When you really have federation no one needs to hype it, people don’t even realize it because things just work the way you expect them to. Every time I hear Where ever you get your podcasts, I’m reminded of how well that worked.

   I don’t think conversation on the web has been the big benefit some people think. Do you remember when you first realized that people weren’t talking to you in a response to your post, they were talking over your shoulder to the people who read your post. I guess it depends on who you are, but I...

   A backgrounder on how the web is used for conversation, the pros and cons of each variant, and what role RSS can play in it, thanks to ChatGPT.

   ChatGPT has memory across chats. This just popped up on the screen. I’d like to tell it that until further notice I use Node.js and do not use Express, and do use jQuery for my browser based JavaScript, and I use the debugger all the time, so you can assume that. If this works, I now have a...

   When I started working with Automattic last year, one of the big milestones we were aiming for was getting FeedLand and WordPress working together. Now we have the first step. I hope you take a moment to give it a try and let us know how it works. Scripting News readers have helped bootstrap all...

   Jay Gilmore: ActivityPub breaks my brain. It doesn’t need to be that hard given the payloads we are talking about. True.

   There’s a new plugin that adds a blogroll to a WordPress site. It would be helpful if people who are regular readers of Scripting News who use WordPress, set up a test site, give it a try and let us know how it goes. You can help us get to the next level with this stuff. So there are two sides,...

   A big idea for the blogging world. I’d like to combine AI and search to make a really great search engine for bloggers. We would contribute what we know we already do and in return, along with everyone else, get to benefit from the collection. And when we browse, it knows which blog we write. So...

   John Palfrey as the mover behind Press Forward will bring the gospel of EZ Pass for News on his ongoing whistle stop tour of local news orgs. JP was my boss rabbi when I was at Berkman, and is why we got so much done there. He ran air cover for what we did, the BloggerCons, giving RSS a home,...

   EZ Pass for News is formula for functional relationships between local news pubs and people in far away places ie not their locality who may from time to time want to read an article or a series of articles on their site, and pay per issue instead of buying a subscription.

   I was chatting with a friend who went to Bronx Science, as I did, and we were talking about Isaac Asimov, and I said I thought he went to Science too. So I fired up ChatGPT and asked if Asimov went to Science, and it said yes. Then I asked where he went to high school and it said Bronx Science. But...

   I don’t have time to write about it now but the end of last night’s Knicks game was one of the most dramatic bits of NY sports ever. I would like to thank Kevin Durant for saying the Knicks weren’t cool. It’s somewhat like the Streisand Effect where the thing KD was trying to hide was that he was...

   The largest open publishing network in the world is the web.

   The idea of us all working together to federate is the right idea, but making ActivityPub the hurdle everyone has to jump over is imho the wrong idea. I’m building on feeds RSS, Atom, RDF. A lot of good stuff works on that basis. And it’s a much shorter path to interop than ActivityPub.

   I hate paywalls tied to subscription. I’m never going to subscribe to a Philadelphia news org, but based on Jay’s recommendation I might pay on my EZ Pass for News to read this story, esp since I saw the Civil War movie. I just had a thought, I might subscribe to a Philadelphia news org for a...

   Over the weekend I tested the blogroll plugin for WordPress. It worked. After a little more testing and docs writing we’ll be ready for other people to test it, an important step before wider use. So if you’re a regular Scripting News reader, and are curious what this blogroll stuff is about, you...

   Jeff Jarvis writes that a German man who died with K books in his house was obsessed with the work of writer Arno Schmidt, who was my great uncle, my grandmother’s brother.

   Good morning sports fans

   I asked meta.ai to draw a pastoral scene with sheep and dogs, birds, fish, airplanes, clams and seagoing ships in ancient England.

   Back in the old days, during a great sport event, we’d post our feelings, pro or con, to Twitter. I observed as follows: Let’s do something great with our lives In the meantime I miss the role that twitter used to play and never will play again. It was the place to go to say ’How about those...

   Doc asks the question on all our minds: Why does ChatGPT misspell the f ck out of words on images Don Park, Wes Felter and JY Stervinou chime in.

   After living with the blogroll on the home page of Scripting News for about a month, and having heard from early testers, I felt that it was demanding too much attention when I was reading stuff on the blog. So I made some time last week to experiment with a subtler sidebar. In Quiet Mode, the...

   It’s totally ridiculous to equate protest with antisemitism, esp with Israel led by a MAGA ally. The two concepts are orthogonal. I do not support the Israeli government any more than I supported the government of my country, the United States, when the MAGAs were in charge. We lost over million...

   Quick video demo of meta.ai. This is a demo of just one feature, its ability to recalc drawings as you edit the prompt that defines the picture. As you can tell from the demo I love it because it’s new, creative, super fun to use and to watch the result. And lovely to see this much progress so...

   More and more I’m getting used to WordPress as the platform I develop for. Imagine if you, as a developer, could add your own data to a WordPress post. Then you could build editors that work at a higher level. For example, you’d keep the Markdown source for the page. When it was saved the system...

   A street in New Orleans that Meta.ai invented. I asked for Joseph St across from the cemetary. Even so an interesting image, makes me think of the city in a nostalgic way.

   I did the blogroll stuff because I needed a minimal feed reader that could run from the right sidebar of any app.

   I just spent a few minutes with meta.ai, Facebook’s answer to ChatGPT, and it’s really good. The drawing functionality recalcs while you’re entering the prompt, so if you type, vary gender, age and race, and as you type each word, the image changes.

   Suppose you’re working deep inside a complex project and have an unrelated idea. How long does it take to switch to writing mode, get the idea down, and return to what you were doing. The less time it takes the more fluidity. Twitter totally won there. And we, the bloggers, made a tradeoff. We...

   In the past, when I have tried to make other people’s products better, it often doesn’t go very well. The archive of this blog is filled with great examples. Yet I, as they say, persist.

   Video: Design issues in FeedLand blogrolls.

   I just tripped across this post from where Matt had sent me an email saying they were supporting the Twitter API in WordPress. I had forgotten this. That’s how long it’s been that he’s wanted to hook WP up to the social web. It doesn’t look like I posted that to Scripting News. I wonder what...

   If Tesla went out of business, would my Model Y stop working

   I’ve never been to TED or SXSW.

   Good morning NBA fans. Today is the official beginning of the post season, and this Knicks fan is one freaking happy camper. Just thought I’d get that outta the way before getting down to business.

   Each form of online discussion has a grain to it. Doc and I used to talk about how something follows the grain of the web. Twitter has its own grain, formed by its character limit, what information is shared ie number of followers in both directions . I made a list of some of the social...

   Anton Zuiker is the first Drummer user with a FeedLand blogroll.

   Followed by Frank McPherson and Gary Thompson.

   How to add a FeedLand blogroll to a Drummer blog. You must have a Drummer blog and a FeedLand account. You can specify that all the feeds you’re subscribed to are in your blogroll or use a category and only feeds in that category will be in the blogroll. The blogroll updates automatically, when...

   Next up, let’s connect Drummer blogging to FeedLand blogrolls.

   I want to work with the best developers, I don’t care where they work. It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn’t happen, we don’t even look at...

   Final Eastern Division standings. Knicks finish second. Best Knicks team in a long time. Ended the season with a five game winning streak.

   I don’t like how betting has invaded sports broadcasting. I don’t like that it breaks the bond among people who root for one team their whole lives, as I have with the Knicks and the Mets. I think of people who love the same teams as I do as family. I like that there are Knicks fans who also like...

   Question: What’s between a tiny little text box and a full blown content management system Answer: A full featured text editor with a social media feel to it without the limits of twitter like systems. That’s what textcasting is for, to identity the essential features. This editor supports them. ...

   My wpidentity package now has storage.

   I just finished Ripley on Netflix, an part miniseries remake of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which I remember, probably incorrectly, as a light hearted story. There was very little to laugh about in this new version, but omg it is such a beautifully presented story. Even if you hated the plot you’d...

   In some ways the look of Ripley resembles Poor Things, another eclectic and lovely to look at presentation.

   I really want to see Civil War. Gets an amazing review in NYT.

   In an email to Doc this morning: The web is such a huge total mess. CSS is a junk pile of reinventing that learned nothing from the ideas it was reinventing. The only reason we put up with this is the freedom we got from it. But that’s been gone for a long time. I have a feeling we’re wasting our...

   A piece I wrote about Doc in entitled Doc Quixote.