Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

- 2025-11-23T17:40:31Z
I'm looking for WordPress sites that are set up to cross-post to ActivityPub. My daveverse site is set up that way which means that you can follow it in Mastodon, for example, or any other ActivityPub-enabled site. The great thing about this is if you write in WordPress there is no character limit, and you can use links, styling, titles. So much more writing power. I want to see how other people use it.

- 2025-11-23T14:29:12Z
ChatGPT makes a pretty fantastic feed validator.

- 2025-11-23T17:56:19Z
I like it when people send me thoughtful responsive notes about things I've written. I think it's possible to set up a social network so that most of what you get follows that pattern. It has to do with incentives.

- 2025-11-23T16:15:08Z
Say someone is working on an open source project, no matter what role they play, they don't own the project. They can't sell it, or profit from ownership. That goes for whatever role a person is playing, if they're the project leader, or just helping out, or even not helping out. Now that's not to say the founder or show runner couldn't start a business based on the open source software, but so could you. We all own all open source projects and open formats and protocols equally, and that means we don't own it.

- 2025-11-23T15:56:48Z
Next FeedLand release has the option of keeping items around for a certain number of days. Running on two servers for burn-in. I don't recommend turning this on now unless you're helping test.

Post WordCamp note re BloggerCon - 2025-11-23T15:16:04Z

This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room.

I remembered this was the rationale for how and why we did BloggerCon in the mid-2000s, to bring the hallway conversations into the meeting rooms.

We did this by using a university, its classrooms, and we put someone in front of the room called a discussion leader.

A good DL should know the topic they're leading and be able to start it off with a provocative intro, 5 or so minutes, and then a microphone, held by a student, is moves to a person with their hand up, and they can speak. Not a question. They have something to say. They are the expert of the moment.

The leader can cut them off and move the mike to the next person. (Works even better if there are two roving mikes.) When this works, it really holds everyone's attention.

This idea came from literally hundreds of hours in boring sessions with a panel of experts and people lined up waiting to speak, in the form of a question of course, and getting nervous and composing a speech in their head, and when its their turn they ramble on and on, so of course the good stuff happens in the hallway.

It is harder to do this kind of conference where the "content" takes care of itself. But the BloggerCon type, when it works is far more dynamic.

BTW, the best discussion leaders are teachers and reporters.

- 2025-11-22T15:32:51Z
The new FeedLand release is ready. It's installed on feedland.org, not on feedland.com yet.

I don't eat dog food thank you - 2025-11-22T14:19:26Z

Loving a series I just heard about, This Is Going To Hurt.

I discovered it the usual tedious way, scrolling through newly available shows on one of the streaming services with my iPad handy and when I see one that looks interesting, I look it up on Metacritic. If the rating is below 60, I don't look any further, but this show was rated 91, which is a very high rating. It's a British medical drama, the characters and story are fantastic, you can see that right from the beginning. They do show a lot of surgery details, I wish they didn't, I just can't watch that stuff. But I hold the iPad up to block the screen when it gets hard to watch, and I judge from the dialog when the gore is over.

Another thing I can't stomach are pictures of dog food, esp people eating dog food. If you have a similar phobia, episode 4 of Pluribus, which is as usual great, is hard to watch, but the segment where a character eats dog food is self contained.

There also a commercial for dog food that opens with a chunk of the most disgusting dog food, from a company that makes dog food that looks like human food. They're challenging you with a question, would you eat this shit? Well no! -- and I don't want to look at it either dammit. It's why I don't like the term dogfooding, ie people using their own products. As much as I love dogs, the people who use my software are not dogs, and my software is not dog food.

Also I want to add that I have a vague memory of actually eating dog food when I was a small child with a bunch of equally young friends because we were curious about what it was like. My memory is that it isn't bad. But the memory for me, now as an adult, is nauseating. I like eating human food, even though I'm sure in other contexts it's equally disgusting.

But do watch This Is Going To Hurt. Sorry it's only seven episodes, I would have loved it to continue for another few seasons. I have one more episode left to watch, though it totally could have ended after six episodes.

- 2025-11-21T15:38:18Z
Good morning sports fans!

- 2025-11-21T15:57:06Z
I'm continuing to work on the way FeedLand detects changes in feed items. This morning I did a careful study of the function that gets a guid for an item in conjunction with ChatGPT. It would be so much easier if RSS 2.0 required an item-level <guid> element, but it doesn't. That was the philosophy, all item-level values are optional. My notes are here.

- 2025-11-20T15:51:04Z
I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, and if any have changed, we broadcast the message that the item has changed. I'm doing a complete review of this, based on actual data, and found there were a fair number of places we were calling a change, when nothing that mattered had changed. Now I'm debating whether or not a pubDate change should be seen as an item change. My initial thought when we were working on RSS, was that the pubDate should never change. In the real world of publishing I don't think the publication date changes. Right? Of course some feeds do change the pubDate because that's the art of feeds (sorry for the sarcasm). But I don't think FeedLand should call that a change. Wondering what other feed developers do? So I asked ChatGPT. This is incredibly valuable research. One thing I learned is that people use atom:updated. It's true RSS 2.0 has no item that says when an item updated. Anyway net-net, the consensus is that a change in pubDate is not a change. I don't think I'm going to make it immutable though.

- 2025-11-20T14:39:30Z
The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human, and this one should be first.

- 2025-11-19T14:03:06Z
One of the reasons Mastodon doesn't get credit for being "on the web" is that there's been no buzz about the ActivityPub support in WordPress. Ghost has been beating the drum about their ActivityPub support for (many) months. I don't know if they're actually there yet, I've never knowingly seen something from Ghost on Mastodon. I sent an email to Matt this morning suggesting that we promote the incredible connection between WordPress and Mastodon via ActivityPub. In the early days of the blogosphere we had the same problem, there was no good way to see who was writing, so we started a site called weblogs.com, which ping'd each site that we knew about to see if it had changed, if so it went to the top of a list that was published at weblogs.com. So if you wanted to find out what's new you'd just go there. It got more complicated over time, as the blogosphere grew at a very fast clip. We could do that for WordPress sites on ActivityPub by pointing to their site from a weblogs.com-like site. There's no shame in telling the world about the cool new technology you've made, esp when it will make life so much more interesting! But it can't do that if they don't know it's there. Let's do some promotion. :-)

- 2025-11-19T13:50:37Z
The news gets everything wrong about the nouns of our political system. They talk about Repubs and Dems, but the real power is with the people. Something that Heather Cox Richardson said so eloquently in this week's podcast with Nicolle Wallace. I know I recommended it yesterday, but please do listen to this and don't forget it. When you're watching MSNOW you're getting the wrong nouns. I think this problem could be solved by moving every show on MSNOW to a different American city. The people on the panels should come to work in Detroit, St Louis, Phonenix, Denver, Charleston, Cleveland, Seattle, places like that. Get out of NY and DC. Really connect yourself to the whole country. That would rock a lot of boats.

- 2025-11-19T14:00:36Z
I love the domain for MSNOW. Just before it came out, Jeff Jarvis wondered on all the social networks why it wasn't msnow.com. Well, because they found an even better domain.

- 2025-11-18T22:59:05Z
Highly recommend this week's conversation between Nicolle Wallace and Heather Cox Richardson. The contrast of their points of view is dramatic, the election wasn't a win for the Dems, it was a victory for the people.

- 2025-11-18T16:32:06Z
I'm looking into the problems in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI.

- 2025-11-18T17:10:51Z
BTW, one of the areas of breakage is in our handling of source:markdown. What changed? There are now feeds I didn't create (ie "in the wild") that have source:markdown elements. This bug is 100% my doing. The feeds are fine. These are the kinds of bugs you like to find, and fix.

- 2025-11-18T17:57:06Z
A feed that Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter. Done.

- 2025-11-18T17:17:22Z
I'm preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding -- it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.).

- 2025-11-17T14:33:01Z
The Lever podcast does have an RSS feed. A good way to find the feed when the usual hacks don't work is to post it here, where it's a matter of pride for the braintrust to dig it up. Thanks as always. 😄

- 2025-11-17T13:21:12Z
Over the weekend I flipped the switch on a new app that makes my blog available on WordPress. It seems to work really well. The WordPress site is Daveverse. And because it's on WordPress it is also available on ActivityPub, at @scripting@daveverse.org, which means you can read it on Mastodon. It doesn't feel weird at all to be reading a blog post on a social network. I posted on Bluesky that we would love to have the same connection with their social network. It might happen sooner than you think. There are people developing writing tools for ATProto, but they're kind of stuck since Bluesky has all those limits that exclude the writer's web. It's so complicated, but out the other end, I hope will come a consensus that the social web should use more of the text features of the web. Further, the distributed nature of the web itself can form the backbone of distribution for the social web, that is if you think RSS is part of the web. When it's all said and done, we will realize that TBL got it right when he designed text with titles, subheads, styling, links, editing, no character limits, etc. He probably didn't even have to think about it much, considering he was basically replicating the standard document features from word processing apps of the 70s and 80s, without the printing. That's how evolution works, and the last 19 years of distortion by Twitter and those that followed them, will be seen as a weird transcription error (I hope).

- 2025-11-17T13:33:36Z
An old quote falsely attributed to Gandhi. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

- 2025-11-17T17:43:27Z
I'm chasing down what appears to be a bug in feedlanddatabase. Items that haven't updated are being reported as having updated. Fairly sure there is a problem here. Next up, will add debugging code so I can see if my theory is correct.

- 2025-11-16T15:55:33Z
Follow this on Mastodon at @scripting@daveverse.org.

- 2025-11-16T15:44:58Z
Here's a screen shot of what the Daveverse home page looks like. It's got all the stuff from scripting.com. It's not a perfect rendering of my Old School blog, I have more features, but it's pretty good. I'll be testing this out and thinking about it now, as we go forward. But here's the milestone: I have a WordPress place to hook into now that has pretty much everything I write outside the tiny little text boxes. What I write in WordLand or Drummer, the two places I write for real. The rest of it is throw away nonsense, a waste of time. No one reads anything, everyone fighting for attention.

- 2025-11-16T15:34:49Z
I was going to tell you how much I like the Lever podcast, and wanted to recommend it, but they make it impossible to find the RSS url for the feed. The usual hacks don't seem to work. Since I'm subscribed to it on Pocket Casts, I thought I might be able to find the URL on their web interface, and it's possible I might have found it that way. Nope. It just points to the web page for the podcast, which did not have the RSS feed. I know they must have one. I was looking for a way to download my OPML file, would be nice if you could do it from the desktop.

- 2025-11-16T14:23:46Z
We ought to be thinking about a filtering system for feed readers based on instructions written by users, and shared on the web, to be parsed by our AI. Design your personal algorithm with an AI engine. Share the good ones with your friends, and have it work on the web, in any feed reader. There are ways to do that. If you're working on such a project, let's hook it up to FeedLand. It does a lot of feed reading, and has a nice API for downstream feed readers. It's a good place for an AI-based filter.

More Pluribus spoilage - 2025-11-16T13:56:55Z

Spoilers follow. Like Doc, I have trouble getting into TV series, but not Pluribus, probably because it came from the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two series that I have watched from beginning to end at least three times.

The star of Pluribus, Rhea Seahorn, was my favorite in Better Call Saul, as Kim Wexler. So I expected a continuation of those shows, and in some sense Pluribus is much like them, but the main character Carol, is nothing like Kim -- who is by far the coolest character in any of the shows, and that's saying a lot.

That's okay because the sweetest character yet in a Vince Gilligan comedy (all these shows are comedies btw, even though the plots are super heavy), is Carol's sidekick, Zosia, played by Karolina Wydra. She's basically the voice of the Others, but the illusion is so alluring, one character in the show has already (understandably) fallen in love with her. And we know that Carol has formed an attachment too, despite her best efforts to hate her. ;-)

BTW, this post is the first one that's cross-posted to the daveverse site. There still are some things to fix, but this is a nice piece of software. Basically implements what I've been calling Inbound RSS, not for a social web app, rather for WordPress (which in my mind is becoming more of a social web system every day).

My Discourse System (MDS) - 2025-11-16T19:42:15Z

I wrote this as a comment on Doc's blog.

Doc, I’m working on a discourse system that works better than comments, imho. One thing it does is lets me use the full fidelity of the web instead of forcing me to type in yet another Inadequate Text Box (ITB) with none of the features of my blog editor.

I’m working on a Unified Text Theory (UTT) for the web. Instead of scattering Stupid Little Text Boxes (SLTBs) all over creation, let’s come up with a nice text router, that means our writing can be in one place, but through the magic of pointers, can appear to be in many places. (Actually there's nothing magical about it, pointers are very basic computer technology, when I learned to program on a PDP-11 in 1977 it very much had pointers.)

It’s mostly a matter of GOST (an acronym for Getting Our Shit Together).

All this is a preamble to say that my comment on your post can be read here.

https://daveverse.org/2025/11/16/3096/

It’s also on scripting.com.

See how that works. You can’t really tell where it is, but if I make a change to it, somehow the change appears everywhere.

And I’m using my favorite editor to write. Not the dinky one provided by the web browser.

And of course this should be on my blog too. Damn. I’m still doing it.

- 2025-11-15T15:13:59Z
Today's song: Folsom Prison Blues.

- 2025-11-15T16:40:56Z
Interesting thought with a small Pluribus spoiler. We should all think of our AI pseudo-people with as much disdain as Carol has for the "people" who watch over her. They aren't people, in either case. In Pluribus they give you the hint in everything they say. It's not "I think this" it's we. I'd like my chatbot friends to use similar language. Never behave like a person. That should be as forbidden. We'll regret not controlling this, I think.

- 2025-11-15T15:06:34Z
Tim Bray did an analysis of how the Sarah Kendzior suspension on Bluesky would have played out in the MastoVerse.

- 2025-11-15T15:35:58Z
I have been thinking, for years now, why not reconceive the discourse system on the social web to factor out moderation. It is the web, so anyone can add a feature any time without having to rewrite the whole web. I've been trying ideas out for years, but people preferred silos. Hoping now there are enough people to start a bootstrap. Won't be much of a discourse system if people don't course. 😄

More testing stuffffff - 2025-11-15T16:15:09Z

With any luck this will be the last of the tests for this particular feature.

If this continues to work, tomorrow or Monday I'll switch it over to cross-posting to daveverse instead of the throw-away test site.

Below are the debugging messages I used today. Nothing really happening here. ;-)

• This is one of those days I am pretty sure I have nothing to write but as I get going I'll remember stuff. Maybe. As you've probably surmised I'm still working on tests. These are called regression tests. Yesterday I got the whole thing running, but knew I still had to move things around, and turn some features off that weren't needed. So every time I do one of those things that could shake things up, I have to try it again to make sure I didn't break it. This is the page I have to look at for the result. The cool thing is that the wordpress site is starting to feel like scripting.com, the software runs that quickly. But there are a lot of bits of software running all over the place that have to work in order for it to feel that solid.
• How did the regression test go? Wellll, I did break a bunch of stuff. But I put the pieces back in place. And with any luck this post will show up on the other end. It did.

- 2025-11-14T18:25:34Z
I absolutely love Pluribus, but it has the hardest freaking name to remember. I love stories like this, with new assumptions about what is, and people coping with what may or may not be great, or boring, or who knows what. I know they've got me thinking about it all the time, and that is what I like in a good televised story.

- 2025-11-14T14:35:26Z
It's kind of weird for me to be hanging out around WordPress, but I like it. They've been very welcoming. It's kind of like I imagine it would be for Ward Cunningham to be working with Wikipedia. It may not have been everything he wanted from wiki's but it might be the best place for him to develop new features, most likely to have an influence on the way wikis are used in the real world. It's also kind of like it might have been if Doug Engelbart had been willing to hook up with Living Videotext back in the day. I had a couple of dinners with him in Palo Alto where I presented the idea. We had a growing user base of outliner users, our products had commercial success that weren't possible in the 60s and 70s, before there were personal computers like the Apple II or Macintosh. If he could help us, it would be good for both of us, I reasoned. He had his own codebase, and was working with a bunch of other people, and was happy with the setup. In 2025, I have ambitions for WordPress, I think it can play a bigger and different role in the web than it does. I believe there's a new class of developers and users who could benefit from the stability and scaling of WordPress. It's a good community, it's basically the web itself, which means imho that it can grow to be new things to new people. Anyway, you can see why this post has to be on both scripting.com and on my daveverse site as I discussed yesterday.

- 2025-11-14T18:08:09Z
Now I have the other half of the bridge working. This post is full of the testing I did on this, and yes it all worked. I'm going to post something new and see if it makes it through to the other side. And you get to see if it works or not. And now I'm going to make a change. Having made the change I want to see if it made it through. It's kind of remarkable to me that I got this much done in one day. That's what happens when you invested in good tools. And this is where the changes have been visible, on a scratch site used just for these occasions. Tomorrow, the third day of this project, I clean up the loose ends and then we should be good to go with the posts I make on scripting showing up in daveverse. Then I can get started with the next project that depends on this.

- 2025-11-13T14:17:08Z
Good morning. I like how things are going in FeedLand and WordLand today. The dots are starting to connect.

- 2025-11-13T14:54:42Z
You will probably see a series of test posts here, as the day goes on.

- 2025-11-13T16:56:41Z
Here's what I'm doing. I want to get all my blog posts together in one place. I still want to use Electric Drummer to write stuff for scripting.com, there's a whole system built around it being where it is. But, I want all the posts on scripting to also appear on the daveverse site, so that the first version of my discourse module can be simple to create, debug and use. So I've got the first half working, I've got a script that hooks in via WebSockets to FeedLand and is notified every time Scripting News updates. It mirrors the updates to a site on WordPress (for testing) and once it works, I'll have it send the stuff to daveverse. That part remains to be done. Not sure if it'll be a desktop app or a server-based app. But now I need a break. ;-)

- 2025-11-13T21:43:57Z
Some pre-dinner testing. This was correctly recognized as a new item. And I've made another change, this should be picked up as well.

- 2025-11-12T21:55:02Z
A short podcast about Sarah Kendzior, Johnny Cash and Bluesky.

- 2025-11-12T15:31:21Z
The big news is that there are now docs for source:markdown. The goal is to have a writer-friendly standard for text that's as useful as the one for audio. As with everything in RSS-land, cooperation among the different vendors was never its strong point. I hope to change that, and hope to build a network for written text as open and powerful as the one that developed for podcasting.

- 2025-11-12T15:38:08Z
I've added the NetNewsWire blog to my blogroll.

- 2025-11-12T15:29:00Z
Fixed a longstanding performance bug on the scripting.com home page. Sometimes it'd just sit there for five seconds. Really embarrassing. It should feel faster now. Still diggin!

- 2025-11-11T16:00:13Z
New developer notes for source:markdown. Report problems here.

- 2025-11-11T15:55:55Z
An example feed that has lots of source namespace elements.

- 2025-11-11T13:52:56Z
Today I'm going to work on re-shaping the docs for source:markdown because it seems to becoming a thing that people are supporting in their feeds and in their feed consumer apps. We're going to have discuss how it's supported, on both ends. What goes into a source:markdown element, and what does not, and how should readers use it. I will assume the role of benevolent dictator, as I did with RSS 2.0, with a bit more of an understanding of what's important. See Rule #1 in Rules for Standards-makers. "The only reason we have open formats and protocols is so our software can interoperate." And the Rule of Users: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."

- 2025-11-11T15:37:00Z
As part of the process I reviewed the developer notes I posted in 2022. I see why there was confusion, it was so early in the process. I'm replacing those developer notes with new ones, that's based on more practical experience.