/reader

Bronx Science, in retrospect#

• Story. I'm on a mail list for Berkman, where I spent two years at Harvard. Alumnae of all generations are on this list, and it's interesting.#
• Just got an email that someone was proud of having their picture taken with Susan Landau. I didn't know who she was, so I looked her up.#
• She was born in 1954. And is a highly accomplished math and comp sci wizard, with cred at Harvard, Google, and now teaches at Tufts. #
• Then I get to the place where they say she went to Bronx Science. #
• That was my class, unless she, like I, skipped a grade. We both would have started in 1969 and graduated in 1972.#
• I just wanted to write this up because I've noticed in the last few years, now that I live in the northeast, not far from the Bronx, I tend to come across more Science alums, and when I do, I generally find we have a lot to talk about, and share a New York style nerd sense of humor. #
• And as a math major myself, I conclude that their test was pretty good, it definitely selected a certain kind of mind, and the people it selected generally went on to do interesting, creative and useful things. #

• Steve Jobs asked you to think differently about computers. #
• I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress. #
• I'm not going to make you wait to hear what it is. I want you to see WordPress as comparable to Bluesky or Mastodon. #
• I've done this before -- asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said "we don't do that." They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.#
• I did it with RSS and podcasting. We needed to seed these things, get the ideas in front of people with actual products, with real utility for users. And eventually they came around. #
• Now I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress, something you thought you already fully understood. #
• Internally, the software, WordPress, Mastodon, Bluesky, do a lot of the same things. But because WordPress is so long-lived relative to the other two, it's more complete, scaled, it federates easily, lots of people do it. #
• It has important features the other two don't, although some Mastodon instances are more relaxed about character limits, linking, titles on posts and editing. These are important features. But because the mother ship doesn't support all of them, it's hard to represent it without the limits. This can be fixed easily, btw. Just being analytic about it. I like Mastodon and ActivityPub because they provide interop, and that's the name of the game. Make your product but don't lock users in. Interop is your way out if you need to get out. ;-)#
• WordPress has excellent support for RSS, esp using a little-known feature called rssCloud. It enables realtime notification of new or changed feed items. It's been around since 2009, and like all of WordPress, it's thorougly debugged and scaled. I use it in FeedLand and WordLand. If you watch the blogroll on scripting.com on the web, you'll see it in action. Or if you read news.scripting.com, leave it running and watch the new items show up in realtime without you having to do anything. That's rssCloud. #
• WordPress has a deep and powerful API, well designed, documented, and they don't break it. Developers who know me know that the last part is the most important. A platform must remain unchanging. That means you have to put in a lot of thought up front, and then live with your mistakes, providing continuity.#
• The API has barely been used by developers. Huge amount of potential there. #
• It's open source, of course. #
• It has a large support industry built around it, you can get a lot of help in setting up and running an instance. #
• And I, Dave Winer, am part of this now, have been for a couple of years, working relatively quietly, building out what I think WordPress needs to get started in this new direction. I am going to help bootstrap a great developer community around all these capabilities. This is something people didn't count on. I have an incredible track record of establishing popular APIs and developer communities. I know how to do this, even wrote a guide to how to do it, which apparently has helped other developers create and work on open platforms. #
• I've done three things that will help the bootstrap. #
• Apps. Like MacWrite and MacPaint, someone has to go first, to share basic ideas about how the user interface will work.#
• A storage service where the user owns their writing, so it can be edited by any app they give permission to. This means that app developers don't have to be resellers of storage. This is the biggest economic limiting factor to a large innovative, truly entrepreneurial developer community. Every other network arrangement requires you to raise money or be fearful of having huge support and monetary overhead if you attract too many users. When the Mac market booted up it had none of these limits, the users bought the hardware, we made the software. The web has never had the equivalent runtime environment. I'm going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going. My treat. Until we can get help from infrastructure owners to host the service. And if you want to host it for yourself, it's open source, so you will be able to, without anyone's permission.#
• Content. We won't have to wait for new writers to start using my service. Thanks to RSS there will be plenty of feeds in a form that is surprisingly like the data that flows through the other systems. We will carry writing from Substack and Ghost, for example. #
• Finally, in the WordPress world I have to tell you how I feel about the 800-pound gorilla, Automattic. Whatever you think -- key point -- they didn't lock you in. The community, which I'm just getting to know is very circumspect about everything and that's good and right. It's based on the reality that you never know when or how you're going to lose your freedom, so you always have to watch out. I have looked at this from the inside, from the API and the history, and I've gotten to know a few people at the company, and I trust certain things about them. I don't think they'll necessarily listen to you, or me -- and they can get in the way, but I'm willing to take a chance that they won't. They've kept their open source promise and they run a stable platform. Linux is that way, it offers that kind of stability, and so does WordPress. Much of the world, myself included, haven't paid much attention to WordPress and we have only used a small fraction of its potential. I'm going to try to build on and unlock for other developers, a whole new side of the platform.#
• One more thing you should know -- I'm not in it for the money. I just want to help the web heal from all the abuses it has taken over the years. They took paradise and blew big holes in it that users couldn't find a way out of. They undermined open formats and protocols. They lied to the users, all the time, over and over. Now I don't object to making money, but I'm putting it out there, you can compete with me, I want you to compete with me, as long as you don't try to cut off the interop. And I'm not naive, believe me, I expect that will happen. #

Early morning tease#

• Everyone has heard of WordPress, right? I'm going to be introducing a very weird idea about WordPress, one that's going to bend your mind a lot, especially if you're a member of the WordPress community, but also if you're a developer who has used WordPress in an application sometime in the last 20 years, or a user who has used it to keep a blog, or to run a business website, or just someone who hangs around the web. It's famous, but not in the way I'm going to present it. I'm going to ask you to see WordPress the same way you think of Mastodon or Bluesky. It's a way of storing realtime text and graphics, and arrange them by time, and read and write them, subscribe to people, comment on what others have written, communicate with other people you find on a twitter-like network. If you look at the actual sofware, you'll see that WordPress and the other two systems have very similar features. They all store messages. And arrange them chronologically and in relation to other messages and people. But WordPress does it better.#

Big bird in my pool#

• Last week I did an unusual podcast about three huge birds fighting over a fish in a nearby pond. Usually I write and talk about technology or politics, but this was such a compelling story and I didn't have any photos or video, so I did a verbal story. Hope you enjoyed it. Well now I have a video! #
• On Tuesday I went out to my pool, there was one of the big birds, in the pool. He couldn't get out. The pool is fenced in, as it must be, to keep animals and children from drowning, and the fence was too tall for the bird to fly out, or so it seemed. When it spotted me, it freaked out and tried to squeeze through the fence, which was impossible, the holes in the fence were too small for his sizeable body. #
• The bird did eventually manage to fly out, thankfully -- maybe I'll do another verbal podcast to explain why that was such an accomplishment. But for right now I just want to share the video. #

• The big bird in the pool. #

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.#

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web. #

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period. #

Plot for a political sci fi comedy#

• It's the future, and the great power of the X galaxy, on the planet Y of star Z, has accidentally elected a despotic prime minister who also happens to be an excellent standup comic. Kind of like Robin Williams, from the planet you come from, but he's a centipede and only breathes what you would think of as Chef Boyardee lasagna, but it's not really that, it's different. #
• Anyway, he's old, 757 centuries give or take, and they're expecting him to die soon, and they can elect someone boring so they can forget about politics. Everyone is looking forward to the relaxation. #
• And then one day he does die, and everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief, until later that night, on the 10-screen equivalent of what you would think of as TV, hilarity ensues when the "dead" PM showed up, looking fit, young and dashing, doing slapstick and talking about how he's going to make a mess of something. #
• Everyone was furious and then puzzled, we thought he was dead -- until the rumor started going around that the scientists had invented a sort of "artificial" thing that could perfectly emulate anyone or anything, including a Lasagna-breathing centipede comic despot from planet Y of star Z in the X galaxy. Everyone was pissed, but mostly agreed the PM was still pretty funny.#
• End of pilot. #

• Movie poster demo.#

The consensus among the people who responded to my what does "on the web" mean query is this. Something is on the web if it has a URL you can use to view it in a web browser. That means, in 2025, that the URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS. Every "page" on a site must have a URL so they can be pointed to independently, otherwise known as deep linking. It's not enough to just have a home page that's on the web. So for example, an iPhone app isn't on the web just because it has an information page that is. #

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some scenes where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing. #

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating. Or maybe I should just stop offsite linking for one day a week. That would be interesting wouldn't it. Or I could charge extra for the version with the links. (It's very rare that I charge anything to use any of my web work, but I have done that at times.)#

I've been exchanging emails and voicemails with Dan Knauss, a longtime WordPress developer and one of the hosts of WordCamp Canada which I am speaking at in October. Learning a lot about the community and culture. I wonder, have I ever been part of a community that's over 20 years old? I can't think of one off the top of my head. I have gotten this far without knowing much about the WordPress community, other than what I've heard via Matt and what I've been able to infer from that. I've known Matt since he was a teenage boy wonder in the tech industry working at CNET and then as an entrepreneur. I think my point of view is a new one, I don't bring much baggage with me. I am generally sympathetic with Matt, having been the leader of the blogging world when it started, and found it a pretty thankless place, a position I was happy to relinquish in 2003 when I went to academia. #

There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably. #

I've been following Mark Cuban's recent posts on Bluesky, coming up with constructive things successful entrepreneurs can do to help. I had a different idea. Apply for a fellowship at a university, away from where you live, maybe in a place you've always wanted to try. In your application say you bring your entrepreneurial experience, but you're leaving your money on the side. You're coming to the university with the idea of creating something collaboratively, bringing the entrepreneurial approach of startups to the mix of people you find among academics. You're there to learn from the teachers and the students, and help them understand what you do. Use your mind, experience, creativity, even your contacts, but leave the money at home. You can live in a nice house, drive a nice car, but eat in the places people in the university eat, go to the lectures, concerts, sporting events, in other words, go back to school with your new perspective, and make a personal contribution. It's much more satisfying than spending money is, I speak from experience. There's a different kind of success in the collaboration. Another way to test yourself and develop new perspectives and experience. I wrote about this a few years back in Developing Better Developers. #

Trump's secret was comedy#

• Trump is a comedian. He makes people laugh the way Joan Rivers or Don Rickles did. #
• It's verbal slapstick, which is for some reason I don't understand immensely funny and entertaining.#
• Newsom is making us laugh by imitating Trump imitating Joan and Don. It's working. He must keep doing it, and he should evolve the schtick, he should make Trump match him. And where Trump is promoting depraved policies with his comedy, we can count on Newsom to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law and all the progress we've made. #
• He can invite famous comedians on his podcast to play opposite him, sometimes the straight man, playing their SNL roles. So much potential. He's got the attention, don't throw it away. #
• Politics was boring, it's not boring anymore. But there's no reason excitement and entertainment can't be good for us too! ;-)#
• Trump's secret is comedy and Newsom is stealing his thunder#

Mark I want to use my (comparatively small) fortune to develop a truly open platform for discourse on the web. Users and independent developers get to try out all the ideas for discourse and learning. We create the ideal system together to plan our future, not being owned by oligarchs.#

New version of FeedLand coming. It has features to support an Edit This Page function in WordLand and possibly elsewhere. #