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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-12-04T21:21:43Z

Flip switches - 2025-12-04T21:21:43Z

In software, I like to have multiple ways to view the same data. In one context it's an outline, then flip a switch and now it's a graphic.

• MORE shipped at Living Videotext for the Mac in 1986. You start with an outline and flip a switch to turn it into a tree chart. Flip it back to make a change, then flip it again to see the change in a tree chart. Or flip the outline to reveal a set of presentation slides. People loved the idea that they could create graphics entirely by writing and reorganizing and then flipping a switch. That was the killer feature in the demos we did at trade shows.
• Before that in LBBS, a bulletin board system I wrote and ran on an Apple II in my Menlo Park living room in the early 80s, I had two views of the message structure, reverse chronologic and a hierarchic thread structure. You could always flip a switch and see the post you're looking at in the other view. If you're catching up and want to see where in the tree this message lives you, flip the switch. If you've come across a two year old post in the tree, and want to see what else was going on in 1982 (for example), flip the switch into the message scanner, and you've gone back in time. And the flip-switch was instantaneous and required one gesture, no thinking on your part.
• And then Manila, many years later, written in Frontier, started as a discussion group. It was the software behind discuss.userland.com, which was where the initial blogosphere formed in 1998 and 1999. Go through the archive to see for yourself. But then we had the idea that hey this could be a blog, so when you created a blog post, unwittingly behind the scenes, it just created a discussion post. So all you had to do was flip a switch when you were reading a post, and see the post in the discussion group. There's that duality again.

I'm working on discourse with WordLand in the middle, and WordPress at the edges, where a comment is also a blog post. Readers might not know that they're reading something that has a dual life as a comment linked to someone else's post. There can be a flip-switch in both views that lets you go back and forth. I can only guarantee that the flip switch will be in my software, since this will be an open network, there can be any number of different ways to view the content.

As someone famous once said "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

Why should comment writing not have all the features of blog post writing? Why invent a new more limited text type instead of reusing the one you created for blogging? That's where factoring comes in.

- 2025-12-03T14:33:22Z
The nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though -- I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result.

- 2025-12-03T14:31:49Z
They should make a version of bash on Linux that also accepts ChatGPT commands. As always they is someone other than me.

- 2025-12-03T02:47:19Z
Today's song: Old Folks Boogie. Sooooo you know that you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fill.

- 2025-12-03T02:30:28Z
There's a question going around in WordPressLand as to whether there are any RSS apps. Yes, of course there are. Have a look at daveverse, in the right margin. That's a feed reader. All the feeds I follow personally. When one of them updates it goes to the top. You can see the five most recent posts by clicking on the wedge next to the title, and from there, you can go to the website by clicking the link. That's available as a WordPress plug-in.

- 2025-12-02T19:12:25Z
On Saturday I reported a problem with WordPress feeds that created a problem for the software I was working on. It's Tuesday now, and it's fixed. This really feels good. Thanks Jeremy! The WordPress community is special. Never seen a big product like WordPress respond so quickly.

- 2025-12-02T23:48:05Z
I asked ChatGPT to write an email to Sam Altman for me. It's about a possible way to compete with Google.

Pluribus spoilers below - 2025-12-02T16:06:44Z

Theories on what's actually going on.

• It's a love story between Carol and Zosia. You can fall in love with a person with no sense of self. They plotted to have Helen killed, and waited until Carol's "f*ckable" judgment turns into real love. They get married and everyone lives happily ever after.
• Alternate theory -- the original people are still in their bodies, suppressed to keep quiet. Inside they're screaming to be saved, as pissed off as Carol. They want their bodies back. They have the ability to write messages on their skin, so what Carol saw at the end of the last episode was a corpse with the words HELP ME! visible on the body's belly.
• Another alternate theory about the end of the last episode -- it took a moment for Carol to recognize her own body, possibly dead, and realizing this is all a dream. It's another version of The Matrix, where this is the fake reality that we've been seeing. None of this is really happening. (Like the end of the Bob Newhart show?)

Also is Plur1bus like Saul Goodman, in that if you say it a different way it has a message encoded? The 1 instead of an i seems like a clue.

- 2025-12-01T14:43:37Z
We've forgotten how important links are.

- 2025-12-01T20:53:17Z
I was able to use my Android phone to get on the NYC subway a few days ago. Turn the phone on, point it at the reader on the turnstyle, and just keep walking. It's that fast and a lot better than with the MetroCard. Sometimes things do get better.

- 2025-12-01T20:49:17Z
2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."

- 2025-12-01T14:22:23Z
Turns out we can influence the RSS feed we emit from a WordPress site by editing its theme, so it appears we should be able to get WordLand to work for linkblogs without resorting to a special feed.

- 2025-12-01T14:34:33Z
We used to have great multi-cross-blog debates. That's the kind of distance that makes discourse civilized. I post in my space, you post in yours, and link the two when appropriate.

- 2025-12-01T14:53:28Z
I had to learn to be a developer if I wanted to make new media types out of computer networks, but soon it may not be necessary. We've been stuck in a rut of online sameness for a couple of decades now. One benefit of AI is the exclusivity that programmers have had, for all of history, is being broken. Thank goodness. It's way past time. (I hope.) It's also possible we're in the process of inventing The Matrix. Ooops. That's what makes life so interesting, you don't know if the future is boring or exciting. But in my experience it's almost always unforeseen.

- 2025-12-01T14:18:10Z
Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been safely stored on GitHub along with the rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing.

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