on my WordPress blog that's also on Masto.
# Sat, 13 Sep 2025 14:13:01 GMT
## How did a healthy well-fed and educated 22 year old man from a good family throw his life away and for what? To kill a 31 year old family man who dedicated his life to making massive numbers of people miserable? What’s more tragic? And how many other Americans are on this track?
# Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:18:19 GMT
## Embrace the creativity of others
- I wrote a piece in October 1996 after attending a conference of the tech industry that as it turns out was in its final stages. This was one of the last times it met. I was coming from the web, and wanted to see if anyone else was ready to change how we work with each other.
I've been following that ideal ever since, people seem to misinterpret it for subservience or weakness, or a pretense to cover another kind of greed, when it's really sincere, and all about strength. Sometimes people say yes, and when that happens magical things happen. I swear to god. I've been there. I've done it, it's not something you can do on your own, by definition. It's rare when people actually help each other and thereby create something. It's why the Beatles are such a great story. Someday I still hope to be part of a group like that. Right now, it's still totally everyone for themself. That is breaking. Read the news. But I believe if we did start really collaborating and not just talking about it, things would change very very quickly. Things would happen that can't happen until we work together.
I had it figured out in 1996, but still haven't figured out how to make it happen, and time is running out.
# Fri, 12 Sep 2025 14:47:32 GMT ##
I did a podcast interview yesterday with Nathan Wrigley at WP Tavern. I had a great time, and learned a lot. It's interesting that while I am not a member of the WordPress community, there is a big intersection between that community and one I do belong to -- the web. WordPress was founded on the principles and idealism of the web. It's baked in. So it might be the largest community of users, not exclusively developers, who have the same values as the web, which are very very powerful values. I'm rediscovering them and it's wonderful. It means I can plug your app into my server and they work first time. It's the just works part that makes it the web. It makes you suck in your breath and go, I'm there now. One interesting thing that came up was the subject of altruism, which is something I reject re myself. It doesn't work if what I do is altruism, because we all must be somewhat committed to the success of our competitors, because if we don't we are locking people in. It's so important that users have freedom of movement. If they don't things stagnate like our 19 years of Twitter. I'm going to be Nathan's show again, and again if he'll have me, to check in on the progress of my humble project to create a new layer, combining WordPress and all the other good stuff that isn't hooked up to it yet. I could not have hoped for a better introduction to The Land of WordPress.
# Thu, 11 Sep 2025 12:39:36 GMT
## It's really simple
- Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets.
Around the time of the 20th anniversary I decided to swing back and see what more we could do with RSS. It had been sitting there basically going nowhere for most of those 20 years. I want to be clear, there were good and useful products created and supported, but there was none of the innovation that would have happened if it hadn't been so severely injured by Google and the many VC-backed startups hacking away at it.
A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That's what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn't be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.
Anyway, around the 20th anniversary, in the leadup to it, I decided if no one else was going to invest in RSS, I would, and let's see what comes of it.
The result was FeedLand which is fundamentally different from all the other feed readers in that its subscription model is patterned after the twitter-like social media apps. Everyone's subscription list is public. I can look at your list and you can look at mine. You can also put categories on the feeds you subscribe to and route them to other servers doing other things, through the magic of the web. And get this -- you can even subscribe to a category of my subscriptions. Lots of power there, but still it's simple.
FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, WordLand is a real editor that supports the basic writing features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. Markdown is like MP3. If you're mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It's there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you're mixing text you're mixing Markdown.
So while everyone was dancing on Twitter's dumpster fire of a social network I decided to build on something much bigger. The web. RSS and Markdown. WordPress and FeedLand.
The name Really Simple Syndication is supposed to make you smile, while most techie formats make you want to pull your hair out. RSS reads pretty well even if you know nothing about feeds and XML. I wish the browser people hadn't insisted on masking it with ugly CSS style sheets. I like lifting the hood of a car to see what's there even though I don't know what many of the things in there do. I learn by doing it.
RSS isn't ugly, it's brilliant, and shouldn't be fear-inducing, hence the promise: it's really simple.
The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we'll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them. It's true. Why didn't anyone see this coming? Well we did see it coming, but the Dems were too dumb to do anything about it. They're supposed to be the "woke" party, isn't it funny that they're so un-woke about something like keeping Americans fed!
# Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:44:46 GMT
## Bullet points from yesterday's podcast
- I asked ChatGPT to provide bullet points for yesterday's podcast. I thought this time it did a really good job. It did misunderstand some things I said, I just deleted those, below.
Screen shot of a post by Evan Prodromou on Masto yesterday. "You publish where you want to publish, Dave. We'll find a way to connect to you. That's the whole point." Indeed that is the whole point. I say it like this. "Interop is all that matters." If our products interop that's pure love. The rest of it is baloney. Maybe I'm not a nice guy. Not my job. We've being fucked over by "social media" for 19 years now, and the new ones who say they're open, and on the web, and decentralized, are not. The only way out of this mess is what Evan said. BTW, I sent Evan a pointer to the subscription list which is my outflow. I use OPML for the list and RSS for the feeds. That's where you will find my writing.
# Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:17:45 GMT
## 
I watched the movie Seven last night, and I can't stop thinking about it. It got a shitty review in the NYT, which usually means I won't bother with something, but this time I decided to give it a try. The reviewer, Janet Maislin, didn't like the acting of Brad Pitt. I thought Pitt was an unlikeable jerk, but I also thought that was the role, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't care. I also couldn't figure out what city it was. It wasn't NY, but Maislin says it was. Usually in a movie set in NY, I recognize many of the locations. There are only a few places movies are shot in the city. But again, I didn't care. What keeps me thinking about it is the story. I'm not going to spoil it. Don't read any reviews before watching it, they pretty much all get in the way of the storytelling.
# Mon, 08 Sep 2025 14:11:55 GMT
## How to be part of the rebooted blogosphere.
# Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:53:42 GMT
## 
Two videos every US resident should watch to prepare for what might be coming. 1. The Lives of Others. A drama set in the eastern part of post-war Germany before the wall came down. People lived their lives, but their relationship with the government and the military would seem very strange to an American of 2025, But more of this is definitely what's on the way, and the technology for watching what you do is much better now, and our neighbors aren't any different, which is what the Germans depended on. 2. The Handmaid's Tale. Same kind of police state as in Lives of Others with a Christian twist. Everyone is a member of a caste. Most women are infertile since some unspecified disaster, and the ones who can reproduce exist only to reproduce. There are women who clean the house, and do a few other things. There are certainly other books, movies and series worth tuning into, but these are the ones I recommend now. Handmaid's Tale is also a book, which I have read, but the show on Hulu goes into more detail.
# Sun, 07 Sep 2025 17:15:37 GMT
## New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook into FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. There's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the few weeks.
# Sun, 07 Sep 2025 17:21:26 GMT
## Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this.
# Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:22:04 GMT
## New version of FeedLand
- There's a new version of FeedLand, v0.7.0.
Here's the thread where we discussed the testing of the new release. It worked everywhere we installed it, so it seems fair to open it up to people running their own FeedLand instances.
The only features it adds are ones needed to use it with the new version of WordLand, coming soon now.
But if you have the time, it requires an update to the database, so it's not the usual thing. It explains at the beginning of the thread what the change is to the database.
Here are the instructions for doing the upgrade.
If you're installing a new instance, the instructions are the same as always.
If you have trouble, post a note on the thread.
Thanks to Scott Hanson for validating the new version. It's always important to have someone to check my work.
# Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:24:34 GMT ## About feedland.org -Yesterday's note on scripting.com about feedland.org was not the whole story. In the end I thought it made more sense to start the database over from the start.
There were a few users who subscribed to feeds that were constantly updating, and they never came back to use FeedLand. So as soon as I started it back up it started loading new items at a very high rate, and after a couple of hours it was still going. There aren't that many people using feedland.org, so I thought the best thing to do is to start over and hopefully people will figure out how to resubscribe to the feeds they want to follow.
Then I felt that people might be able to use a few tips on how to get going again, so that's what this post is about.
Sign off and on
First thing you should do is sign off and sign back on.
You will still have the credentials in your browser, but the server doesn't know about them, so when you try to do something that requires you being logged in it will fail. But if you sign off and on again, that will take care of that problem.
To sign off, choose the command in the system menu at the right end of the menubar.
Once you're signed off the only option will be to sign back on. :-)
Restore subscription list
How to restore from a backup of your subscription list.
From the first menu, choose Subscribe/From an OPML File.
Here's a screen shot.
Questions?
I started a thread on the support site for questions.
# Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:57:20 GMT ## I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. The server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-) # Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:14:46 GMT ##BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).
# Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:22:56 GMT
## Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be of an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, may affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have low regard for non-professional people writing on the web.
# Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:48:57 GMT
## ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don't do that, and made a couple of suggestions which didn't seem to make sense based on what ChatGPT had told me. So I tried what they suggested and it worked, and went back to ChatGPT and asked what it thought, and it said yes of course that worked, and would you like me to show you how to do it even better. I guess it takes a path and never goes back to see if there isn't a better one. We've been through this before. Anyway, always be circumspect about it's advice, it's not just hallucinations you need to watch for. That said, with help from both ChatGPT and Digital Ocean, I now have a better setup, and it should run without the problem we hit yesterday.
# Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:27:13 GMT
## AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.
# Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:20:39 GMT
## Podcast: Last chance for the open web.
# Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:32:01 GMT
## I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs.
# Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:54:58 GMT
## CSS Grid where have you been all my life? Very rational, simple.
# Tue, 02 Sep 2025 21:56:27 GMT
## General note: When I say RSS, I recognize that there are other feed formats, but I don't want to confuse things. The software makes all that transparent, so let's make it transparent for the users too, ok?
# Tue, 02 Sep 2025 21:55:17 GMT
## WordLand + FeedLand will ask...
- If all the people who love RSS and make software for it, feed readers, editors, blogging software, put our heads together, we could make a great network for people to write on, that would be so exciting, it would pull a lot of interest from the silos. If momentum builds, they will eventually add RSS as an inbound and outbound format because they will want to be on this network.
We, as writers, shouldn't have to live with the compromises that come from having to make 5 versions of everything, and still you don't have a way to share a lot of the interesting stuff people write.
If we choose to work together, even just a few of us, we could make big change.
# Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:41:24 GMT ## My life has a musical track -How you know you’re reallllly old. You tell Alexa to play songs by Elton John and you find yourself singing along with Crocodile Rock with tears streaming down your face. Then they play Philadelphia Freedom. Mama mia.
The thing about Crocodile Rock is that it's twice-nostalgic. He's singing about a generation-older than mine. Yet it planted in my memory connected to a period in my own life. I was a freshman at Lehman College in the Bronx, recovering from a raucous high school experience where I dropped out and moved into an apartment in the Bronx at 16 and came pretty close to losing my middle-class education-valuing upbringing. At Lehman, I was investing in myself and found out I was good at the things I thought I was no good at because the teachers were so awful. I got a good math teacher, Dr Isaacs, who treated me special because I had a good mind for math, it turns out. And thus I became a programmer when I thought I would likely go into politics before that. I still had the taste for politics, and as it turns out, writing, so I combined all of them into one, and out comes blogging and podcasting, and complicated algorithms that do simple easy to understand things.
And now Scott Knaster who has had an exciting Adjacent to Greatness career says that Philadelphia Freedom is about Billie Jean King. I did not know that!
