NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.#

Government should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. Focus our attention on each product (ie climate change, social security, Ukraine, etc), so the ideas don't get missed, and we can network in support of the initiative. This is all part of the idea of having a democratic.party website that we call call home for our political organizing. None of this pissing in the wind we do on twitter-like systems. Form buddy groups of people we organize with, based on locality or common interests. Organize the people as well as the billionaires are organized. This is what political parties should be in 2024 for crying out loud. We're missing the point of the mess in our politics. It's all a mess because it needs to be organized and it's not. Maybe I should take everything else off my blog now so I can use what little attention I have been able to gather here to focus on this idea. We. Need. To. Organize. #

BTW, Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don't know anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is in that dimension. To the extent that we do know anything about him: 1. He's a jokester. 2. He has a brilliant and beautiful wife. 3. He has a huge villa in Italy which he keeps very private. That's about it. He's rich. We have nothing in common. He should run for office and get in the mix. The fact that the NYT chose him, that says something about them, other than they don't care what people think, or they think we're really shallow and will fall for bullshit like George Clooney who says he loves Biden. We didn't even know he knew Joe Biden! Why should Clooney have more of a say in this than I do? Tell me what Nancy Pelosi thinks, or Al Sharpton (I know I said that before). Or give Michael Moore a shot. He has a lot more skin in the game than Clooney. I'd love to read an op-ed by David Frum. Liz Cheney! I would be interested in her opinion on this. #

Shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode.#

On this blog 20 years ago: "Our mission when covering the DNC is to figure out what goes on at a DNC. On the other hand, some portion of the 15,000 reporters at the DNC will be trying to figure out what we, the bloggers, are doing at the DNC. I suspect most of them will conclude that we don't belong there, in the same way most of the early articles about weblogs concluded we are not going to kill professional journalism." This turned out to be true. #

TWiT studio in Petaluma is shutting down. A lot of great stuff came out of this place. Please take a video of the studio before it closes down for good. I've learned this over and over, having shut down a few offices where great stuff was created and forgetting to do this. #

In today's episode: "The very cute but also very courageous Wordle Kitty is learning how to be a surgeon. They brought a mysterious leader into the operating room and asked the Kitty to please operate on the leader and save his life so Wordle Kitty got out the textbook and read up on brain surgery, even though the patient only had a nick on his ear, which was admittedly very bloody, she operated on the patient’s brain and unfortunately the patient died. So we are looking at the scene where the dead body of the patient is on the operating table and Wordle Kitty is smoking a cigarette, relaxing and reflecting on what she learned. She’s still very cute of course."#

This blog 20 years ago today.#

The shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode. The shownotes pages now have a player. Still have a little more work to do on it. I like this because it's a lightweight project, which is something I need while the world is boiling over. #

This blog 20 years ago today.#

The show notes for today's Podcast0 episode. #

Does the marquee element in HTML work in your browser?#

This post on Threads has already gotten over 7K reads. That's a lot for me, on any platform, and I have far fewer followers there, and no blue checkmark. #

The episode from this day in 2004 is now in the Podcast0 feed. #

Here are the show notes for this episode. #

Today's song: Respect Yourself. For all of us, but especially the people of the United States of America.#

I had a post here about the inevitability of Biden stepping aside, then I turned on the news and saw how the press was humiliating the President at a meeting with the president of Ukraine. We can't give into this. How dare they insult the president as he represents the US in NATO. I can't get behind this. We're in a bad bad place. #

If you listened to my audio blog posts in the summer of 2004, I recommend subscribing to the new podcast0 feed. I just listened to the show from this day 20 years ago. It was quite a throwback, lots of questions about what I was talking about, I've forgotten a lot of it. It took a full hour to prepare the feed. I can tell this is going to be quite a flashback experience. Maybe it'll get me in the mode to do some serious innovating, because we were on fire and didn't know it, in so many ways, back in the summer of 2004.#

If we were organized we could handle anything. The only reason we're panicking about Biden's capability is that our news flow is owned by largely invisible media moguls. The only way out of this mess is to route around them.#

I agree with Manton. The way the twitter-alikes do discourse is not the only possible way, and imho, and, as I've said before (in 2007!), most of what passes for discourse on twitter is actually spam, and that goes for Masto, Threads, Bluesky and Facebook (aka FriendFeed). #

It bugs me that there’s all this focus on Biden, when what we really need is to organize as voters so we can be ready to deal with whatever happens. That’s the real problem. The press can point out a problem, and it is a problem, but no one has the ability to build a consensus among voters. I think it’s possible to put together an online version of the Democratic Party, something that never goes away, is available to rally the electorate at any moment. That’s the way to neutralize the power of the media moguls who have us wrapped around their fingers.#

Suppose Biden abdicates. What happens then? How does this not become a mess like Bernie and Hillary, or Nader and Gore, Perot and Clinton, Kennedy and Carter, McCarthy, RFK and Humphrey.#

Joni Mitchell: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."#

If you've lived much at all you know what Joni says is true. I got there when my grandmother died in 1977, when I was 22, my first close relative that I lost, and I tried to come to grips with the idea that I'd never see her again and found it impossible, but it was true nonetheless. No way to escape it. When my mother died, in 2018, I only thought after we cleared her house to be sold, the house I grew up in, that I didn't even take pictures of it before it was emptied. I was so used to it being a constant, I forgot to realize until it was too late, that I was saying goodbye to everything I knew for my entire life. Forever. It's why we're playing such a dangerous game of chicken with Biden's presidency, because the stakes are so incredibly high. A mathematical approach to this problem says imho that everyone should shut the fuck up about Biden's flaws and get us organized so we can handle any eventuality. The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation. Whatever happens this year, what's waiting for us is for most of us to wake up from the dream that there are any constants in our lives. It's all falling apart, in every way. The only thing that matters is we start working together, intelligently, or else it's over. #

I admit that after the debate and the interminable attacks from the press on our democratic process that I'm pretty depressed about the future. I was talking with a friend over the weekend, a fellow NYer who moved up to the mountains as I did, about the political situation, and I asked if he would be prepared to sign a loyalty oath to Trump. He said he'd never do it. If they tried to force him, he'd get a gun and shoot them. This isn't the first time I've heard that, and I called bullshit. You're never going to do that. I know this guy, I know myself. I won't do it either. And I think I probably will have to sign the loyalty oath and so will you. There are so many ways to turn your life off, legally -- and without recourse. Think about what happens when you lose access to a social media account. Or when a credit rating agency doesn't believe you are who you are. Or when someone hijacks your phone and you can't get back control of it (and try to use anything without a working phone number). I've been through all these miserable processes. And none of them were legal, or controlled by the US government. A president who demands loyalty of you will get it. And that is certainly exactly where we're headed, again. #

I find the blogroll on the home page of my blog to be an incredible way to catch up on what people I follow are posting to their blogs and news sites. It's more like a feed reader than a blogroll because when a site updates it moves to the top of the list and when you click the wedge next to the title you get the five most recent posts with links to the full story. Maybe it was a mistake calling this a blogroll. I'm trying to come up with a better place to put it so more people would see it and use it and might think it would be nice to have a place like that for themselves. In any case I'm thinking about what to do next with FeedLand, which is what's behind the blogroll software. It hasn't lived up to my hopes, and I don't think it's likely to. I may be done writing software for others, I was writing only for myself for a few years, between 2017 and 2021, and I really liked that. The experiment of writing for others was not a success. So I'm thinking about how to wind down FeedLand, keep it available for the people who are already using it, but close it to new membership. Just thinking out loud here for a bit. It's that time, to consider what I want to do with the next few years, assuming, praise Murphy, I have them to play with. 😄#

I'm glad Biden is attacking journalists, he has a much bigger voice than I do. If I had his influence I'd be saying the same things, though I wouldn't be as kind. It's time to put the journalists back where they belong, covering news, not trying to run the country. #

I feel about twitter the same as I feel about the nytimes. As if we're not on speaking terms. Not that the nytimes ever listened, or really twitter, for that matter.#

Is Sulzberger another Musk. Inherited something of value, moving as quickly as possible to destroy that value.#

It's time to stop caring what journalists think.#

We should try this someday: A twitter-like system built with feeds, with all their limits. People can link to my posts, but not attach themselves to my flow. Goodbye spam and the motive for abuse, attention. Something I'd like to try someday, but first you need people who are interested. It's a chicken and egg thing. #

I wonder if people remember what a divided Democratic party is like. Obama had Hillary. Hillary had Bernie. Gore had Nader. Bill Clinton had Perot. I guess Mondale and Dukakis unified the party? Before that, Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, that was something. open war. Probably we'll all be wishing for Joe Biden if you all succeed at getting him to resign. BTW he's just one person, there's a limit to how much bullshit one person can absorb.#

Journalists don't give the orders. That's what's out of whack. #

I cancelled my NYT subscription. They can't hear their readers. It's time for a new journalism, and we're going to have to do it without them. I haven't cancelled my Washington Post subscription yet, but I'm pretty sure that's coming soon enough.#

You say you want Biden to step down. You've been heard. This is the President of the United States. If you don't respect the man at least respect the office. #

Congrats to Threads on a good first year. Looks like I signed in on opening day, July 5, 2023. They have done a good job of slipping into the spot previously occupied exclusively by Twitter.#

Threads gives you a virtual ticket stub for when you join, nice touch.#

Threads: "The reason people are finally talking about Project 2025 is because an actress used her platform to bring attention to it when the media failed to."#

This year I'm thinking how we can boot up a source of news that has the balance we deserve. Now that the Supreme Court is no longer keeping up any pretense of respecting the Constitution, and journalism is either colluding, or preparing for their meeting with a military tribunal in March next year, followed by, if lucky, a re-education camp, we need help knowing what's real and what's not. #

I hear that cancelling a NYT subscription is wicked hard. That alone makes me feel like cancelling. I cancelled their morning email of things I need to know about. It's one thing for them to exclusively report on Biden's age in their space, but my mailbox is mine. Get the F out of my mailbox. #

Gordon McLean asks: "If I was to move my blog away from WordPress, what platform is simplest?" #

I added a section to this site's About page re "Not secure."#

Truth be told one of the reasons I added it now was because I wanted a place to use the new easter egg Nakedjen recorded for me (and you).#

Olbermann calls on Biden to resign, making Harris the incumbent.#

Somehow, even though I watched an hour of news on MSNBC last night, and was on all the social media all day, I didn't hear about Pelosi's comments, or the leaked poll data, until this morning. It wasn't until I looked at the synopsis of Olbermann's podcast that I learned that something had changed. For whatever reason, even though I have made a significant investment in time to stay informed, it isn't working. Fact. #

If something like this happens and you haven't seen it in my linkblog, or on my blog's home page, please post a link to my Mastodon account. #

I added links to my two new podcast feeds to the About page on Scripting News. Screen shot.#

Listen to today's Countdown podcast. I was cheering out loud during the first segment. When you read this post, you'll see why. I tried listening to the NYT Daily podcast today, but it made me hate them all over again, starting with saying how great a week it has been for Trump. You can say that, imho, but you have to say right after that, that it was a terrible week for the rest of us. Because any good news for Trump is awful news for everyone else. And I do mean everyone, including the people who plan to vote for him again. #

Chief Justice John Roberts: “I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”#

They edited the Constitution the way board members of tech companies design software products, with no idea how it works.#

My favorite soft drink these days is Coke Cherry Zero. It's got a really nice taste. Went to the store today, they only had one 12-pack, but they also had a 12-pack of Coke Spiced Zero. I decided to give it a try. I had a can at lunch and it's weird but okay I guess, but the belches are strongly flavored and that's realllly weird. It took me a while to figure out where this belch-breath was coming from. It tastes like I took some very strong medicine. The weirdest soft drink I've ever had. But it kind of grows on you. I'll try another one and let you know how it goes. #

I post stuff to Facebook that could get inundated with hateful comments. I have a pretty good idea upfront which ones those are. I go ahead and post them. At the first sign of flameage I turn comments off, with a simple explanation. "I turned off comments here. I didn't want to have a discussion about this, it's just an observation." I think this is totally legit and more people should do it. Really frees you up to say what you see. #

BTW, this is what the new podcast feed looks like viewed in feeder. #

Every day now feels like another January 6.#

Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation#

A new version of Blogroll Browser. You can now go directly to the OPML version of a blogroll, and to the HTML page we discovered it in. I know all this must seem strange, hard to figure out what's going on. That's how I feel about it too. But I know there's interesting data here, how people are connected to people. I'm still trying to figure out how to make a browser that engages the mind in that. It can take a long time to figure these things out. I had the basic idea for a blog in 1994, but it wasn't until 1999 that we really had it figured out and implemented for non-techies. This may be like that, or the browser might be just around the corner. #

More Blogroll Browser features. Beginnings of a social graph.#

The buggy images of ChatGPT perfectly fit the blogger come as you are ethos. We called this Dogma 2000, the site is gone now, and it's even gone in archive.org. Sad to realize some of the simplest most worthwhile ideas are gone now. #

When talking to ChatGPT think of it as Commander Data on Star Trek, who, in an interesting turnabout is a robot played by a human. Oh the humanity. #

Another month in the archive. Time flies when you're having fun! #

Today's podcast, what we need from Biden, and how we need journalism to get out of the way. Biden has a base. He should communicate directly with us. Joe, tell us you saw what we saw. A snake oil salesman. A con man. A loser. A criminal. We heard the tape of him blackmailing the Secretary of State of Georgia. He wanted the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors. Did he sell our secrets to Putin and others? He did all kinds of horrible stuff that the press has forgotten to talk about. The biggest problem here isn't Biden's age, though it is a problem, it's the controlling nature of our journalism, and the lack of any oversight. They can't be criticized because all we have are our individual voices, with no organization. We keep paying the price. This podcast is in the form of a voicemail to an old friend, Jeff Jarvis, who I introduce at the beginning of the podcast. We share the same frustrations, I can see it in his posts on various social media networks. I'd like to elevate our discourse. And in the meantime, imho, it's a pretty good story. 10 minutes. 😄#

There's a new version of the Blogroll Browser this morning.#

Not sure if it ever came out why Trump stole the secret docs. Did he sell copies? If so, for how much and to whom. This would make an excellent news story. I imagine President Biden knows all about this, btw. #

This is how much of the activity on Threads, for me at least, comes from the fediverse. #

Challenging questions: Why don't journalists cover the Biden base? Do they even consider the possibility that there is one? Or do they think they are the base? I thought they weren't supposed to care who the nominees are? Why do they feel entitled to say one candidate should withdraw but not the other? Have any of them even thought this through? #

The debate got the presidential race to another level. It also caused the NYT et al to fully decloak. It was impossible to watch, but it was also honest. We all knew but pretended we didn't that Biden has the kind of trouble he has. We voted for him anyway in 2020, and we will again in 2024. And Trump, what he did was worse than lying, it's a con job, because as soon as he takes office he's going to surrender to Putin. And stop fighting climate change. And destroy what's left of our democracy. And open the concentration camps and make the Jews pay for it. Biden can be president, the news orgs have to decide to let him be and stop trying to control the rest of us. We can make this work. Not the Democrats or Republicans, the Americans.#

I just gave another $100 to Biden/Harris. We love Joe, come what may.#

This is my ideal for the size of a social network. I have actually had networks this size in the past. When it clicks, it's really great. #

A podcast about the debate. We needed one thing from Biden, to believe he's got this. It didn't happen. Okay what's next. #

Today's song: "Respect yourself, respect yourself, respect yourself."#

I don't want to write about last night's debate. But if I did, I'd say there's nothing to be done, we just have to let this play out. Even if Biden were to step aside, that would just open the convention and there are lots of Democrats who would see this as their opportunity to be the FDR or Lincoln of the 21st century. There would be no nominee until after the convention, maybe it wouldn't be so bad for the Democrats to have everyone's full attention for a few months. There will be lots of polls, that's for sure. In the meantime, I'm going to try to enjoy the summer, it's beautiful here in the mountains north of the city, and I have some software to finish. And of course I will vote for Democrats straight down the line in the coming election. #

I've started a FAQ for why we should vote for Biden in November. I would have liked to have been looking at this list last night at the debate, to remind myself that even if the President had trouble explaining it in words, there were still good reasons to vote for him. #

Podcast: The Fediverse is doomed unless subscription gets easy, fast. Twitter kicked butt when it came out in 2006 and the butt it kicked was the feediverse. Why? Because it was too damned hard and unnecessarily complicated to subscribe to a feed. In Twitter there was a button on each feed page that said Subscribe. Click the button and you're subscribed. That's it. May sound like a small matter, but it's not. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I've been dying to say that. 12 minutes. #

Summary of yesterday's news: You should now be able to subscribe to my podcasts. Use the search function in your favorite podcast client and look for Scripting News. This is what it looks like in Apple Podcasts, for example. #

Here's the new Scripting News podcast-only feed. #

And the FAQ for the feed, linked to in the feed.#

The Apple Podcasts page for the podcast feed.#

The page on feedland.com and feedland.org.#

Today's song: Bell Bottom Blues. "It's all wrong but it's all right."#

I want to be able to run Frontier on the new Macs, but was disappointed that VMware doesn’t work and had given up on the idea. But I just learned that UTM might work. Here’s the transcript of my inquiry. Wondering if anyone has had good experience using UTM to run older Mac software on Apple CPUs.#

Heard an interview show on NPR where they went to laundromats and asked people about the upcoming election. Big surprise they say pretty much exactly what they say on the news about the candidates, all of it bothsidesisms and no mention of the fascism coming our way if we go one direction. It's all everyone's fault, so why bother voting, is mostly what they say. SMH in disbelief.#

If you think you understand the significance of RSS, I bet you don't. Please listen to the 14-minute podcast I posted yesterday for the real story. We should learn from this and not repeat the same mistake, and of course until the real story is out, we can't learn from it. Let's get it right on the Wikipedia page. It isn't about Guha or Libby, me, or whoever. It's really about the power of Netscape and the early web news publishing companies that supported RSS, and the blogging systems that jumped on board (including my own products) and then two years later, the NYT coming on board, followed by the entire news industry. A bunch of nerds arguing on a mail list is not the story. With the benefit of well over twenty years hindsight this should, by now, be kind of obvious. #

Threads could make it a lot easier for us to cross-post to their system, esp since they say they will support ActivityPub. As it is there are too many hoops to jump through imho. I think basically they all want you to use their UI's which amounts to writing in tiny little textboxes of course. #

I'm going to start a new podcast-only feed, and this will be first episode. 14 minutes. It tells the story of RSS as a remarkable coming-together of tech, news, publishing and blogging. The first burst came from Netscape and four leading web pubs, Salon, Red Herring Wired and Motley Fool. As a leading blogger and developer of blogging tools, I jumped on board as soon as I heard of it, as did the people at Blogger. RSS was an instant standard with a great installed base, and retained its simplicity. You have no idea how remarkable that is. It grew like a weed. An installed base developed. There was confusion for a couple of years, between 2000 and 2002, about what RSS was, but the market stayed with the format specified by Netscape in 1999. Then in 2002, at UserLand we did a deal with the NY Times to get their news flowing through RSS, and in the next year, the entire news world supported RSS. That's the story. You can write all about who did what in a background story, but the big story, the miracle, mostly remains untold. What matters is an open format took root and retained its simplicity. And it pays to understand why it was not a strong enough foundation to be successful, first because the vendors didn't work with each other, and then because Twitter made subscription one click, where it was ridiculous how hard it was to subscribe to a feed in RSS. We should learn from this, and not repeat the same mistakes, and of course until the real story is out there, we can't learn from it. This is a 14-minute podcast. I cut off the last five minutes because I got lost in the weeds. All of this is documented in the archive of this blog and the sites it points to. And if there's interest I'll happily talk about it in a future podcast. #

I saw a Tesla truck parked in Woodstock yesterday. I wasn't prepared for how big it was. It's an impressive looking machine. #

There's a new star in the kittyverse, Wordle Kitty. I let her do my Wordle-play. Today, she was feeling a little under the weather so Wordle Kitty checked into the town urgent care center where they gave her some medicine which gave her the strength for a “splendid” performance at the days Wordle puzzle. So while she’s feeling a bit ill under it all is a feeling of splendor and the usual over the top cuteness! :-)#

Manton Reece: "I really dislike the Mastodon setting to require HTTP signatures for everything. It makes basic features like just grabbing some JSON for an actor more difficult. The user’s profile is on the public web anyway! We need apps that work natively with the web on its own terms, not more protocol layers."#

The best software does one thing well, that a lot of people want to do, that there is no other way to do. I've never seen this, but it's the ideal.#

There's a new kitten to keep track of -- Wordle Kitty. When I need to score a big win, I turn Wordle over to this kitten and she does a kickass job while remaining as cute as can be. #

Thanks for all the good advice via email and Mastodon re best way to record an interview podcast in 2024. I'm really getting into this. I'm definitely going to come up with a nice pure podcast feed for Scripting News. But first I have some new software to ship. 😄#

Bruce Schneier has a new blog moderation policy. Everyone should have one. #

Today's song: Take Me Back to Tulsa.#

Why did the Podcast 2.0 people reinvent rssCloud? That's the kind of bullshit Google does. We don't do that in the open formats and protocols world. What really pains me is they claim to follow my Rules for Standards-makers. Imho they do not. Two rules apply. Rule #1 says the only reason we do this is interop. It's called Rule #1 for a reason. And the one way rule a little further down the page. I've seen this happen twice where people say they abide by the RFSM but then do exactly the opposite of what it says to do. We have to do this better people. Come on. Also come up with something more humble than the name you've chosen. We've been down this path. The only way it ends is in tears. #

Now that I'm publishing a podcast feed designed to be read in commercial podcast clients, I'm learning for the first time how they work. For example, they seem to list shows not in the order they discovered them, as I do in my products, rather in order of pubDate. So when I set the dates on the shows from 2004 to their actual dates, that would have worked if I hadn't made a mistake in GMT-encoding the dates. Stupid programmer (me). Now they will show up first in the lists forever unless I switch to that form of dates. This so totally sucks. I wish there were something in RSS to say "Hey readers dump your cache now, let's start over, because I fcuked up." It wouldn't have mattered anyway, I'm sure none of them would listen, right? #

ChatGPT is the Ozempic of online info-finding. Neither is a panacea, there are side-effects, but both make possible great feats that weren't possible before, and both have come about just in the last year or two. #

Until recently I was always unsure of how to use CSS, been that way for many years. Then I started to use ChatGPT and could ask it how to do things, and I’ve gotten much closer to the designs I wanted, and I’m getting better at it with every project I do.#

I'd like to do a series of interview-style podcasts. I'm wondering if there are any services set up to make this easy. Or should we just use Zoom, and record the audio somehow?#

People of my generation (born 1955) are at the point in our lives when we would feel better if we got credit for our accomplishments, good intentions, the ways we made the world better, but it’s dawning on us that we didn’t make as much of a difference as we hoped to, and what little we did accomplish will largely go unrecognized. Even worse, none of it, even in the short term, made much of a difference. 😂Threads API reminds me wh#