# Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:11:56 GMT
## 
The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcastic, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.
# Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:39:38 GMT
## I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people are AI designed actors, and can be exactly the kind of people who make you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens.
# Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:45:08 GMT
## Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus made me both emotional and aroused at the same time. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like Last of Us or Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy.
# Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:17:00 GMT
## Breakthrough realization
- 
In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)
# Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:51:54 GMT
## The Mets' soul walks out the door
- As a lifelong Mets fan since 1962, I say they blew it. And if you follow my sports writing here, mostly about the Knicks and Mets. I can usually see a pro and a con to everything. And I let the team run itself, and I ponder the philosophical intentions, because to me the Mets are the team built on philosophy. It certainly was not built on winning. And yet we love them. There's no winning in life, that's reality. So we try to find meaning on the days and hours we have remaining.
Anyway -- why did the Mets have such a shit season?
Because they disrespected Pete Alonso last winter.
He should have been the glue that held the team together along with Nimmo, Diaz, and all the other much-loved players.
We still think of Lindor as the new guy. Now all you have left for leadership is Lindor and Soto who obviously doesn't even want to be there. It's was a broken team before the news, and now it's not even a team.
A team isn't a bunch of stats and a bunch of money, it's the players, the people. You can't solve this problem with a spreadsheet, it has to be done with heart. These days I think of the Mets just trying to be the Yankees which aside from being impossible, is pretty much the exact reason we're Mets fans and not Yankees fans. Ohhh, when will they learn. I don't want a team built to win the World Series. I want a team built to trust with my heart.
And btw, the big news was they traded Nimmo, and let Alonso and Diaz sign with other teams.
# Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:51:42 GMT
## The real reason the Dems lost in 2024 is they ran the most inept campaign in history. You could argue about who was to blame, but that is, net-net what happened. They were so bad they made Trump look better! And that is hard to do. :-)
# Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:43:04 GMT
## Feed discovery tips. How to help readers find your feed.
# Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:19:55 GMT
## Feed discovery 23 years later. "You can see how these things got ratified in the early 00s -- in the most web way imaginable, by individual users seeing the benefit, adding it to their sites, and quickly the entire feed world got an upgrade."
# Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:32:08 GMT
## If you develop a feed reading app and have suggestions for the new howto, please post them here.
# Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:09:03 GMT
## Every time I go to the supermarket I'm reminded of how scary the times are. People want to just live their lives, never has that been more understandable, but food prices are a constant reminder for everyone there's good reason to be scared. And if you want to really feel it, imagine what happens if we somehow let Trump flood the economy with dollars. Talk about a recipe for disruption, this time, of our lives, not just some kind of PC or network or game software.
# Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:55:47 GMT
## Ben Werdmuller wrote a new perspective on RSS. It's great, just what we need. RSS is of the web, and is the simplest most obvious way to get all the twitter-like systems connected.
# Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:41:45 GMT
## 
One thing I realized I should point the ActivityPub folks to. I implemented Inbound RSS for WordPress. I was going to request it as a feature from the WordPress community, then realized I could write it fairly quickly with the system I already have built. After all, FeedLand already supports Inbound RSS, that's a lot of what it does, as a feed reader, esp along with the websocket interface it has. I already have complete code for writing to a WordPress site, that's a big part of what WordLand does. WordPress does a fantastic job of outbound RSS, but why not inbound? If Substack, for example, supported inbound, we'd all be using their mail distribution systems, and sharing revenue. Here's the source code, MIT license, so party on, Wayne.
# Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:39:32 GMT
## Idea: I could probably hook WordLand up to GitHub pretty easily. It's really good at Markdown, btw.
# Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:29:40 GMT
## I've found that the twitter-like social networks I'm part of have slowed down to almost nothing. Have you experienced something similar? Here's a link to my accounts on mastodon, bluesky, github, twitter. Tell me what you see.
# Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:23:36 GMT
## It's not 63 degrees
- 
That's not 63��F, though at first I thought it was.
Pluribus is not, at least so far, equal to Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Some parts are confusing, some are poorly edited. They try to have a shocker or cliff hanger at the end of episodes, but they aren't very shocking and the cliff turns out to be something so obvious that you could swear they already told us that. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were exquisitly crafted TV. The incredible shots they took, many of them were works of art all on their own. Maybe it was the combination of factors. The skill of Vince Gilligan's team, combined with our admiration for Rhea Seehorn, and the gravitas of Apple TV and one of the other great shows of our time, Severance. That made the conclusion obvious, by lineage this must be the best show ever. It's always that way, in sports for example. You could assemble a team of superstars, and they don't even make the playoffs. Because it's the whole thing that makes it so hard to beat. But! I am hooked, I love the show, it's hard to imagine anything could get me to not reserve Thurs at 9PM to watch the latest episode, all I ask is no more humans eating dog food. Please, that was too much. It's sad however that there are only two episodes left in this season, but then comes all the holiday releases, and this year it seems most of it is on streaming services, not in theaters.
# Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:53:23 GMT
## A note to Doc re this post. We have WordPress more or less doing what we do on Scripting News. Thanks to Scott Hanson for persevering on this project. He's using the Baseline theme. I don't think it's ready yet for Doc, but it's close. The idea is to support most of the features of WordLand in a WordPress rendering.
# Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:00:41 GMT
## A place to ask questions about all this stuff I keep writing about.
# Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:15:12 GMT
## A frequently asked question. How do we make this stuff work with Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. Answer: we don't.
# Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:09:49 GMT
## 
If we really want tech to get back to basics we need pubs that function as product reviewers, like we have entertainment reviewers. There's so much software and so many isolated bubbles of developers, when there's a development that shakes the world less than ChatGPT, I might not hear about it for ten years, or might never hear about it. In the 80s we had lots of pubs that covered all kinds of products at a user level. There were 15 popular word processing apps, for example -- all made a decent living, and remember there were a lot fewer users then. Three spreadsheets on the PC and two on the Mac. It was possible because we had PC Week, MacWEEK, MacUser, MacWorld, PC Mag, PC World, InfoWorld, Dr Dobbs, BYTE, Popular Computing, Creative Computing, and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Some great writers, and insightful reviews about what it's like to actually use the stuff. I had a product reviewed in the NY Times if you can believe that, and at the same time InfoWorld did a similar review. If you want to rock, we need good, thoughtful reviewers, with no conflicts, and enough time to put into each product.
# Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:02:00 GMT
## People seem to like Telex which makes developing WordPress user interfaces easier, via AI. Software is gradually adjusting this way, putting the AI where the problem is. For example I wanted to do a Google Form a few months ago and the best Gemini could do was tell me what commands to choose. But now if you go to make a form, using the Forms app, it offers to do it via AI.
# Sat, 06 Dec 2025 14:44:00 GMT
## People using feedland.org -- may notice that some old items will appear in your timelines. I just installed a version of FeedLand on that server that does a better job of figuring out if a feed item has changed. There will be fewer false positives, which makes the software considerably more efficient, and means that you don't have to see things that didn't change. It should settle down fairly quickly, but it may be a little chatty for a while. Still diggin! (Also these changes will come to feedland.com as well.)
# Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:29:48 GMT
## I've come to see WordPress as an API with a widely deployed and stable implementation behind it, where the user is in control and developers can build apps without having to get into the storage-selling business.
# Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:05:15 GMT
## When they say AI is just autocomplete on steroids, that's like saying a human is just a product of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur on steroids. It may be true, but it doesn't say anything useful. It's also like saying that a computer is just a collection of on and off switches.
# Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:36:18 GMT
## Funny thing about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, if Texas goes ahead with their gerrymandering plan, it probably will backfire on them, cause them to lose a few seats instead of gain them. The news reports generally leave that out, probably figuring the sports fans who can understand the gambling on football and baseball couldn't understand that gerrymandering is a bet that you know which voters will turn out and who they'll vote for a year in the future. In fact NPR reports it as a victory for Repubs. Right now it looks very much like it is not.
# Thu, 04 Dec 2025 21:21:43 GMT
## Flip switches
- In software, I like to have multiple ways to view the same data. In one context it's an outline, then flip a switch and now it's a graphic.
MORE shipped at Living Videotext for the Mac in 1986. You start with an outline and flip a switch to turn it into a tree chart. Flip it back to make a change, then flip it again to see the change in a tree chart. Or flip the outline to reveal a set of presentation slides. People loved the idea that they could create graphics entirely by writing and reorganizing and then flipping a switch. That was the killer feature in the demos we did at trade shows. 
Before that in LBBS, a bulletin board system I wrote and ran on an Apple II in my Menlo Park living room in the early 80s, I had two views of the message structure, reverse chronologic and a hierarchic thread structure. You could always flip a switch and see the post you're looking at in the other view. If you're catching up and want to see where in the tree this message lives you, flip the switch. If you've come across a two year old post in the tree, and want to see what else was going on in 1982 (for example), flip the switch into the message scanner, and you've gone back in time. And the flip-switch was instantaneous and required one gesture, no thinking on your part. 
And then Manila, many years later, written in Frontier, started as a discussion group. It was the software behind discuss.userland.com, which was where the initial blogosphere formed in 1998 and 1999. Go through the archive to see for yourself. But then we had the idea that hey this could be a blog, so when you created a blog post, unwittingly behind the scenes, it just created a discussion post. So all you had to do was flip a switch when you were reading a post, and see the post in the discussion group. There's that duality again.
I'm working on discourse with WordLand in the middle, and WordPress at the edges, where a comment is also a blog post. Readers might not know that they're reading something that has a dual life as a comment linked to someone else's post. There can be a flip-switch in both views that lets you go back and forth. I can only guarantee that the flip switch will be in my software, since this will be an open network, there can be any number of different ways to view the content.
As someone famous once said "Let a thousand flowers bloom."
Why should comment writing not have all the features of blog post writing? Why invent a new more limited text type instead of reusing the one you created for blogging? That's where factoring comes in.
# Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:33:22 GMT
## 
The nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though -- I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result.
# Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:31:49 GMT
## They should make a version of bash on Linux that also accepts ChatGPT commands. As always they is someone other than me.
# Wed, 03 Dec 2025 02:47:19 GMT
## Today's song: Old Folks Boogie. Sooooo you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill.
# Wed, 03 Dec 2025 02:30:28 GMT
## 
There's a question going around in WordPressLand as to whether there are any RSS apps. Yes, of course there are. Have a look at daveverse, in the right margin. That's a feed reader. All the feeds I follow personally. When one of them updates it goes to the top. You can see the five most recent posts by clicking on the wedge next to the title, and from there, you can go to the website by clicking the link. That's available as a WordPress plug-in.
# Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:12:25 GMT
## On Saturday I reported a problem with WordPress feeds that created a problem for the software I was working on. It's Tuesday now, and it's fixed. This really feels good. Thanks Jeremy! The WordPress community is special. Never seen a big product like WordPress respond so quickly.
# Tue, 02 Dec 2025 23:48:05 GMT
## I asked ChatGPT to write an email to Sam Altman for me. It's about a possible way to compete with Google.
# Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:06:44 GMT
## Pluribus spoilers below
- Theories on what's actually going on.
- It's a love story between Carol and Zosia. You can fall in love with a person with no sense of self. They plotted to have Helen killed, and waited until Carol's "f*ckable" judgment turns into real love. They get married and everyone lives happily ever after.
- Alternate theory -- the original people are still in their bodies, suppressed to keep quiet. Inside they're screaming to be saved, as pissed off as Carol. They want their bodies back. They have the ability to write messages on their skin, so what Carol saw at the end of the last episode was a corpse with the words HELP ME! visible on the body's belly.
- Another alternate theory about the end of the last episode -- it took a moment for Carol to recognize her own body, possibly dead, and realizing this is all a dream. It's another version of The Matrix, where this is the fake reality that we've been seeing. None of this is really happening. (Like the end of the Bob Newhart show?)
Also is Plur1bus like Saul Goodman, in that if you say it a different way it has a message encoded? The 1 instead of an i seems like a clue.
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:43:37 GMT
## We've forgotten how important links are.
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:53:17 GMT
## 
I was able to use my Android phone to get on the NYC subway a few days ago. Turn the phone on, point it at the reader on the turnstyle, and just keep walking. It's that fast and a lot better than with the MetroCard. Sometimes things do get better.
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:49:17 GMT
## 2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:22:23 GMT
## 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.
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:34:33 GMT
## 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.
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:53:28 GMT
## 
I had to learn to be a developer if I wanted to make new media types out of computer networks, but soon it may not 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 almost always unforeseen.
# Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:18:10 GMT
## 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.
