Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

Think different about developers - 2025-10-23T13:35:25Z

Tell the people who make AI's -- I want a way to have apps run in your browser that has direct connections to the AI engine, and it connects via the user's credentials, not the app devs (though you are entitled to know who the developer is). When I explored the idea of making apps for ChatGPT, this was the roadblock, I have to become a reseller of your service. Can't you figure out how to let the user pay directly? I just want to make tools, not be in the retail AI business. Feh.

This is the same problem web devs have, we have to become resellers for Amazon S3. Why can't Amazon, who already has an account for every freaking person in the world, let the user own their own data, which I believe they would reallllly like. I don't want access to it, I just want to make great tools for them to use. And they're free to use other products with the data. This helps encourage data format standards. It's why the PC software market was so much more vibrant than the web developer market.

I keep trying to explain this to people who aren't web devs, but in a position to help, and make a shitload of money, but all I get is blank stares, and "we don't do that."

weblogs.com re-viewed - 2025-10-23T13:21:04Z

Yesterday I did some research into how weblogs.com, in 1999, tracked changes in the blogs it was following. This was a precursor to feed readers. There was a main output file called changes.xml, a reverse chronological list of sites, not feeds, feeds didn't exist yet.

What the home page of weblogs.com looked like in June 2000.

A page that explained what weblogs are.

A snapshot of changes.xml from weblogs.com on Dec 13, 2003.

A search of scripting.com for changes.xml.

You can ask ChatGPT to tell you about changes.xml. I did, it was able to put together all the random bits that are now gone, it found them somewhere and I got a much better answer than I would have gotten if somehow all my docs had survived, and most of them did not. This btw is one of the great features of ChatGPT. Truly a miracle.

BTW, here's a transcript of my talk with ChatGPT about this stuff. Sometimes these links don't work for everyone. I wish they would get that working, dear friends at OpenAI. This is how your word of mouth builds.

- 2025-10-22T17:39:01Z
Still looking for more great WordPress news sites.

- 2025-10-22T13:50:38Z
Question came up on TPM as to whether the blogosphere might reboot in Substack. The author concluded it can't, and I agree. Here's why. "One thing the blogosphere had that Substack can’t have is all parts were replaceable. You could use any blogging tool, and any feed reader and still be part of the world. Substack is a single company that has raised VC money. Vastly different incentives." And this has been tested. You have to use their editor to publish in their enviroment. They're unable to let you see their product as part of a toolset, it has to be the whole thing.

- 2025-10-22T17:29:21Z
You know how the AI companies are all doing browsers. Why don't they have a local url that I could put into an <a> element that pops up the result of a question asked of the chatbot. Something like this. When you click on the link you find out what the Mets did.

- 2025-10-22T17:20:14Z
I'm okay with Trump destroying the White House step by step. We're going to need a lot of new things once he's done. There's going to be a lot of broken stuff that needs fixing. Feces covered monuments. Probably a new cemetary somewhere for his victims. But you know how when the Mets were defeated by the determined Yankees in Shea Stadium in 2000, we tore down the old stadium and built a new one. Same thing. The old White House will have served its purpose. We shouldn't even build a new White House on that location, just like we shouldn't have built a skyscraper in place of the World Trade Center. I wanted to see a mosque and a synagogue, a new football stadium, perhaps. A nice park. A place for a camp fire. Anything but an indestructable office building. We have so many of them. But where are the spaces for kids to play and learn and be friends. No, in place of the White House, I want to see a gorgeous public library. A place of learning. And a softball field and a nice swimming pool. We can tell the kids that once a bad old man lived here, and we decided it'd be more fun to have a big playground instead.

- 2025-10-21T17:46:06Z
Journalists report conventional wisdom thread on Bluesky.

Bingeworthy - 2025-10-21T17:24:00Z

This is a product i created a few years back but it went off the air when Twitter exploded for app devs, now it's back and still lovely.

BingeWorthy screen shot.

- 2025-10-21T01:32:39Z
I wonder if any established open source projects are converting to having ChatGPT or other AI manage the process.

- 2025-10-21T01:34:46Z
On my drive to Ottawa and back, I never had to wait for a charger, and it never took more than 1/2 hour to fill the battery to 80%. The chargers are often in places with restaurants or supermarkets. And it's good for my legs to get out of the car and walk for a bit.

- 2025-10-20T14:20:14Z
Frontier's Simple Cross-Network Scripting is one of my favorite features ever. It made procedure calls over the internet almost as simple as procedure calls inside Frontier.

- 2025-10-20T13:41:02Z
I wish WordPress had a "home" social network. The community is all over the place, on Twitter, Slack, Masto, Bluesky, GitHub, and probably a few other places. I hope to have a social network that is built on WordPress and RSS. It would be open to the public, and anyone could start their own, by running an easy to install piece of software on a server.

- 2025-10-20T13:39:59Z
Took yesterday off, aside from a little blogging, which isn't work for me -- now on Monday, I'm going to do a few warmup projects, and figuring out which big item I should focus on in my post-WordCamp experience.

- 2025-10-19T14:04:56Z
I have to remember to use WordLand to post to Mastodon, because when I go in that way, I don't have a character limit and I can use styling. We were wrestling with this question at WC, how to market the feature in a way that would get people to go to WordPress to write for Mastodon. It would also be cool if you could turn on the ActivityPub connection in WordLand, without having to wade through all the menus and dialogs. Imagine if we had a confirmation dialog like this in WordLand.

- 2025-10-19T13:39:39Z
I have a really interesting idea for Netflix. Do a MCP so I can ask ChatGPT to find a show I'd probably like on Netflix. Then Hulu would have to hook up too, and HBO and Apple and everyone else. That would fix a big entertainment problem because I've already taught ChatGPT exactly what I like in movies and serials by giving it all my favorite shows and why I liked them so much. This was the idea of Bingeworthy, which I never seem to find time to work on. I really just want the freaking functionality. Someone should buy Metacritic btw, their process, however it works, is really good at finding the good stuff. But please someone who believes in open APIs, it totally needs to be in the Chativerse.

What I did on my trip to Canada, part 1 - 2025-10-19T13:29:11Z

I presented WordLand for the first time publicly, the new one with a timeline, so it more clearly shows how we can build a beautiful social network just from open formats and protocols.

No user lock-in, every part replaceable, and open to developers to add functionality without having to reimplement the whole thing. These are all the things I think that have stood in the way of innovation in the web for many years.

A social network that starts out with no centralization and open in every sense has a much better chance of being decentralized than one that starts out centralized and swears they're going to stop doing that -- someday, fingers crossed, etc.

- 2025-10-18T21:19:21Z
Back home from my trip to Ottawa. Took the scenic route through the Adirondacks. Had an unqualified great trip. Should've gone to a WordCamp a long time ago. It's totally my type of people. I have a long list of things to organize, but for now it's time to catch up on sleep and rest, MLB and NBA, and make plans for the future.

- 2025-10-18T21:57:09Z

Saranac Lake, NY.

- 2025-10-17T15:48:06Z
Evan Prodromou explains all that's happening in the WordPressOSphere in the realm of ActivityPub.

- 2025-10-17T15:50:50Z
Wouldn't it be great if there were a list of WordPress users who have turned on their ActivityPub plugin, so we know who to subscribe to on our favorite ActivityPub service.

- 2025-10-17T14:06:09Z
I'm back at WordCamp in a big room waiting for Matt Mullenweg to answer questions for the people here. Yesterday's presentation went really well, lots of smart people really interested, fantastic discussion after. A very nice web culture. I went with three slides to get started, and then talked, demo'd, answered questions, and listened to ideas. Told a few jokes. Got a few laughs. It got the job done, help feed the word of mouth on WordLand.

Good morning from Ottawa - 2025-10-16T12:30:53Z

Here's the link to the slides promised below.

I've been going back and forth on slides. I always do this. In the end I hate slides because I digress while going through them and skip ahead, end up wishing I hadn't used them. So I decided to compromise. I'll do the first three in some detail, and digress and go down tangents as I see fit.

The three main slides.

1. Accomplishments of WordPress.
2. Why podcasting retained its independence.
3. Demo of WordLand.

There were 20 or 30 more slides after that.

So what I'll do is this. Present the first two in some detail, then page through the rest quickly and come back and do the demo. Also publish a link to the deck on my blog so people can scroll through them at their leisure. And once the demo is done, I'll answer questions.

I have an idea that we can have a blogosphere that is as functional as podcasting. We just need users to get started, to get the idea off the ground. We don't have to accept the limits, we can have the full web if we want it.

The accomplishments of WordPress - 2025-10-15T12:07:30Z

One more slide from the presentation.

The accomplishments of WordPress.

And with that I'm off to Ottawa, seeking fame and fortune. 😄

PS: One more slide for the road.

Times I've been ambushed at conferences - 2025-10-14T15:42:58Z

Well, I think I'm done. I've got the outline for the slides complete. I can't possibly talk about all the stuff that's in the slides. Once I leave tomorrow I think perhaps I'll post a link for the slides and maybe offer a place to comment. Maybe.

I get very nervous about these things and then remember when I've prepared as much as I have for this, the talk goes quickly and people generally are nice, though I've been ambushed a few memorable times. Let's see -- Austin, Cambridge, San Francisco and Nashville come to mind. ;-)

In Austin it was because I was privileged. I was being honored because it was the 25th year of my blog, and I was one of the keynoters. I told the promoter his people wouldn't like me, and then I forgot I said it when it happened. I was stuck, I didn't want to get into a public argument with anyone. (Had I wanted to rebut, I would have said everyone in this room is privileged, just look around at how well fed and educated everyone is. We all flew in here. We live in a rich country where we are the elite of the elite. Now STFU, in my dreams.)

There have been times when I welcomed an argument...

In San Francisco, I was invited to lead a panel from the music industry about how great Napster was. This was probably in 2000 or 2001 when Napster was at its peak. It was an ambush. All the panelists made me the issue, and then they voted to kick me off the stage. I stayed there and waited until they exhausted their rage, and then asked them a question about music and Napster. Acted like nothing had happened. I had earned my place there, I was a very early industry adopter of Napster. I loved what it did for us. Imagine until then you either had to buy an album to listen to music, build a collection, or wait until it was played on the radio. (What is radio? Kind of an early form of podcasting.) People were talking about music in supermarkets and airports. This could not be stopped, I was sure of it, and they were acting like babies. I stood up and prevailed.

In Nashville, I was invited to be a sort of keynoter for a conference that was patterned after BloggerCon. I did not organize it, but I led a session, which was attended by a famous right wing blogger who I had invited to the Harvard BloggerCon. He brought a bunch of his friends, and they each said no one was listening to them but we were listening to them. I eventually sat down and let them have a session dominated by a few people repeating themselves. It was boring.

Finally I was set up by the promoters of a CMS conference which Berkman hosted at Harvard. I was the master of ceremonies. No one told me that one of my most virulent trolls was there, and when he got up to rage at me I asked him to sit down, but Charlie Nesson who was the senior educator there, and kind of naive about internet trolls, said he should speak his mind. I should have walked out at that point. I knew what was coming. It really shook me.

In Nashville a columnist in a local paper who said I caused the riot, btw. I swear to god I always take my discussion leader role seriously. I gave them all a chance to talk and they all said the same thing, almost as if they had been told to say it.

The web crashes - 2025-10-13T15:35:14Z

Let's remember how the web could have worked.

The ideal is to write in our blog space, and publish everywhere.

That's what we have been trying to do since Twitter came along.

Write on your main blog, cross-post everywhere it belongs.

This could have worked, and it still can.

But it can't work until we get agreement on what text is. This will be much-discussed at WordCamp Canada this week, based on what WordPress is doing and what Evan Prodromou will speak about and of course what I am speaking about.

Getting back on track is as simple as agreeing what text is on the web. For that we have two very good models: HTML and Markdown.

Here's my slide.

- 2025-10-12T18:20:15Z
I'm getting ready for a trip. And part of that is getting my laptop set up so I can post to Scripting News. If you're reading this, it worked.

It's funny because it's true - 2025-10-12T18:21:08Z

Working on my slides for WordCamp Canada next week.

I don't think I'll actually use the F-word in the slide.

But it makes me laugh when I see it.

It's funny because it's true.

- 2025-10-11T15:06:46Z
I'm narrating development work on my Daveverse site. If you're interested, that's where I've been while I'm shaking out core bugs in the new WordLand. These are the things I want to stay fixed and never have to screw with again. It does actually work that way in products that go through a shake-out process. Drummer and FeedLand both work pretty well. Sure there are bugs and things I wish worked differently, but I and a few other people use them as everyday tools. I'm trying to get WordLand with its timeline function to be that way. A bunch of new hookups via HTTP and Websockets.

- 2025-10-10T13:59:04Z
Today's song: Oh My Love, by John Lennon. I was trying to remember this song. It kept eluding me. It's not one of his most famous. It's what you experience when you fall in love. Clarity. Endless possibility. At home in your life. For the first time.

- 2025-10-10T14:10:04Z
I know so many people around my age that were never told this simple truth that I heard Steve Jobs say in a video the other day. Paraphrasing -- the people who made the rules you think you have to live by weren't smarter than you. Once you accept this as fact, then if you can find the leading edge you can make it work the way you want it to. You can be one of those people.

The social network of the web - 2025-10-10T14:16:01Z

I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I'll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? ;-)

I am presenting the day before, where I'll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it's now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user's writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.

There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can't. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can't touch. There's a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive, without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn't do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought "Hey I think I can do that" and when you try, it works! We're back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.

After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what's next? That's the glory a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That's how you know you're hitting a target.

I don't know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn't know about is like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. ;-)

So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.

Cross-posted from the WordCamp Canada site.

Cute paste for WordLand - 2025-10-09T13:39:02Z

Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product.

A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand.

As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.

How to..

1. Copy a URL to the clipboard.
2. Open WordLand, bring it to the front.
3. Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.
4. Select the text you want to be a link.
5. Paste the URL copied in step 1.

It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course.

To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.

I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)

A video demo.

- 2025-10-08T20:01:15Z
WordPress news via FeedLand.

- 2025-10-08T16:58:42Z
The same energy that forced Biden off the ticket should get Schumer and Jeffries out of the top seats. Replace with people who can speak plainly about what's actually happening.

- 2025-10-08T17:17:11Z
I stop reading every piece that begins by wondering if the Dems or Repubs are "winning" the shutdown. Anything the Dems can do that has anything to do with governing is a win for all of us, including the Repubs, but esp the Dems. This is a new world, the old one is gone. Every day is a new reality.

- 2025-10-08T14:16:46Z
Fellow humans. If we're competing with AI, and to some extent it seems we are, consider that they have much better writing tools than we do. If we are to put up some kind of resistance to our cyber-domination, shouldn't we invest in better writing tools for bodied-intellects like us?

- 2025-10-08T13:44:52Z
I try not to run away from controversy when conventional wisdom is in the way of progress.

- 2025-10-08T13:29:33Z
The big deal with WordPress, as outlined in the Think Different piece is that the strong API makes WP into something quite different from what most people think it is. I think of it as an OS for writing on the web. Very analogous to what we use(d) PCs and Macs for before networks were everywhere. This came up in a thread on Bluesky about MicroPub which appears to be a redo of Metaweblog, with better identity system.

- 2025-10-08T13:43:15Z
The ActivityPub world, which MicroPub is part of (I guess), could benefit from reading Joel Spolsky's piece about Architecture Astronauts.

- 2025-10-07T16:41:25Z
Why we all should love RSS. It makes the web higher level without taking anything away.

- 2025-10-07T19:38:47Z
Thanks to Tanya Weiman for observing that this blog started 31 years ago. Probably the longest-running blog on the internets. Still making trouble. And as they say, still diggin. You can always tell how long it's been by looking at the bottom of any archive page, where it's constantly calculating, down to the second, how long this blog has been running.

- 2025-10-07T16:06:46Z
Try as hard as I can I still have distinct flows and more than one place where I edit. I think that's a consequence of working on WordLand. I have to use it for serious writing, otherwise how would I know if it works. Maybe I can find a way to merge flows, but not at the moment. I still have to do some copy/pasting.

The antidote to Bigco dominance - 2025-10-07T16:09:50Z

Fascinating blog post from Jason Shellen, tech entrepreneur, formerly with Blogger and Google. Here’s my perspective on part of the story he tells about RSS and Google Reader.

Netscape gave us RSS 0.91 and it was good enough to create a new powerful layer on the web. Then Netscape blew up and a bunch of repeated efforts to kill it from big companies. I’ll leave it to others to say why, but they tried over and over to extinguish the spark. Independent developers were stubborn, we kept using the original format, and in the end the independents prevailed.

Don’t ever think bigco’s are the answer. They almost always suck the life out of open systems. If you have something good going: work together. It’s the antidote to bigco dominance.

If you suck up to the bigco thinking they’ll let you in, maybe they will for a short while. But what you’ll be left with may not be worth the cost.

And just because you have a job at a bigco doesn’t make you hot shit. Maybe for a moment.

This theory has a name, it’s described in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and its lesson applies in tech and in the political disaster the US has become.

- 2025-10-06T21:06:32Z
I do all my shopping in ChatGPT. There must be a way to monetize that. For example, I want to buy a new backpack to carry my laptop and other mobile stuff. I should be able to set up anywhere there's wifi. I've got a modern MacBook Air, an iPad and two phones, one iOS and one Android. The main one is Android, I have to carry the iPhone because I use an Apple watch. I imagine there must be some improvements made in backpacks since I bought the last one, which was when I lived in Berkeley, in the late 00s.

- 2025-10-06T21:05:27Z
I've been evangelizing evangelism lately. Focus on goals and help others help us achieve them. It's a virtuous cycle, because once people figure out that they can get help by helping us, they will help us more. That is, when it works.

- 2025-10-06T14:15:25Z
Reason #29812 you know our current writing system is broken. When you want to post something that has more than the maximum characters they post an image instead of the text. I once wasted a few months making a writing tool for those kinds of posts, hoping that if it caught on we could have a shadow network that moved the actual text around the net between users.

- 2025-10-06T14:22:05Z
I did a video demo of pngWriter in Dec 2016.

- 2025-10-05T15:59:16Z
In 2014 I wrote a manifesto about web writing. A decade later later, I'm still trying to get writing on the web to work again. It was on a good track before the rude interruption.

Before we were so rudely interrupted - 2025-10-05T18:04:57Z

I've used this phrase a few times recently: "Before we were so rudely interrupted."

Or, "the big interruption."

I'm referring to 2006, when web writing was downgraded, to be 140 characters with no styling, no links, without the ability to edit.

That's when writing on the web started going in the toilet.

So when I say it again I may link to this post, because out here on the web, linking is always allowed.

Nightly email subs work again - 2025-10-05T15:15:42Z

Please try again if you've been waiting.

Report problems here.

It had been broken since Sept 14.

Still diggin! ;-)