/reader

Happy Eleventh of Bleptember! (This one’s not going out on Mastodon, at least not immediately, because I’m having some Internet difficulties at home right now!)

📰 Using a feed reader is the best way to read my blog posts. How clever you are to know that! 🚀

I thought I’d found one of these before but there are none currently sitting in my blogroll. Hope it’s useful to someone!

• Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets. #
• Around the time of the 20th anniversary I decided to swing back and see what more we could do with RSS. It had been sitting there basically going nowhere for most of those 20 years. I want to be clear, there were good and useful products created and supported, but there was none of the innovation that would have happened if it hadn't been so severely injured by Google and the many VC-backed startups hacking away at it.#
• A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That's what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn't be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.#
• Anyway, around the 20th anniversary, in the leadup to it, I decided if no one else was going to invest in RSS, I would, and let's see what comes of it.#
• The result was FeedLand which is fundamentally different from all the other feed readers in that its subscription model is patterned after the twitter-like social media apps. Everyone's subscription list is public. I can look at your list and you can look at mine. You can also put categories on the feeds you subscribe to and route them to other servers doing other things, through the magic of the web. And get this -- you can even subscribe to a category of my subscriptions. Lots of power there, but still it's simple.#
• FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, WordLand is a real editor that supports the basic writing features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. Markdown is like MP3. If you're mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It's there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you're mixing text you're mixing Markdown. #
• So while everyone was dancing on Twitter's dumpster fire of a social network I decided to build on something much bigger. The web. RSS and Markdown. WordPress and FeedLand. #
• The name Really Simple Syndication is supposed to make you smile, while most techie formats make you want to pull your hair out. RSS reads pretty well even if you know nothing about feeds and XML. I wish the browser people hadn't insisted on masking it with ugly CSS style sheets. I like lifting the hood of a car to see what's there even though I don't know what many of the things in there do. I learn by doing it. #
• RSS isn't ugly, it's brilliant, and shouldn't be fear-inducing, hence the promise: it's really simple.#
• #

That didn’t matter for a long time: smartphones were the center of innovation, and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. Now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery, and I think that, more than anything, is what bums people out: no, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery via John Gruber

If you have been a regular reader, then you are familiar with my often-repeated argument that companies, like people, don’t really change. They are married too closely to their DNA. In case you need a refresher on my concept of corporate DNA, I recommend this old piece of mine from the archives.

There is a reason why Meta continues to be a worse version of Facebook, and why Google still struggles to look beyond its DNA of data-driven engineering. Apple is no different. It is a company driven primarily by hardware and hardware design. Everything it does starts with that and that is why I believe it ends up in the comfortable confines of hardware innovation. I explained yesterday that this is not a bad thing. They can continue to be a big player in the future as long as they actually start to adapt while still staying true to their DNA. I will have more on that later. 

If Apple fails at something, it is that while it is good at launching a hardware platform, it does not quite understand its true capabilities. The iPad suffered because its biggest champion, Steve Jobs, died before it could take root.

They couldn’t turn Apple TV into anything meaningful. It could easily have been a hub for the digital home. They have created one of the most imaginative devices in recent memory, the Vision Pro, but it is languishing because it doesn’t get enough attention from a user’s standpoint. For instance, how is it that a company with unlimited money isn’t funding visual content for the platform? But then, it is not in their corporate DNA. 

In the past, it didn’t have to do much as developers did it all. Mac developers’ loyalty was legendary. The iPhone is what it is because of the app economy it helped create. Apple’s challenge now is that it is a beast with many arms that has to juggle many balls. It has to satisfy Wall Street, and It has to make innovation junkies like meand media folks who seem to crave the new, interested in the company. And somehow, it needs to find imagineers to fill its ranks and give them the freedom to make its hardware sexy and usable.

The response suggested a short bio at the top with a prominent call to action or link to Bandcamp.

Another idea was some kind of music widget with, possibly, a random track. I like the idea but would have to create a new table in the database with links to various tracks that I could randomly pull from.

Instead, I am considering a standard Bandcamp embed with the latest release. I already put embeds on /music so that's a simple cut & paste job. I might try a base embed, but have an option in the admin page for the link to the latest release. Rather than redo the home page each time I release something, I could just change the option. 🤔

One other thing Gemini proposed was to have a grid of cards for the different sections of the site: blog, music, etc. The old home page had all the links in a big 'card', so maybe I could use the same style but with each item having its own section.

I started testing a responsive CSS grid that would change the number of columns based on screen size, but haven't really worked out how I want it to look.

At least it's got me thinking and given me some ideas, which is more than I've had in weeks.

# Mucking around with a test page, I came across an issue I never realised I had on the original home page. It was something caused by my misunderstanding of how a particular PHP function worked.

It's now fixed!

As noted pretty much everywhere since the shooting occurred, a little over two years ago—on stage at a Turning Point USA event focused on faith, of all things—Kirk made it clear that he’s an idolater who believes in the necessity of human sacrifice.

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

When someone like Charlie Kirk becomes among the many who have died on his very own idolatrous altar, you’re allowed to think—or even to say aloud—“too bad, so sad”, and then just move on with your the rest of your day, and with the rest of your life.

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