Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

- 2026-02-03T14:15:06Z
Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing the output of an app so other apps can use it as input. Another thing AI apps have in common with work we've done in the past is the ability to script apps, which was one of the big features of Frontier esp on the Mac starting in the early 90s. This started out just for desktop apps but worked just as well for web apps, once that opportunity became available. I felt strongly that the Mac with it's very functional GUI could benefit from a powerful system-level scripting language with the UI objects being scriptable, and the data of the apps accessible via script. That kind of duality is still a common theme in computer work, I'm doing the same kind of thing with WordPress, as the OS for the web, and making it possible to create different UIs in ways that earlier social web apps can't. I think that functionality as with the others will pair very nicely with ChatGPT and its cousins.

- 2026-02-03T14:46:24Z
Screen shot of system.verbs.apps as it appeared in my frontier.root frozen sometime in the early 00s. I wrote a quick Mastodon post about this. So many stories to tell about each of these projects. Looking at the list and realize we got all those people to work together. They don't talk about that when the write the history, but that is the real accomplishment. There is so much really good tech that ends up lost to history because people wouldn't open their eyes and see that they weren't alone. That might be the biggest flaw in the design of our species, that it's so rare that we get together on the way things should work. Other examples -- MP3, QuickDraw, HTML. And so much time wasted replacing things that already worked fine. (Think of all the programming languages invented in the last 20 years. What a waste of resources. No doubt the AI's have already created a meta-language to compile all that code into. If they could think, what would they think of us for not paying attention to each other.)

- 2026-02-03T15:02:16Z
1996: Nerd's Guide to Frontier.

- 2026-02-02T15:41:17Z
I have an array built into every app I do, on server or in the browser, called snarkySlogans. When I need a bit of text to test with I just choose a random snarky slogan. They are little truths that have occurred to me over the years. You're free to steal this code, they do come in handy at times. There's a snarky slogan to cover that -- "Only steal from the best." Another one I really like: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."

- 2026-02-01T22:00:02Z
Why did we need all those programming languages?

- 2026-02-01T21:58:21Z
Imagine building blocks to assemble your own social web app. A toolkit you could plug into your bot.

- 2026-02-01T15:41:59Z
I was surprised to find that nirvana.userland.com, a site that was new in 1998, is still running.

- 2026-02-01T15:09:25Z
January is archived, as is 2025. On to the future! :-)