#
I think micro.blog is going to get very interesting once the APIs for all these random social networks fill out.
Scripting News

28 Mar 2024 at 02:02
#
I wish I could send ChatGPT a pointer to a page I'm working on and ask it questions about my CSS. Or imagine ChatGPT running in Node, supervising my server app, looking for problems, odd usage patterns, and later looking for optimizations. And that's just the beginning.
Scripting News

28 Mar 2024 at 01:40
#
I saw these Sony buds advertised and I had to try them. They're now my favorite way to listen to music and podcasts. Most ear buds in my experience don't do very well with bass, and I love music with a strong beat. Sony makes great inexpensive headphones.
Scripting News

27 Mar 2024 at 22:55
#
 I wish I could ask ChatGPT to look at this page.

Then I'd ask why is every object in class trBlogrollFeed 31 pixels high? By my computation it should be 27 pixels. Where are the extra pixels coming from? It matters. For a comparison, the same structure on this page renders at 27.5 pixels which looks just right, but it's weird that it computes it's got that extra half pixel. I don't really believe in half-pixels. Hey if you have any ideas, post a note here.
Scripting News

27 Mar 2024 at 20:07
#
I dream of a day when I can subscribe to a podcast on my desktop and have my mobile podcast app know about it automatically. (To be clear, using open formats and protocols, so that this convenience does not lock me into using one podcast client, obviously.)
Scripting News

26 Mar 2024 at 17:26
#
Experiments. I pasted the URL of a Mastodon post into a Threads post. I was kind of expecting it would use the power of federation to just get the post and put it in Threads. I asked a similar question on Mastodon, pasting the URL of a Threads post into a Mastodon post. As in the other direction it did nothing with it.
Scripting News

26 Mar 2024 at 17:05
#
On Threads: My goal for the next few years is to get the feed world and the social web world to merge, and I'm pretty sure the style of reading of the social web will prevail because it is the rational most news-like way to read news.
Scripting News

26 Mar 2024 at 16:25

Maddow didn't go far enough

 I don't usually watch Maddow on Monday nights. I lost my faith in her when she went after Facebook a few years ago, not that Facebook didn't deserve her attention, but her arguments while condemning them were exaggerated. I knew the facts, she left out important details.

She steered viewers into believing things that weren't true. Didn't exactly lie, but pretty close. I figured if she does that for stories I know, then she's probably doing it other times when I wasn't so well informed.

But the Knicks were blowing out the Pistons on the next channel over, and I had tuned in Jen Psaki, who as luck would have it, at the exact moment I switched, was explaining how the fact that she served in the Biden Administration before joining MSNBC was very different from the controversy over Ronna McDaniel, who Maddow went on to explain was basically a terrorist and traitor and Trump co-conspirator (not just an enabler), and not in a war that was over, but one that was still being fought, and not insignificant because this fascist movement has control of one of the two major parties in the US and McDaniel was instrumental in that. There are good arguments that she should be in a prisoner of war camp, not employed by one of America's major news networks.

That NBC hired McDaniel as a contributor says something awful about Maddow's employer. And Maddow, if she has any details on that, isn't saying what they are.

I've had this problem with other reporters in the past whose owners were caught up in some controversy that made them newsworthy. The reporters refused to cover it, or even be a source for others who were. This is where journalism goes wrong imho. Maddow should know the details, and if she does, she is obligated to share them, because they are significant, and go to how much trust any of us should give to any news coming to us from NBC. Maybe she has to quit to do that, and if so, go ahead and quit. Because the shadow it casts over everything touched by NBC, which includes MSNBC and Maddow is just too freaking long. It's similar to the "news" she reported on Facebook, except now instead of steering us to believe lies, she's holding it back, and instead of it being about one very powerful social media company, it's about the future of the government of the US. And maybe she doesn't know, as Upton Sinclair once said: “It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends on [them] not understanding it.”

I don't blame Maddow for liking her job. But as a reporter, there are more and more reasons not to trust her and esp to not trust the company that employs her. When it was obvious she wasn't going to tell us the story behind McDaniel's hiring, or even name the people responsible for it, I switched back to the Knicks, where at least I think I understand who they are and what they're trying to do.

Update: MSNBC backed down on hiring McDaniel.

Scripting News

26 Mar 2024 at 12:31
#
This is a screen shot of my blogroll. I can have posts from Mastodon or Bluesky here. But not Threads. It's really easy. Just support outbound RSS and we can add you to the club.
Scripting News

25 Mar 2024 at 13:57
#
 I was glad to have 3 Body Problem to binge over the weekend.

Created by the showrunners for Game of Thrones based on a much-loved series of science fiction novels, which btw I have not read. This was emphatically not Game of Thrones, though some of the actors played roles in both series, and in each case that was awkward. Not the best actors, they didn't get much screentime in GoT, but here, they get the big lines and omg it was embarrassing, they don't pull it off. Creepy. I loved the first four episodes, incredible story, and the special effects, awesome. Then it really started to stink in episodes in 6 and 7, endless stupid dialog with music that made every stupid thing like a climax of a sort. But I was still watching, and then it came back roaring in the final episode. On the other hand it's like so much of today's TV, superheros, epic conflicts, resolution, good guys win. A cross between Lost and Ender's Game. A space adventure and the supernatural. Net-net -- it was worth it. A good distraction, I will probably watch Season 2.
Scripting News

25 Mar 2024 at 13:35
#
 I still love reading my own stuff in the blogroll.

Learning how to make stuff look good in a tiny little format like that. I don't mind having a small space to deploy in, but I like to have lots of room where I write. Linkblogs and blogrolls go together really well. Blogrolls work best for smaller groups of people and projects, not the huge number of followers people have on the twitter-like social web. But I think even a few hundred items in a blogroll work, as long as it's dynamic, and it's reverse chronologic.
Scripting News

24 Mar 2024 at 22:57
#
Never thought I'd be so glad to see the xml-rpc site back up and running. I found out about it being off by someone sending an email asking if they could buy the domain from me. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have noticed. The whole idea is to put these static sites in a safe place and forget about it. But clearly there are no safe places and someday you might get dragged back to try to debug some work you did a bunch of years ago.
Scripting News

24 Mar 2024 at 22:48
#
So I went ahead and moved xmlrpc.com to a HTTPS server. The other day I forgot to mention that style sheets might not be readable when you move from HTTP to HTTPS, leading to this striking breakage I saw when I first got to look at the site in its new location. And now thanks to Google and the EFF, I get to spend time debugging something that worked just fine in 1998 and every year since then. Should I send them the bill for my time? Fuckers.
Scripting News

24 Mar 2024 at 22:14
#
 Braintrust query: I have not been able to reliably get to a bunch of my sites that use HTTP this morning. For example, feeder.scripting.com, a site that I use to test feeds.

Also xmlrpc.com. It's possible that something broke overnight in my server. Or Digital Ocean is having a problem? Doesn't seem like it's something Google is doing to punish me for using HTTP, though that is always the first thing that comes to mind. I tried moving the XML-RPC site to a different server, but the problem follows it. No changes have been made to the site in years. Not exactly what I had planned to be digging into on a nice (but cold) Sunday morning in the mountains. I started a thread, if you have any insights. At least scripting.com is still working, but it's not served through my software or Digital Ocean.
Scripting News

24 Mar 2024 at 12:59
#
 I saw someone get upset that ChatGPT can beat humans at debate, but we humans, esp here in the US for the last few decades, haven't been taking good care of ourselves intellectually. It would be one thing if we placed a high value on being informed and thoughtful, but we're going the other way.

However, if we were aiming to be as smart and knowledgable as possible, we'd be losing to them anyway. The machines have infinitely expandable memory, and we don't and we lose stuff, and we hallucinate a lot more than they do. But why is it a problem if a machine does something better than we do, even something we (foolishly) think we're the best at. That's why we make machines. I have a great car, and live in a house that's heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. If I want to travel to the other side of the world, no problem. These are all things that machines do for me. One thing a machine might not be good at is inspiration. I asked ChatGPT to give me a good idea for something to write today. The idea it came up with: "The Day the World Forgot How to Yawn." I rest my case.
Scripting News

23 Mar 2024 at 23:04
#
 I've had my blogroll for a couple of weeks now, and I've got it on-screen a lot, as I'm developing another user interface that has the blogroll in it.

This blogroll is much like the one I had in the 00s, but it's in motion, and it's a source of news and ideas. It's also doing the thing that Twitter used to do, it lets me have a way to see what specific people are interested in. I expect more of that as new people get this kind of blogroll. Right now I'm pretty much the only one. The next step is getting the blogroll running in WordPress. And then getting it running on Om's blog and Doc's blog, both of whom have real experience with the art of blogrolling. From that, I expect to have a better idea of what the editorial UI should look like for people creating and managing these blogrolls. We'll iterate until it's pretty easy to set up and manage one. Also to be clear, I want it to run in other platforms, this is not exclusive to WordPress. It's just the place where the people are right now, the ones I really want to work with. But I wouldn't mind it running in Substack for example, if there are any writers there who find this compelling. That would require cooperation from the company though, their platform as far as I know, does not support other-party plugins.
Scripting News

23 Mar 2024 at 16:00
#
What if climate change comes to where you live in the form of tornadoes that last 30 days.
Scripting News

23 Mar 2024 at 03:33

Broken images suck, Google

 Something the HTTPS evangelists must not understand: there's substantial breakage when you convert an HTTP site to HTTPS. Every image in every page breaks. Broken images make a statement, they're like broken windows, they say no one gives a F about this site. Well I care about the archive of scripting.com, I hope people understand that. I have been creating a record here since 1994. It'll be 30 years in October.

Instead of trying to blackmail me into breaking my archive, Google should be helping to preserve it. And not just mine, the entire early web. We poured our hearts and hopes into this, and massive amounts of time, without which Google would not exist.

I know Google doesn't have a heart and it isn't a living thing, but it's bad PR to make that so freaking obvious.

I think that perhaps Google is already run by the machines. Maybe it was the first such company.

To remind you of what Google's idea of the ancient web is, I put a broken image next to this post.

Thanks for listening.

Scripting News

23 Mar 2024 at 03:19
#
 Something the HTTPS evangelists must not understand: there's substantial breakage when you convert an HTTP site to HTTPS. Every image in every page breaks.

In return I get Google to stop saying the site is "insecure." I think the broken images make a much louder statement, making it clear that no one gives a F about this site. Well I care about the archive of scripting.com, I hope people understand that. I have been creating a record here since 1994. It'll be 30 years in October. Instead of trying to blackmail me into breaking my archive, Google should be helping to preserve it. And not just mine, the entire early web. We poured our hearts and hopes into this, and massive amounts of time, without which Google would not have been possible. I know Google doesn't have a heart and it isn't a living thing, but it's bad PR to make that so freaking obvious. I think that perhaps Google is already run by the machines. Maybe it was the first such company. To remind you of what Google's idea of the ancient web is, I put a broken image next to this post. Thanks for listening.
Scripting News

22 Mar 2024 at 13:27
#
 Back in the 80s before many of you were born, you could buy a word processing program, which was basically a text editor, and you could use it to write and then when it came time to send that writing to other people, you would print it.

And get this the printer could take its input from any of those writing tools. There were no tiny little text boxes. The printers didn’t come with their own editors, you had choice and therefore there was lots of competition. Amazing, right?
Scripting News

22 Mar 2024 at 12:37

Morning coffee notes

 I spent some time this week reviewing the UI of Radio UserLand, released in 2002. It was both a feed reader and a writing tool.

One would have thought, btw, that from that start that all subsequent blogging tools would have the same connections, even if the functionality was not all in the same product. But then came Twitter and Facebook, and they said they weren't blogs, and presumably would start a new tradition with new user expectations. And that worked.

So the integration opportunities were limited, something that took me 11 years to fully appreciate, and to give up on. I was in a intellectual cloud, not thinking straight.

Meantime, the tradition of blogging was preserved by WordPress. As a blogging tool, it supported the same connective features that Radio did. There were some it couldn't cover because Radio was a desktop app, not a web app (though it looked like a web app, you installed a piece of software on the desktop).

This was the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea realized.

So for example, we had upstreaming, which was a one-way Dropbox, a number of years before Dropbox existed. This meant that the link between the CMS and the server went through the file system. The product didn't live long enough to fulfill the potential of that feature. The idea was that you could use any editor you wanted to write something that was posted to the blog, you could choose to have it rendered through the site template, or uploaded as-is. The editor we supplied with Radio was one of those tiny little text boxes, but I hoped that better editors would emerge. I wanted to make one myself, combining the outliner in Frontier with scripting, to drop posts into the folder structure that Radio expected.

Radio's tiny little textbox circa 2002.

Years later I tried to do it with Dropbox itself, with a product called Fargo. Dropbox was so incredibly close to the ideal user-owned storage server system, but they wouldn't go the final step, in creating a class of content that could be shared with two or more apps but not all apps. So the user didn't have enough control for it to work.

The idea of multiple apps working on the same data would be revolutionary. How do I know? Because that's how computers worked before the web. So to make the thing I want to do work, now, in 2024, I'm going to have to create my own storage system for the user, and I will pay for it, at least to start.

Hopefully at some point I'll be able to turn that over to Automattic and have them run it, or if they don't want to, maybe someone else will. But it has to be there for the web as a runtime environment to support the same diversity of software that the PC and Mac did in the generation before the web.

Technology does go backwards, a lot -- we lose valuable things without any thought, when we could keep them. Anyway, more on this later for sure.

BTW, that's why it's good to keep some old people around, we might remember the things that were lost. I'm trying to make sure the really good ideas, the keepers, get another chance.

Another random morning bit -- something subtle in the blogroll you might not have noticed. It has no trouble dealing with titled or untitled posts. Blog posts typically have titles, social media posts do not. RSS was opinionated about this -- it said you should support both views. But the feed reader folk ignored that guidance. My little blogroll shows you how to do it, it's pretty simple. If it doesn't have a title use the description. Think of it this way. What if motorcycles, cars, trucks and bikes couldn't all use the same roads? What kind of way would that be to run a civilization. Same thing with feeds.

There's a screen shot of the blogroll to the right, with Scripting News highlighted and expanded. Some of those posts have titles and some don't. You and I as developers care about that, but we should show that difference that in the user interface. The users don't care. It's confusing and takes their attention away from the writing.

Another topic. Something I noticed in WordPress's RSS feeds. If I start a post out with an empty title, it uses the post ID to form the URL for the post. That's the right thing to do imho. But then if I add a title, which can happen, it changes the URL to use the title. But URLs shouldn't change. It also changes the guid, so a feed reader will think there were two posts when there was just one. Now I don't know if they can change it at this late date, I imagine there are workarounds out there. But I noticed this the other day, and thought I should mention it. Why not just use the post ID for the guid, esp since it says the guid is not a permalink? And use it in forming the URL. I totally understand the benefit of using the title in the URL. But you can't depend on the title being there.

Scripting News

21 Mar 2024 at 12:55

Why we're lucky WordPress is here and other topics

 I spent some time this week reviewing the UI of Radio UserLand, released in 2002. It was both a feed reader and a writing tool.

One would have thought, btw, that from that start that all subsequent blogging tools would have the same connections, even if the functionality was not all in the same product. But then came Twitter and Facebook, and they said they weren't blogs, and presumably would start a new tradition with new user expectations. And that worked. The new blogging platforms were silos.

So the integration opportunities were limited, something that took me 11 years to fully appreciate, and to give up on. I was in a intellectual cloud, not thinking straight.

Meantime, the tradition of blogging was preserved by WordPress. As a blogging tool, it supported the same connective features that Radio did. There were some it couldn't cover because Radio was a desktop app, not a web app (though it looked like a web app, you installed a piece of software on the desktop).

This was the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea realized.

So for example, we had upstreaming, which was a one-way Dropbox, a number of years before Dropbox existed. This meant that the link between the CMS and the server went through the file system. The product didn't live long enough to fulfill the potential of that feature. The idea was that you could use any editor you wanted to write something that was posted to the blog, you could choose to have it rendered through the site template, or uploaded as-is.

The editor we supplied with Radio was one of those tiny little text boxes, but I hoped that better editors would emerge. I wanted to make one myself, combining the outliner in Frontier with scripting, to drop posts into the folder structure that Radio expected.

Radio's tiny little textbox circa 2002.

Years later I tried to do it with Dropbox itself, with a product called Fargo. Dropbox was so incredibly close to the ideal user-owned storage server system, but they wouldn't go the final step, in creating a class of content that could be shared with two or more apps but not all apps. So the user didn't have enough control for it to work.

The idea of multiple apps working on the same data would be revolutionary. How do I know? Because that's how computers worked before the web. So to make the thing I want to do work, now, in 2024, I'm going to have to create my own storage system for the user, and I will pay for it, at least to start.

Hopefully at some point I'll be able to turn that over to Automattic and have them run it, or if they don't want to, maybe someone else will. But it has to be there for the web as a runtime environment to support the same diversity of software that the PC and Mac did in the generation before the web.

Technology does go backwards, a lot -- we lose valuable things without any thought, when we could keep them.

BTW, that's why it's good to keep some old people around, we might remember the things that were lost. I'm trying to make sure the really good ideas, the keepers, get another chance.

Another random morning bit -- something subtle in the blogroll you might not have noticed. It has no trouble dealing with titled or untitled posts. Blog posts typically have titles, social media posts do not. RSS is opinionated about this -- it says you should support both views. But the feed reader folk ignored that guidance. My little blogroll shows you how to do it, it's pretty simple. If it doesn't have a title use the description.

Think of it this way. What if motorcycles, cars, trucks and bikes couldn't all use the same roads? What kind of way would that be to run a civilization. Same thing with feeds.

There's a screen shot of the blogroll to the right, with Scripting News highlighted and expanded. Some of those posts have titles and some don't. You and I as developers care about that, but we shouldn't show that difference that in the user interface. The users don't care and rightly so. It's confusing and takes their attention away from the writing.

Another topic. Something I noticed in WordPress's RSS feeds. If I start a post out with an empty title, it uses the post ID to form the URL for the post. That's the right thing to do imho. But then if I add a title, which can happen, it changes the URL to use the title. But URLs shouldn't change. It also changes the guid, so a feed reader will think there were two posts when there was just one. Now I don't know if they can change it at this late date, I imagine there are workarounds out there. But I noticed this the other day, and thought I should mention it. Why not just use the post ID for the guid, esp since it says the guid is not a permalink? And use it in forming the URL. I totally understand the benefit of using the title in the URL. But you can't depend on the title being there.

Finally, to answer the question raised by the title of this piece -- WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web, and simply create places where posts with and without titles are equally supported. It's that simple. Without WordPress we would have to build all that, and wait for it to deploy in numbers, to matter in the market. All we have to do now is make the connections.

Scripting News

21 Mar 2024 at 12:55



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