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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2024-04-24T14:13:52Z

- 2024-04-24T14:13:52Z
When I started working with Automattic last year, one of the big milestones we were aiming for was getting FeedLand and WordPress working together. Now we have the first step. I hope you take a moment to give it a try and let us know how it works. Scripting News readers have helped bootstrap all kinds of cool stuff, we can do it again.

- 2024-04-24T14:04:52Z
Jay Gilmore: "ActivityPub breaks my brain. It doesn’t need to be that hard given the payloads we are talking about." True.

FeedLand and WordPress - 2024-04-24T13:20:25Z

There's a new plugin that adds a blogroll to a WordPress site.

It would be helpful if people who are regular readers of Scripting News who use WordPress, set up a test site, give it a try and let us know how it goes. You can help us get to the next level with this stuff.

So there are two sides, the FeedLand side and the WordPress side.

• The FeedLand side. Sign on to FeedLand, create an account if you don't have one, and subscribe to a bunch of feeds. These will be the feeds in your blogroll. There are some tips on how to find feeds, in the next section.
• The WordPress side. There's a new plugin, developed by the people at the Team51 group at Automattic. They have a checklist for how to install the plugin in a WordPress site.

You can get ideas for feeds for your blogroll from reading other people's feed lists. When you see a checkbox that isn't checked, you can subscribe to the feed simply by checking the box.

Have a look at my feed list for ideas. Here's a list of recent users, click on their names to see their feed lists. You don't have to finish this now, you can come back and tune this up anytime.

Developers: Use feedlandBlogrollToolkit to add blogrolls to other platforms.

If you have questions or comments, or need help getting it working, post a note in the discussion group here.

- 2024-04-23T16:13:38Z
A big idea for the blogging world. I'd like to combine AI and search to make a really great search engine for bloggers. We would contribute what we know (we already do) and in return, along with everyone else, get to benefit from the collection. And when we browse, it knows which blog we write. So it has a very good idea of what we mean when we ask a question and what we already know. This is totally missing in ChatGPT and is something Google and other search engines have never been willing to do (or even understood, I guess). But this is a huge idea. I'd like to give it my blogroll too, so it knows which sources I consider credible. I love that it creates an incentive to post to your blog, and it makes working together automatic.

- 2024-04-23T16:06:07Z
John Palfrey as the mover behind Press Forward will bring the gospel of EZ Pass for News on his "ongoing whistle-stop tour" of local news orgs. JP was my boss/rabbi when I was at Berkman, and is why we got so much done there. He ran air cover for what we did, the BloggerCons, giving RSS a home, podcasting, blogs for everyone, the people and democracy. Now he's doing it for the local news business.

- 2024-04-23T16:11:53Z
EZ Pass for News is formula for functional relationships between local news pubs and people in far away places (ie not their locality) who may from time to time want to read an article or a series of articles on their site, and pay per-issue instead of buying a subscription.

- 2024-04-23T15:56:01Z
I was chatting with a friend who went to Bronx Science, as I did, and we were talking about Isaac Asimov, and I said I thought he went to Science too. So I fired up ChatGPT and asked if Asimov went to Science, and it said yes. Then I asked where he went to high school and it said Bronx Science. But by then I was pretty sure he didn't, so I went to Google and meta.ai, and neither knew where he went to high school. So I asked on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky and Threads. Not sure why I even care! Oh well. 😄

- 2024-04-23T16:18:06Z
I don't have time to write about it now but the end of last night's Knicks game was one of the most dramatic bits of NY sports ever. I would like to thank Kevin Durant for saying the Knicks weren't cool. It's somewhat like the Streisand Effect where the thing KD was trying to hide was that he was no longer cool. Classic projection. Obviously he was not the hot shit he thought he was in 2019. 😄

- 2024-04-23T16:03:40Z
The "largest open publishing network in the world" is the web.

- 2024-04-22T17:12:56Z
The idea of us all working together to federate is the right idea, but making ActivityPub the hurdle everyone has to jump over is imho the wrong idea. I'm building on feeds -- RSS, Atom, RDF. A lot of good stuff works on that basis. And it's a much shorter path to interop than ActivityPub.

- 2024-04-22T13:20:20Z
I hate paywalls tied to subscription. I’m never going to subscribe to a Philadelphia news org, but based on Jay’s recommendation I might pay $1 on my EZ Pass for News to read this story, esp since I saw the Civil War movie. I just had a thought, I might subscribe to a Philadelphia news org for a week or two, given that the Knicks are playing their NBA team right now in the first round of the playoffs. I really want to know everything there is to know about this faceoff. See, I want to pay for journalism here, but journalism hasn't been willing to sell it to me, at any price. They've never gotten the basic truth of: "The customer is always right." Really important point and true in every way.

- 2024-04-22T13:00:09Z
Over the weekend I tested the blogroll plugin for WordPress. It worked. After a little more testing and docs-writing we'll be ready for other people to test it, an important step before wider use. So if you're a regular Scripting News reader, and are curious what this blogroll stuff is about, you'll be able to try it out pretty soon.

- 2024-04-22T12:51:47Z
Jeff Jarvis writes that a German man who died with 70K books in his house was obsessed with the work of writer Arno Schmidt, who was my great-uncle, my grandmother's brother.

- 2024-04-21T15:41:10Z
Good morning sports fans!

- 2024-04-21T23:52:26Z
I asked meta.ai to draw a pastoral scene with sheep and dogs, birds, fish, airplanes, clams and seagoing ships in ancient England.

- 2024-04-21T21:25:52Z
Back in the old days, during a great sport event, we'd post our feelings, pro or con, to Twitter. I observed as follows: "Let's do something great with our lives! In the meantime I miss the role that twitter used to play and never will play again. It was the place to go to say 'How about those Knicks!' when they win a game like the one they won last night. Not no mo." Betsy Devine was the first to like this. I felt heard.

- 2024-04-21T21:27:28Z
Doc asks the question on all our minds: "Why does ChatGPT misspell the f*ck out of words on images?" Don Park, Wes Felter and JY Stervinou chime in.

Quiet mode for the blogroll - 2024-04-20T16:18:11Z

After living with the blogroll on the home page of Scripting News for about a month, and having heard from early testers, I felt that it was demanding too much attention when I was reading stuff on the blog. So I made some time last week to experiment with a subtler sidebar.

In Quiet Mode, the blogroll doesn't call attention to itself until you click on it. Then its background changes from neutral to white. That's the equivalent of shining a spotlight on it. Also the borders become blue to indicate that the browser's focus is on the blogroll.

I wanted to do more to tone it down. So, in Quiet Mode the title moves up and to the left, and is in a much smaller font, boldface, nicely visible and stands off from the list, but doesn't call your attention to it. It's there when you want to know more.

You may want to call it something other than a blogroll, btw. If you're using blogs to coordinate projects with others, something I think a lot more people would do if it worked better, instead of "blogroll" you'd might call it your "workgroup."

Anyway, I have switched Scripting News over to the new quiet mode, it's already the default, but I put a checkbox just below the blogroll that lets you toggle between the two modes to see the difference and possibly spot problems. The checkbox will go away before long. I just want it there to quickly do an A-B comparison.

Here's a quick video demo of Quiet Mode.

And a place to comment or ask questions.

- 2024-04-19T14:19:46Z
It's totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over 1 million Americans who did not have to die imho, because our government was not only immoral and hugely corrupt, but also made no attempt to govern. I am a child of Holocaust survivors and an American born in the USA, and am proud of and grateful to my country. Any American is free to protest the actions of our government or any other government, or really anything. If you don't believe in that then you aren't actually trying to make America great, you're saying something altogether different and incompatible. I am American. I am also deeply offended at other Americans who propose to speak for me. That actually is antisemitic, btw.

- 2024-04-19T13:06:14Z
Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it's new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so quickly. You really should watch it on YouTube so you can see how what I type relates to the image in real-time. It's like subtitles inverted, with a very knowledgeable, creative and high bandwidth computer network behind it. Living in the future.

WordPress For One - 2024-04-20T01:55:41Z

More and more I'm getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for.

Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you'd keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system would re-render the Markdown, turning it into HTML, but you'd still have the Markdown around for editing. And of course there are other kinds of editors that make sense, knowing that the output is going to the web, but you don't have to write in the technical language of the web. You might want something more suited to wordsmiths -- ie writers, if you are a writer. I have that working here, and have been building on it.

I've gone back to Radio UserLand and tried to extrapolate, where would we have gone with that product, 22 years later. And now I'm beginning to see in the pieces that are forming the new product I've been working on, something whole, something that works.

I think of it as "WordPress For One" -- you might be writing as part of a larger site, but this is your writing space, a place you can mold to fit your style, where it gets more comfortable over the years, more you. That's what I've felt has been wrong with the direction the web has been going in, we're getting boxed into smaller and smaller spaces, but for some of my writing I want a nice stage with good lighting and full freedom to tell a story that I have to tell, not necessarily all at once, but possibly in a series, over time.

I also want to be influenced by your story. I want Working Together.

Of course I still very much develop for FeedLand, and in the back of my mind I want to loop back around to Drummer (it's my main writing environment), and then I have another product I call Belter I want to finish. And I wouldn't mind trying to make a CSS thing that makes more sense than the tragedy CSS is, and also would love to see a port of Frontier to Linux, though I don't see doing that myself, but I would like to guide it (so it runs all the old stuff first).

An imaginary New Orleans street - 2024-04-20T02:25:57Z

A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.

- 2024-04-19T01:43:34Z
I did the blogroll stuff because I needed a minimal feed reader that could run from the right sidebar of any app.

- 2024-04-19T01:30:21Z
I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook's answer to ChatGPT, and it's really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you're entering the prompt, so if you type, "vary gender, age and race," and as you type each word, the image changes.

- 2024-04-18T13:47:22Z
Suppose you're working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We accepted fewer features and writing in a silo because it was practical. It worked, where less fluid software didn't. So they got all the casual writing, and over time sucked the life out of blogging. I think it's time to put the fluidity back, without compromising on features and lock-in.

- 2024-04-19T01:16:51Z
In the past, when I have tried to make other people's products better, it often doesn't go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist. 😄

- 2024-04-17T13:46:47Z
Video: Design issues in FeedLand blogrolls.

- 2024-04-17T14:35:26Z
I just tripped across this post from 2009 where Matt had sent me an email saying they were supporting the Twitter API in WordPress. I had forgotten this. That's how long it's been that he's wanted to hook WP up to the social web. It doesn't look like I posted that to Scripting News. I wonder what other nuggets of forgotten history I'll find there.

- 2024-04-16T19:42:30Z
If Tesla went out of business, would my Model Y stop working??

- 2024-04-16T13:58:22Z
I've never been to TED or SXSW.

- 2024-04-16T14:29:15Z
Good morning NBA fans. Today is the official beginning of the post-season, and this Knicks fan is one freaking happy camper. Just thought I'd get that outta the way before getting down to business.

Working together - 2024-04-16T14:08:10Z

Each form of online discussion has a grain to it. Doc and I used to talk about how something "follows the grain of the web." Twitter has its own grain, formed by its character limit, what information is shared (ie number of followers in both directions).

I made a list of some of the social networks I've been on starting in the mid-70s. The list is very long. And each of them had their own limits, rules and features, and each led to a certain kinds of relationships between the participants. Mail lists that gain traction always flame out. It's hard to get people to read your blog. If you make it easier it changes into something else. Instagram, Youtube, TikTok form hierarchies of influencers. I think of those as the networks Taylor Lorenz covers.

But there isn't a structure that I'm aware of that leads to people working together. It's a puzzle I keep trying to figure out.

We need working together to survive climate change and fascism. It would be good to crack this nut.

One of the nicest things about ChatGPT is that it's always up for working with you. The critics of AI don't begin to understand this. As an example, I'm going to ask ChatGPT to draw a picture of people working together. Here it is. I didn't have to wait. It didn't look at my follower count, or my bank statement to decide if it was willing to work with me. I pay the $20 a month, and I've got a persistent always-on collaborator.

What got me thinking this way this morning is a bit of collaboration I did with palafo (a human) on Threads. It's remarkable. We actually did some work together. No sarcasm. It may be hard to read the thread but if you're curious about collaborative systems, here's a real example. Serendipitous, unplanned, but we figured something out by combining our experiences. Fantastic.

Later, Ben Werdmuller, a person who I've gotten to know recently, is intelligent and asks good questions. He asked one today, how do they get the live audience on SNL to laugh when they want them to laugh. I had an idea and shared it. (This was discussed on Reddit. I also checked with ChatGPT.)

If you take away one thing from this post it's that we can collaborate with the machines, and maybe that will unlock collaboration between humans. In fact, in a way they are facilitating the collaboration. If you want to be part of the collective human intelligence, you may be thinking about the machines the wrong way. Maybe they're the most human thing we have, because AI is made up of humans, somewhat like Soylent Green. 😄

PS: I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of humans working together to clean up a mess.

PPS: Yesterday I gave John O'Nolan what I think is a good idea for getting his Ghost blogs federating with Threads, Mastodon et al. I didn't expect thanks or even a response, but I wonder if he even heard it. Most of the time, trying to help other people results in not even an acknowledgment that they saw it. If I were him I'd look for a painless, quick way to get maximum interop. Something like ghost.social. I'd give the same advice to Matt at Automattic (in fact I think I did).

PPPS: I think acknowledgment is a key part of working together on the web. Nothing more than "I wanted you to know I saw it" is often all that's needed to grease the skids of discourse. I've had a friendly disagreement with Manton at micro.blog about this.

- 2024-04-15T20:43:52Z
Anton Zuiker is the first Drummer user with a FeedLand blogroll.

- 2024-04-15T21:19:57Z
Followed by Frank McPherson and Gary Thompson.

A blogroll on a Drummer blog - 2024-04-15T14:53:15Z

How to add a FeedLand blogroll to a Drummer blog.

• You must have a Drummer blog and a FeedLand account.
• You can specify that all the feeds you're subscribed to are in your blogroll or use a category and only feeds in that category will be in the blogroll.
• The blogroll updates automatically, when one of the feeds has a new post, it goes to the top of the list.
• You can expand a feed to see the five most recent items. Click on the pubdate to go to the full item on the web.
• It supports keyboard navigation. Up and down arrows move through the list, Return to expand/collapse.
• We're working on WordPress plugin.

Four head-level attributes in your blog.opml file. Only one required.

• blogrollUsername -- required
• blogrollServer -- optional, if not specified it's feedland.com
• blogrollCategory -- optional
• blogrollTitle -- optional, but you really should provide a title, otherwise we invent a silly one for you. 😄

Screen shot of how the head-level attributes are set on Bull Mancuso's blog.

Screen shot of the blog itself with the blogroll.

A link to Bull's blogroll category on feedland.com.

A place to ask questions offer kudos, etc. 😄

PS: I'm not trying to sell you on using Drummer to run a blog. Rather I needed a place to figure out how this works, so we know how to set up and document the WordPress plugin.

- 2024-04-15T01:25:17Z
Next up, let's connect Drummer blogging to FeedLand blogrolls. 😄

- 2024-04-15T01:18:48Z
I want to work with the best developers, I don't care where they work. It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn't happen, we don't even look at each others software. After waiting a whole lifetime for a culture of collaboration, we have had it for short periods, but it's most of the time it's been people trying to deconstruct and reinvent other people's work, not build on it. I'm still open to this changing. I hope to be a catalyst for it, one more time.

- 2024-04-14T20:23:17Z
Final Eastern Division standings. Knicks finish second. Best Knicks team in a long time. Ended the season with a five-game winning streak.

- 2024-04-15T01:18:08Z
I don’t like how betting has invaded sports broadcasting. I don't like that it breaks the bond among people who root for one team their whole lives, as I have with the Knicks and the Mets. I think of people who love the same teams as I do as family. I like that there are Knicks fans who also like the Yankees even though I totally despise the Yankees and everything they (don't) stand for, but we all love the freaking Knicks (and ignore the Nets, btw). Before long there won't be any of us left, everyone will see sports as a business, an obsession, or their downfall, because you can't win at gambling, we all know that. The whole tribal thing about sports is broken by integrated gambling, it suggests many of us, maybe eventually most of us, are here not for love of team, rather they're feeding an addiction.

It's bigger than a tiny little textbox - 2024-04-13T21:47:55Z

Question: What's between a tiny little text box and a full-blown content management system?

Answer: A full-featured text editor with a social media feel to it without the limits of twitter-like systems.

That's what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them.

100% built on WordPress. Why reinvent all the good stuff that's been debugged and scaled and has all that support in the world. As I like to say, one way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is.

PS: A seven-minute podcast that explains. 😄

PPS: And don't forget about the blogroll. It's part of the puzzle too.

PPPS: The house was really cold when I did this recording so I walked around to try to stay warm. By the end I was pretty close to shivering out loud. I turned the heat up after I finished.

The question we intend to answer.

- 2024-04-12T16:51:19Z
My wpidentity package now has storage.

- 2024-04-12T13:56:29Z
I just finished Ripley on Netflix, an 8-part miniseries remake of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I remember, probably incorrectly, as a light-hearted story. There was very little to laugh about in this new version, but omg it is such a beautifully presented story. Even if you hated the plot you'd have to watch it just to see the art. And if you're Italian or love Italy, you have to watch it. Anyway now that I know all the twists and how it ends, I'm going to have to watch it again, but I might wait to recover from the experience. It is, at times, hard to watch. But oh so goooood.

- 2024-04-12T14:03:38Z
In some ways the look of Ripley resembles Poor Things, another eclectic and lovely to look at presentation.

- 2024-04-12T14:08:15Z
I really want to see Civil War. Gets an amazing review in NYT.

- 2024-04-11T14:48:42Z
In an email to Doc this morning: "The web is such a huge total mess. CSS is a junk pile of reinventing that learned nothing from the ideas it was reinventing. The only reason we put up with this is the freedom we got from it. But that’s been gone for a long time. I have a feeling we’re wasting our golden years overlooking that we’re trying to get creative work done in a corporate crime scene. We won, only to have our victory enshrined by a bunch of corpy wiseasses and nazis." Doc is a very literate and quote-worthy writer, and we bring out the best from each other. So next time you see Doc thank him for me, for the creativity. We're making the best of a bad situation. It's even worse than it appears and I'm old enough to know better.

- 2024-04-11T15:03:14Z
A piece I wrote about Doc in 2022 entitled Doc Quixote.

- 2024-04-11T14:48:05Z
So this ticking time bomb was sitting there all the time the journalists were talking about how Biden is too old to win the election with Trump. Biden was never the issue, the issue was the freaking Supreme freaking Court.

- 2024-04-11T18:17:08Z
The Arizona court decision won’t just have an effect on the politics of Arizona. It will have effect on the politics of the entire freaking United freaking states of freaking America.

- 2024-04-11T14:38:24Z
I was closing tabs this morning and came across this sweet little test app I did when I was working on tabs. I wish there were a practical use for something like this.

Freakout Day on the internet - 2024-04-11T18:20:25Z

I have a suggestion for an internet holiday.

Call it Freakout Day.

Works like this.

When you think of a pronouncement you'd like to make, write it in your favorite tiny little text box, but before you send it, add the word "freaking" between every word in the punchline.

Like so --

The Arizona court decision won’t just have an effect on the politics of Arizona. It will have effect on the politics of the entire freaking United freaking States of freaking America.

Really impresses people. 😀

#rss