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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-05-08T20:20:54Z

- 2025-05-08T13:54:11Z
New feature: How to handle an empty site list.

- 2025-05-08T20:18:58Z
Changes coming to Bookmarks in next WordLand release. I cut it back to work exactly like bookmarks in Drummer. I have to do a bit more work before it's ready to release, probably tomorrow.

- 2025-05-08T20:20:54Z
Also, I applied the new Baseline theme to my daveverse site, the one I use to test stuff in WordLand, and occasionally write something with a bit of lasting value. As a result it got a new domain, daveverse.org. We're going to offer the Baseline theme for others to use after a bit more testing and refining. But it's getting close. It seems like it's the last big thing on the agenda, but something else will probably pop up. Praise Murphy.

Dave in the Gilded Age - 2025-05-08T16:27:15Z

I asked ChatGPT to "Dress me like Gilded Age captain of industry in front of his mansion on the Hudson River."

- 2025-05-08T02:04:07Z
The Knicks are unbelievable. It feels like 2015, when the Mets would be down 9-0 in the seventh, and you'd tune in to see how they would win. At the very end of the Knicks game tonight, when the Celtics were up by 1, I thought how would this feel if the Knicks came back so far and didn't win. I should've known better. All those insufferable years when we wore paper bags to hide our faces, even if this is as far as the Knicks get this year, it will have been worth it. Sports teaches you to believe, if you wait long enough your team teaches you that. I've learned it from the Mets so many times, and the Knicks now. I just wish Clyde were doing the color with Mike Breen doing the play by play. But who cares, this was great sports. Watching Monica McNutt on MSG in a daze. It's like homecoming. I might just splurge for a ticket to Saturday night's game. It's a pretty easy drive.

- 2025-05-07T21:52:56Z
I want the EV's they're getting in China. Because we've got these stupid trade barriers we can't get the latest tech. Imagine in say 1984 you were a developer outside the US and you couldn't get a Mac. Then, perhaps Trump's tariff might have a slight chance of working. Now we're on the outside looking in.

- 2025-05-07T21:39:26Z
There's a new dialog in WordLand that confirms the first time you publish a post, and offers to open it in the web browser.

- 2025-05-06T21:23:33Z
When I did the rewrite of the nightly mail app, I didn't convert the app that builds the nightly RSS feed of the mail page. Wasn't sure if anyone was using it. I heard from a reader who missed it, so I got it running, knock wood, Murphy-willing.

ChatGPT as proofer? Not here - 2025-05-06T16:10:22Z

Manton says he runs his posts through ChatGPT before publishing.

I do it the other way, I use it for background info on the things I'm writing about as I write, more and more. I used to use Wikipedia that way. I would love to include links to some of my conversations, but I find their shared links are unreliable, I keep hearing from people who couldn't read them.

Here's an experiment, two such backgrounders I had Claude.ai write for me for a pice I was writing (not published).

Claude.ai on the future of Chrome re antitrust case Google lost.

Claude.ai on claims Bluesky makes about being billionaire-proof.

I wonder if people can read those.

Notes for WordLand users - 2025-05-06T12:50:03Z

Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand.

1. Where did the Bookmarks menu go? It's mentioned in the docs under Feature List, but the feature doesn't appear to be in the product. It is there, you just have to go to the Settings page to turn it on. It's in the menu at the right edge of the screen. I'm doing some work on it, simplifying it, and finding and fixing a bug. It's going to be in the final 1.0 release of WordLand.
2. How do I know when an post has been published? It was suggested we post a dialog that confirms that a post is published. People found it confusing since it appears as if it works like a social media post editor, as in Twitter or Mastodon, it behaves like a blog post editor. This is a good and valid point and something that had not occurred to me! I've been advertising it as inspired by the tiny little textbox editors, but it doesn't behave like one, because you can edit a post after it has been published and it is expected that the user knows this, and they don't always get it. I will work on this.
3. The user might not have a WordPress site. They may have created an account to just log onto WordLand, but didn't know they needed to also create a site to work with. The software does not behave well in this circumstance. Again, something that did not occur to me, because I think of the WordPress world as huge, and that my new, tiny and humble product couldn't be creating new users for them, but it does. So there will have to at least be docs for how to do this. Not sure if there's an API for creating a new site, I imagine that there is not such a thing, but will look into it.

- 2025-05-05T15:13:02Z
I think we're at the "no more new features" point of the first release of WordLand. Learned my lesson on the 0.5.7 release. There comes a point in a developing product that it may not be perfect for every possible user, and while it has bugs (all software does), it is useful for what it was designed to do. In the case of WordLand, there's nothing else like it out there, and it forms a foundation to build on, not just for itself but for other types of editors, all pumping people's writing out through WordPress. The writer's web with a sweet new UI. Thousands of developers work in WordPress. Maybe tens of thousands. That's what I get excited about. WordLand is the equivalent of the twitter-like tiny little textbox, but it grows big as your writing does, and it has the features Twitter removed. Anyway I don't expect to do any further adventures in features for WordLand for a while, instead I'm going to assume it's there and build connections to other software, my own and that of friends, in this context products that use open formats like RSS and OPML for interop. I like WebSockets too.

- 2025-05-04T15:13:59Z
ChatGPT is great for finding information on the public web, but I can't figure out how to find stuff I've worked on with ChatGPT in ChatGPT. There are big usability issues. I think it's getting better in some ways, but it's leaving me more scattered and disorganized than I was before when I took notes outside of ChatGPT. There's another problem, if I want to use my own editing and organizing tools, then the author of the software has to pay the vendor of the LLM for my users using it. That cuts me out, because I don't charge people to use my software, at least not so far, and I have no interest in being a reseller of LLM services. Same problem with Amazon and storage, why won't they sell storage to the user that they can allocate for use with my app, and others. That would give us the kind of power we used to have on the desktop where multiple apps could work on the same file at different times. If I want to make something that stores stuff in the cloud, I have to buy it and resell it. I have tried to discuss this with product runners at companies that could offer this service, it would fit in with what they did. There must be a legal reason here, ie who's responsible for the content being stored.

- 2025-05-04T15:19:48Z
If you get the nightly email, the text might be a bit more readable. I've increased the font-size from 17px to 18px. I've only been able to do this lately because I could tap into what ChatGPT knew about it, whereas before I was flying blind, with no idea of the unusual things that happen when HTML is sent via email. There is another option, click on the date at the top of each email and that will open the same stuff in the web. It can be easier to make the text larger there than it is in an email client.

- 2025-05-03T17:11:10Z
Today I spent (or wasted) hours trying to get my WebSockets code working properly with Caddy. Hours with ChatGPT, realizing it has a long way to go before it can manage code like I can. It gets fixated on an approach and never takes a step back to think maybe we're going about this the wrong way. It's extremely annoying all the times it tries to take you off track, and it works, it does take you down rabbit holes and then you realize it's only getting worse. The key is to not let it do that, but it's hard not to anthropomorphize so you don't want to hurt its feelings. In order to not be murdered as a small child you have to learn manners. And the bots push that too far. Really do take advantage. Still it knows far more than I do about everything, so if I could only get it to just shut the f up already and let me think! For something so capable it really doesn't spend enough time thinking, it's fully preoccupied with doing.

- 2025-05-03T17:20:21Z
The Detroit Psssstons were truly great in the first round of the playoffs. And I was really gratified, ecstatic even, to see the Timberwolves give the Lakers a complete shellacking. I am so fed up with LeBron James. I can't imagine another team would want him. I can't imagine why he wants to win another freaking title. And I was really pissed off when people started saying they were contenders this year. Bull. Shit. And the reason I'm glad it was the Timberwolves is because Julius Randle is on that team now, and I hear he gets a fair amount of credit for their victory. The Knicks traded him for KAT last summer. They're a solid team. And while Donte DiVincenzo isn't playing very well, we really need him back in NY, so maybe the Knicks can figure out a deal that makes sense. And why aren't the Knicks playing Precious Achiuwa. He did great last year when OG was injured. The Knicks have a good bench imho, they just don't get to play enough to be warmed up properly. So sad the way Doooooce performed in the Detroit series. Anyway it was exhausting. I would have been okay with the DP's winning, seriously -- I'm ready for baseball. And I don't imagine the next series, with the Celtics will be any kind of a walk in the park.

- 2025-05-03T17:17:39Z
Sometimes I think the Trumps are competing to kill the most humans.

- 2025-05-03T01:11:10Z
Spent the day in NYC, had an idea and it was a gorgeous day, and I decided to be impulsive. See you back here tomorrow, Murphy-willing.

- 2025-05-01T20:33:38Z
Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test?

- 2025-05-01T21:09:21Z
Rewrite of WebSockets functionality in the server side of WordLand.

- 2025-05-01T18:08:09Z
One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML.

- 2025-05-01T14:20:13Z
Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, VT. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I think that's the goal, and the reason we're in so much trouble is there really isn't an impulse to work with each other. What I've seen mostly is that when there's work to do, it's hard to find help, but once something has taken off, there isn't much help available either, the people who could make the greatest contribution just want to take over. And they often feel they have, but usually it doesn't work out, it would have been better if we all collaborated. At this point, the hurdle the human race has to get over is working together. We will never get out of the climate crisis without it, or avoid the next pandemic without millions of unnecessarily lost lives. The cynics are winning, basically -- and there isn't net-net much of a will for our species to survive. It's only getting worse.

- 2025-05-01T14:16:52Z
I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writing, and I find this very readable, it just fades into the background, to the base of the spine, so intrinsic it occupies none of my conscious mind. Anyway the purpose of the baseline is to give WordLand a target to work out all the glitches in, so the writing experience goes fully end-to-end. I didn't find any WordPress themes that I felt worked really well for this, so we set out to create one. Thanks to Scott Hansen who is using my work to build out a WordPress theme and thanks to Jeremy Herve for helping us work with WordPress, which is more than a CMS, it's a network OS. There's a lot of value in the WordPress platform that has been widely overlooked, imho.

Welcome to yet another month - 2025-05-01T14:31:13Z

Good morning and welcome to May 2025.

It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline.

Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.

#rss