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Scripting News  XML Source: http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml  

This is amazing. Some of my friends at Automattic quickly put together a toolkit for WordPress that allows it to host my blogroll. There are still some missing pieces and some CSS glitches. But this is exactly where I hoped we would be at this point.

Read this on Threads. The thing that's great about this moment is that people are just beginning to get the possibility of not being locked into silos. They don't know how to parse my posts and screen shots, because I can do something they never thought they'd be permitted to do. Well we've got some visionary and lovable techies at Masto and Blueski who want you and I to be able to do that. And we've been building on that. And will continue to do so, Murphy-willing.

Blogroll fix. The blogroll was grabbing the up and down-arrow and Return for keyboard navigation, one of my favorite blogroll features. Put the cursor where you want, and arrow through the list. Press Return to expand, and again to collapse. Then down-arrow and repeat. But sometimes you want to use these keys for other functions. So I changed it so you have to click the blogroll to set the focus. Its border turns blueish, and the keys work as described. Press the Tab key or click outside the blogroll to take the focus off the blogroll.

I'm working with developers again, thank goodness. I once thought I could make server products or toolkits for people I called "poets" -- motivated writers. I have given up on that, at least for the time-being. I think a properly motivated intelligent writer could get developer-like results, I've seen it happen (Brent Simmons, Dan MacTough). They make really good developers because they understand the user perspective so well, it still lives inside them. The problem seems to be motivation, and a poet knowing that they need to be super-motivated and have the time, to get anything technical to work. If they knew what was required, my 2024 theory goes, and had studied for it, the way they studied for their degree, they could not only be successful, but they could contribute to the developer process. Analogously, we all have to learn a little cooking just to get through life, but only a few people are chefs. Julia Child, a hero of mine, believed she could teach anyone to be a good-enough cook. But I bet she was frustrated by human reality. ??

Now that I have ChatGPT around, my Lorem Ipsum text for testing can be slightly more interesting.

Linkblogs work differently

Linkblogs work differently in blogrolls. When I click a link it takes me to the site the blog linked to, not to the blog.

So.. When you click the link in the screen shot below it takes you to a Metacritic review of the program

Screen shot.

Through it all, news.scripting.com remains my most popular site.

It's so funny, the editor of Wordle on a podcast on Friday, 1000th puzzle day, said there are some puzzles that you might not solve in six moves not because of skill rather because of luck. I was pretty sure when I took my second guess, but that's just when the cursing started. By the third guess I thought she's screwing with us! I should not have listened to the podcast.

We have a 140-char limit, but offer an effortless way to see more.

On Mastodon: I've done this before, starting 25 years ago. Find some new connection I can make because someone was wise enough to add an RSS interface. I get to have an aha! moment and a good laugh at how great this is and then write a freaking blog post about it, and people think man this web thing is pretty cool.

Note to self, make a Chrome extension for my blogroll.

On this day in 1999. Not much happened in RSS. But I'm going to keep checking for the next couple of weeks.

An upgrade idea for the web. I'd like to have a bit of JavaScript code ask to be notified when the user clicks on a link on my page that gets them a 404. I'd like a chance to do some looking around and seeing if I can find the thing they wanted. This comes up when you look at the archive of this blog for March 1999. Back then my server was a Macintosh which had a case-insensitive operating system. A few years later I moved all the stuff to Amazon S3, much less hassle, and probably cheaper too. But over there the filesystem is case-sensitive. I must've been typing in URLs by hand and not caring about case, because why should I, my server didn't care. Except now it does care and when I click links to pages I know are there, but can't be found, I get depressed. I wanted to read the damn thing, that's why I clicked on it. Not to see some cute 404 page (although it is pretty nice). Even better would be a way to tell Amazon to serve this bucket without regard to case.

Saying the web misses Google Reader is like saying the United States misses President Trump. Why do I think that? Think of the mess Google left behind when they dumped the web. Putting all our cards in one basket in software is a very very very very bad idea. As everyone who misses The Orange Feed Reader is evidence of. It's like someone rips you off bad and all you can think about is how much you miss them. You, sir or madam, need to get your head examined.

The big picture

As I complete a big project I like to re-center, to remind myself what I'm working for.

My goal is to create a social web that includes blogs and twitter-like systems. To set a new baseline where titles, simple styling, links, enclosures and the ability to edit are tools writers can use.

Somehow twitter pushed writing into a tiny little box. If we work together we can dig ourselves out of this box.

I love this

I love that I can read Mastodon posts in my freaking blogroll.

Eugen is the founder of Mastodon.

Maybe the thing I'm most proud of is that the blogroll can host Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, because they support outbound RSS. I can also follow Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, for the same reason. And of course Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, whose WordPress supported RSS from inception. Bluesky, Mastodon and WordPress, in the same social web. One of those Golden Spike moments.

The blogroll is a lot like weblogs.com combined with its successor my.userland.com. All this happened first in 1999. Today's blogroll is far in advance technically from the blogrolls of 25 years ago.

When I was growing up they taught us that humans were the only animals that were conscious. They wasn't any scientific evidence of this, we know now, because it obviously isn't true. And to my own credit, I was sure it was bullshit when I was a kid.

Finally seeing a real blogroll bug. We're getting notified that feeds are updating that we aren't following, yet they're showing up in my blogroll anyway. Either have to add some code or look for a bug. Good thing I've got the only really deployed blogroll now.

This is a nit, but it bugs me anyway. I'd love to know why Threads, which in every way is a modern JavaScript app running in a web browser, uses urls that begin with www. In 2024. There's no harm in it, it's just there was a consensus a long time ago that the www part was not necessary.

Did you forget that quickly?

We've noted this before.

Established facts about Trump eventually lose their currency, reporters forget and report it as big news next time they see it happening.

Trump's fealty to Putin for example. How could a reporter forget that? Yet they seem to.

Two moments to bring you back.

Picture 1.

Picture 2.

There are so many of these pictures.

Remember we tried letting Trump play president, we shouldn't have survived it, and in a lot of ways we didn't.

Collectively we're like the main character in The Sixth Sense (no spoilers, but if you have seen it you know what I mean).

So please, dear reporters and editors, try to factor actual proven facts into the context of your reporting.

Four things about threads.net

Four things.

  1. We're selling ourselves out by letting Facebook own a new social network and not putting that energy into building something that preserves our choice.
  2. I understand that Facebook's claims of supporting the Fedisphere won't amount to anything. They will end up controlling what interop means, which means we end up with yet another app store, with all the nonsense that comes with. Welcome to CyberDisneyland.
  3. You know all this, as well as I do. But we have decided not to care.
  4. This is exactly how we snookered ourselves into using Twitter for 17 years.

This would be a nice place to have Markdown support.

Lots of cleaning up after yesterday's party. I love that people are open to new ideas with blogs in 2024. It's been a while.

Written docs about using the blogroll.

BTW, this is the feed list for my blogroll. Feel free to import or subscribe to it into your feed reader.

I've started a page on opml.org for notes on blogrolls.

The Scripting News RSS feed now has a <source:blogroll> element.

Updated the reallySimple package to look for the <source:blogroll> element. This means the data will be available to FeedLand.

The blogroll sorted in reverse-reverse chronologic order.

A place to report problems with the new blogroll.

The popup menu

A popup menu with all kinds of background info.

10-minute podcast about today's Blogroll-out.

That's a blogroll, over there.

Blogrolls were a common feature in early websites. A list of blogs you follow. A checklist of places to look at. Advertising our web friendships. Blogrolls were the beginning of today's social web.

It's time to take a fresh look at the humble blogroll.

Screen shot of home page, with blogroll, shortly after launch.

Here's the lowdown on the blogroll and where it's going.

Blogrolls are for watchers

Here's a screen shot of the new software that came out today, the blogroll feature on Scripting News.

It's a post on Manton's blog, viewed in the blogroll on my site, talking about stuff on my site.

As we used to say in the Old School Blogosphere: "Watching them watch us, watch them watching us, etc, etc."

Manton's blog is expanded, revealing the five most recent posts. The cursor points at one, showing the full text in a tool tip. Click the link to visit the post on his blog.

Shortly after posting this item, Scripting News showed as the top item in the blogroll.

Then Doc Searls posted on his blog, and I had to snap a screen shot.

Did you know that Doc coined the term blogroll?

Then Gruber showed up from Daring Fireball. It's a bit like a party. ??

Today was a very exciting day here, I think tomorrow will be too.

I'm trying to think but nothing happens!

Earlier posts

This image was the result of a late night collaboration with ChatGPT. For some reason it can't spell anything right, and when I asked it to correct the spelling it mocked me. But I loved the design. It understood the hard part of what I was asking for.

The Knicks have been slumping since two of their top players have been out with injuries for over a month, after having an amazing January. One of the two star players came back last night, and what a difference! They went from being a team that could barely put a starting five on the court to having the deepest bench in the NBA. I was trying to do the math, but came up empty. They were absolutely unstoppable. Now that they have two superstars on the court at once, the opposing team can't just double or triple-team the one player, it's basically impossible to defend against their schtick. At the same time, the Knicks are great at defense. When the second injured player comes back, and it seems that will be soon, we might be back in the January mode that was so exciting. Even so, last night's game was a return to greatness. They blew out the 76ers, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. It's fun being a Knicks fan again! ??

Today I'm working on titles.

Tim Berners-Lee's idea for user-owned and controlled storage is good. Can't tell you how many times, as a developer, I wanted this. To get it going it'll need at least a couple of compelling apps, to seed the bootstrap. Like MacWrite and MacPaint for the Mac. Without that, it can't even begin. I could help with their bootstrap if I had some belief they had would not crush developers, which is harder to do than it sounds. The only times it has worked for me, for a little while, was when I created the platform and apps and content (you need all three). But the huge companies have no vision for the role of developers, so these things rarely even get off the ground, and who's going to sign up to believe in the goodness of a huge company. It's a very steep road TBL has chosen to travel. I have argued with my friends at Automattic that they are in a golden position to do this since they already have a large installed base product that's popular with users, and lots of developers who could make good use of storage attached to each account. I hope someone with deep pockets and longevity does it. Then we can really start building an app ecosystem on the net. We've been doing this for 35 years as TBL points out, and we still haven't created an economic developer ecosystem on the web. Storage, believe it or not, is the big missing piece.

We need a protocol for embedding a tweet in a web page. We used to have one with Twitter, but it now works only intermittently. Mastodon has one, and I have been able to use it. But really it would be nice to have a sort of jQuery of this stuff. If they're all going to create their own APIs we obviously need a container for that so developers don't have to worry about all of it.

BTW, has Twitter abandoned "tweet" as a trademark? Is it now public domain? Could someone ask?

I bet someone could develop and AI bot that takes a NYT article and removes the spin. It'd be interesting to see the befores and afters.

This screen shot illustrates the core weakness of Mastodon. We need the ability to log on to Mastodon, not to an instance. A factoring of that functionality. It totally could work, some person, company, foundation or whatever could build software that acts as a simplifier. Have you ever used plex.tv? Somehow they manage to do it. You're connected to someone's server, but you log on through one site.

Rebooting the blogroll bootstrap

Manton is doing great work.

His micro.blog system is pioneering a new form of blogrolls.

We've been working together behind the scenes to make sure his stuff interops with mine.

That's imho the best part.

PS: Blogrolls is where the social web started.

PPS: I have to write a short "what is a blogroll" doc, re OPML and RSS. There's not a lot to it. So it needs to be written down. Will do.

PPPS: I'm having flashbacks to Manila. We're using GitHub more or less the same way. We had a better scripting system. I also know that WordPress can be that too, and plan to use that in my software.

AI and the NYT

Zach Seward, a friend from my days at Harvard and NYU, got a kickass job, starting up the AI effort at the NYT. He's just the right guy for it. Young, curious, creative, and very ambitious. And he has a strong startup journalism background. I couldn't think of anyone I'd want more to be in this position.

Now that he's published notes for a talk he gave at SXSW, it's time to share some ideas I have for the NYT re AI.

  • Current events. This is something ChatGPT doesn't do. Not sure why. I'd like to be able to connect to ai.nytimes.com and ask it to give me a rundown on the lawyer who's testifying in Congress today about how our president is "elderly." I don't want pointers to stories, though they should be included in the response, I want a custom report, like the ones ChatGPT provides, that answers the questions I have about the MAGA lawyer. Maybe the AI will just give me the story without the spin.
  • More useful NYT archives. When I was a kid I spent so much time at the big library in Jamaica (Queens) going back through microfilm of the NYT from before I was born. So far all we've done is replicate the microfilm user experience (which is great and very useful) but the thing that ChatGPT does so well is prepare custom reports. All that source material, used to answer very specific questions. Answer questions like "has anything notorious happened in the neighborhood I grew up in, as far as the NYT knows?"
  • Sell a service to your readers where you manage the archive of their blogs, and in doing so you create a much broader archive for historians, journalists and others to study in the future, and, in the context of AI, feed it all kinds of perspective on the time we live in. Maybe in the future history won't be written by the winners (lotsa luck with that). Anyway, if at some point the NYT and other journalism outlets will harness the energy, knowledge and intelligence of the readers, why not start now?

I criticize the NYT a lot, I know. But that means I care. When I stop criticizing you'll know that I've given up.

Alan Kay said of the Mac, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. That's the spirit.

Manton Reece: Recommendations and Blogrolls. We have been working on this together for the last couple of weeks. Really exciting to see it come to fruition.

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