Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

- 2025-09-07T17:15:37Z
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 up to 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. Impossible to read at times, but 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 next month.

- 2025-09-07T17:21:26Z
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.

- 2025-09-07T14:53:42Z
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.

New version of FeedLand - 2025-09-06T13:22:04Z

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.

About feedland.org - 2025-09-06T12:24:34Z

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. :-)

Screen shot.

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.

- 2025-09-05T14:57:20Z
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! ;-)

- 2025-09-04T14:14:46Z
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).

- 2025-09-04T14:22:56Z
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.

- 2025-09-04T14:48:57Z
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.

- 2025-09-04T15:27:13Z
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.

- 2025-09-03T17:20:39Z
Podcast: Last chance for the open web.

- 2025-09-03T15:32:01Z
I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs.

- 2025-09-02T14:54:58Z
CSS Grid where have you been all my life? Very rational, simple.

- 2025-09-02T21:56:27Z
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?

WordLand + FeedLand will ask... - 2025-09-02T21:55:17Z

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.

My life has a musical track - 2025-09-02T20:41:24Z

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!

- 2025-09-01T14:18:06Z
AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.

- 2025-09-01T13:09:16Z
I want my blog on the same network as my social media.

- 2025-09-01T16:29:41Z
A new kind of spam or phishing email. Appears to be a challenge by Twitter of one of my posts there as a copyright infringement, which it most definitely is not. You have to look closely at the URL it takes you to, which is on this domain. assents-x.com. Hmm at first looks legit, but look more closely.

- 2025-09-01T15:57:20Z
I've been watching a lot of baseball recently. Over the years I've developed as a programmer, and they've radically changed the way baseball is played. Pitchers used to try to pitch a complete game, but now that never happens. Sometimes they take a pitcher out in the first inning if he's pitched over say 70 pitches, because there's no point, what he's doing obviously isn't working, and he's getting close to the maximum pitches they'd let him do, esp if he's young and a hot prospect, they don't want to burn him out. I find that no matter what, after four hours of development work I start getting sloppy, and I can't think big picture as I could in the beginning of the session. I'm trying to finish things up for the day, and leave myself in a good place to pick up in the next session. And like a pitcher you have to stay focused. The phone doesn't ring for the pitcher when he's on the mound, that's why programmers, good ones, who are performing at or near their limit of ability to focus, so totally don't welcome interruptions.

- 2025-09-01T22:24:00Z
A motto for WordLand. "All the tools you need right where you write."