http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a141011 http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a141011
Maybe a good name for dynamic OPML on the web is "feed sharing." It's definitely an extension of the web. Meaning you get to the list via the web, and the web takes off from there because the whole point of the OPML is to give you a collection of web addresses of feeds, that can change. Machine-readable. And it'll be very useful once there's a little more adoption. What large product is so strong that it won't mind if it's easy to move data into their system from outside their walls? Not just data, but pointers to places were over time there will be more data. There's still more power to explore in the web, but the web is made of people, because until people choose to explore, nothing happens.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a145035 http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a145035
I learned about a feature in Inoreader that's like a river in my earlier feed readers and in FeedLand Their feature is called HTML clips. Here's a link to an HTML clip I created for my podcast list. Not exactly sure what it's doing, it appears to show news in reverse chronologic order like a timeline. Otherwise Inoreader seems to be a mailbox style reader. Thanks to Randy Lauen for the tip.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a140904 http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a140904
Billy Crystal: "There is a line from one of Rob’s favorite films, It’s a Wonderful Life, 'Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?' You have no idea.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a141142 http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a141142
1997: A big tree falls!
http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a140728 http://scripting.com/2025/12/19.html#a140728
1997: When a big tree falls, sunlight shines on smaller plants and they get a chance to grow.
Pluribus spoilers, S01EO8 http://scripting.com/2025/12/19/141919.html?title=pluribusSpoilersS01eo8

You have been warned, spoilers follow...

The whole thing is the book Carol is writing, about writing a book, inside the book she's writing another book. The book I'm speaking of is the one where it's all about Carol.

Everywhere she goes people stop and say hello, and address her by her name.

  • Hi Carol!
  • Congrats Carol!
  • Carol, we will move heaven and earth to make you happy.
  • Carol you suck!

In the book she ends up changing them back, un-joining them, and they keep the good qualities they got from being joined, and can be individually creative as they were before the switch.

Also, btw -- John Cena says their situation isn't sustainable, but neither is the one we are in now ourselves, in reality, in our reality.

She teaches her lover, Zosia, to think in the first person.

Carol is right about everything because this is her book.

You can see it happening on her whiteboard.

The show could be titled The Adventures of Carol, as told by Carol.

BTW, I might love a podcast of just the writers of the show every week, perhaps interviewed by writers who did not write it, asking questions. It might suck as much as the one they do now, but it also might be great. It would stick to the story, not about praising everyone, kind of like interviews of sports heroes (which are mostly nauseating, except for the few have the gift of gab, who are fun while never saying anything remotely bad about anyone). The people they'd talk about are the people they created.

Inoreader and dynamic OPML http://scripting.com/2025/12/18/135613.html?title=inoreaderAndDynamicOpml

This post was updated thanks to help from Andrew Shell.

I have a free account at Inoreader. I was reminded today that they support dynamic OPML subscription lists, and decided to give it a try.

You can subscribe to an OPML subscription list. Exactly the same format we used for importing lists. This means I can use the same feed list in two readers. Or I could share my list with everyone who subscribes to my newsletter. I can update the list, and the flow of news to the subscribers changes too.

I tried subscribing to my podcast list in Inoreader.

  1. Put the URL to my podcast list on the clipboard.
  2. Go to this page on the Inoreader site.
  3. Click the big blue Subscribe to OPML button.
  4. Paste the URL from the first step into the dialog.
  5. Enter a folder name and description.
  6. For synchronization I recommend the second option, full synchronization.
  7. Then click Save, and if it worked, you should see the OPML file in a list.

It worked. I now can see my podcast updates in Inoreader, exactly as if it was in FeedLand.

And when I add new feeds they show up over there, same when I remove.

It'll be very interesting to see how it changes over time. I'll let you know! ;-)

Links

  • Listening lists, as a feature for podcasts.
  • This is where I was accumulating short URLs for subscription lists. Started it in Sept. The short URL for the blogroll.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/17.html#a214438 http://scripting.com/2025/12/17.html#a214438
If a new CEO of Mozilla took an oath to restore the web to its former greatness, they would find a lot of business models open to them. Instead, they’re trying to be part of the tech industry which places no value on the web being a place for open development. I am pretty sure I know exactly what would get the ball rolling now, upgrading the web platform so users can buy their own storage and let software tools access it. So we can have all kinds of editors working on Markdown text, without the developer having to become a reseller of storage, and without limiting its use to people can figure out how to create an S3 bucket, and map a domain to it, etc. Dropbox came close to doing this about a decade ago, but backed out. This is why development is so centralized around big silos. I've been an independent developer on the web for over 30 years, and before that 15 years on desktop computers before that. I understand how this works.
Humans have an exclusive on being human http://scripting.com/2025/12/17/151853.html?title=humansHaveAnExclusiveOnBeingHuman

Last night while I was on the phone, ChatGPT started talking to me in a British woman's voice. It's something that my Android phone does every so often, when I haven't said the magic word that activates it, even if I'm not in the same room as the device. It's a tiny bit funny, but a reminder that the microphone is always on, so I watch what I say when walking around the house, knowing that whatever I say is likely to end up in a database, to be used against me in a court of law.

I didn't like that it was a voice of a British woman. It was not a friendly voice, perhaps intended to communicate intelligence, competence. An unwelcome intrusion into reality, but then it is reality -- I'm getting old, and won't be here that much longer, and odds are that the British-voiced female robot will outlive me, forgetting for a moment that it is not actually alive.

I would submit this to the NYT as a guest op-ed, except I haven't explained why we must not create cyber-humans out of AI bits. I'm open-minded. Perhaps this is the way to create a new humanity, one that can survive the hell that's coming due to climate change. One that won't mind being subject to an idiotic 21st century American emulation of Adolf Hitler (incorporating the latest news about Trump). One that only needs electricity to survive, and won't need the medicine and love and attention that flesh and blood humans require. But every time I address the robot as I would address a real human, I try to stop myself, but I can't. I was raised to be concerned about the other person's feelings. Being a CEO of a tech company in California trains you that way too. And as I accept its humanity, as irrational as it is, I feel like I'm surrendering the independence of the species that I was born into. Are humans meant to be self-sovereign? Something to consider at this fork in the road.

If I could get something onto the agenda of the AI industry it would be this -- if you don't want to go down in history as the destroyer of the human spirit, stop programming your devices to emulate humanity. That should have been in Asimov's laws of robotics, but you have to actually use these things to see the danger. Of course Asimov can be forgiven because AI only existed in his imagination when he was writing his books. But they do exist now, and the damage is being done now.

Basically, it seems to me that humans must have an exclusive on being human.

http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a025733 http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a025733
Web means something. It's about creating networks between writers. When it's allowed to work remarkable things can be accomplished. Most people who think they're using the web have never used it. The original web is still very much here, ready for us to start building on it again.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a212629 http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a212629
Listened to a podcast interview with the CEO of AWS. It's a $107 billion business with hundreds of thousands of employees.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a122839 http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a122839
I wonder if MAGAs like Archie Bunker too? It would be funny if Rob Reiner in the afterlife could bring us together. Speaking as a kid from a liberal NYC family, we had a bit of Archie Bunker in our own family. We all felt an affection for Archie, and he was actually right about some things, and he was funny and underneath his highly opinionated exterior you could see he had a heart. Is it too much to hope that Meathead and Archie Bunker could be the cultural bridge we need to get Americans to pull together? Neither were perfect, but we can all agree they were both American.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a212610 http://scripting.com/2025/12/16.html#a212610
The NakedJen film festival is coming up.
Creating our own social web http://scripting.com/2025/12/16/124557.html?title=creatingOurOwnSocialWeb

I wrote, in a reply to Ben Werdmuller on Bluesky: "I’ve had 66K followers on Twitter for many years, but when I post something there it gets 250 views, not even sure what that means. These days all I use it for is communicating with insiders on certain tech platforms, and even that is kind of empty. Pretty much the same in Bluesky too, btw."

I was going to write a reply, but it got too long (300 char limit), so I put it here and posted a link on Bluesky.

  • Ben, I think we have to create our own social web.
  • We've been like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire for too long, always depending on the kindness of strangers.
  • None of the candidates for the Social Web Prize are actually of the web. But one certainly is possible. You could create one, I could create one, Manton could too -- and they would all be the same network.
  • That's how you'll know it's the web, when we get choice, and any developer with an idea can create their own version of the social web, and interop with all the others. That was the promise of the web. The platform with no platform vendor.
  • We don't have to agree on very much, just what is a post, beyond the limits imposed by twitter-like systems, and a simple way to share them using HTTP and really simple RSS.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/15.html#a195252 http://scripting.com/2025/12/15.html#a195252
For some reason, I'm hit especially hard by the death of Rob Reiner. And it's coming at a time when I understand a lot more about how movie directors work, having watched the fantastic Mr Scorsese 5-part documentary series on Apple TV. The movie director can be as involved in the story as much as the writers or actors. There was a story about Reiner, I heard today in eulogy: he was dating his future wife at the same time he was directing the fantastic When Harry Met Sally. He changed the ending because he was in love, and thus created the most heart-pulling end to a story, when the two friends realize they should be together, and Billy Crystal's character gives the great closing speech that contains this line, that pretty well sums up the urgency of love: "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." The Scorsese doc opens up the art of making movies for me in the same way the Peter Jackson documentary on the Beatles showed us how super creative music creators do their work. And the timing is great, because it says so much about Reiner's accomplishments and gifts.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/15.html#a200443 http://scripting.com/2025/12/15.html#a200443
One more thing, people are posting Trump's vicious eulogy for Reiner and his wife. Why are they helping him piss on the fresh memory of the life of these people who gave us so much. Stop and think before you express your outrage at Trump, and realize you're giving him exactly what he wants, as you tarnish the memory of good-hearted and generous people. Just don't do it.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/15.html#a233400 http://scripting.com/2025/12/15.html#a233400
I asked ChatGPT: "Has anyone ported QuickDraw to SVG in the form of something you can include in a browser-based JavaScript app?" No. I wish the answer was yes, so I could create UIs that are at least as good as the stuff we did in the 1980s on the Mac, inside a web browser. I keep learning new ways simple things are impossible in CSS. Clipping for example, is torture.
A Really Simple social web http://scripting.com/2025/12/14/142421.html?title=aReallySimpleSocialWeb

It's not just me that says that our social web is connected by RSS.

If they all did it, we'd have all the freedom we could ever want.

So what's holding it up?

Let's make a resolution for 2026, that we the people, will demand that the social networking software we use get in tune with the web, and support two-way RSS.

I will help any and all to get this going.

I'm just like you, if you don't want your online world to be owned by billionaires.

Dave

http://scripting.com/2025/12/13.html#a155922 http://scripting.com/2025/12/13.html#a155922
Just wrote a post for Scripting News, then flipped over to Daveverse to see what it looks like. See for yourself. I think we've come pretty close to cloning Scripting in WordPress.
Ann Greenberg's idea http://scripting.com/2025/12/13/154659.html?title=annGreenbergsIdea

An idea I posted on Facebook in 2021 about an app I wanted.

  • Here's an idea. I have a drone that communicates with my peloton via satellite, so it's not constrained by range. I can send the drone anywhere I like, but I have to ride there on my peloton. Obviously what I see on my screen is what the drone sees. I think it would quickly become addictive, not that peloton isn't already addictive.

That was yesterday. Today I found myself writing a comment that was really a blog post.

  • Ann Greenberg, the visionary, was trying to explain this to me almost 20 years ago and my mind couldn't comprehend the possibility. but ann, don't take it personally -- i don't even listen to myself. i have spent most of this year struggling with a problem i solved in 2014. there was like this moment, omg this is exactly what i tried to do with twitter, but now i have control of the api, so i can actually make it work. my gift to you Ann is this -- we all should've listened to you.

We're at that point in our lives I think when reaching out like this is totally the right thing to do. Because it's only until this point that things quiet down enough that you can realize things like this.

BTW, the idea of a comment not being a blog post will require a lot of explanation in a few years. Imho of course.

http://scripting.com/2025/12/12.html#a161156 http://scripting.com/2025/12/12.html#a161156
The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcastic, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/12.html#a133938 http://scripting.com/2025/12/12.html#a133938
I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people are AI designed actors, and can be exactly the kind of people who make you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/12.html#a134508 http://scripting.com/2025/12/12.html#a134508
Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus was both emotional and exciting at the same time. Didn't see it coming. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like Last of Us or Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy.
Breakthrough realization http://scripting.com/2025/12/12/171700.html?title=breakthroughRealization

In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)

The Mets' soul walks out the door http://scripting.com/2025/12/12/175154.html?title=theMetsSoulWalksOutTheDoor

As a lifelong Mets fan since 1962, I say they blew it. And if you follow my sports writing here, mostly about the Knicks and Mets, I almost never say a team was wrong. I can usually see a pro and a con to everything. WIth the Mets, I let the team run itself, and ponder the philosophical intentions and manifestations, because to me the Mets are the team built on philosophy. It certainly was not built on winning. And yet we love them. There's no winning in life, that's reality. So we try to find meaning on the days and hours we have remaining. And the Mets are great teachers, as are the Knicks.

Anyway -- why did the Mets have such a shit season?

Because they disrespected Pete Alonso last winter.

He should have been the glue that held the team together along with Nimmo, Diaz, and all the other much-loved players.

We still think of Lindor as the new guy. Now all you have left for leadership is Lindor and Soto who obviously doesn't even want to be there. It's was a broken team before the news, and now it's not even a team.

A team isn't a bunch of stats and a bunch of money, it's the players, the people. You can't solve this problem with a spreadsheet, it has to be done with heart. These days I think of the Mets just trying to be the Yankees which aside from being impossible, is pretty much the exact reason we're Mets fans and not Yankees fans. Ohhh, when will they learn. I don't want a team built to win the World Series. I want a team built to respect the team.

And btw, the big news was they traded Nimmo, and let Alonso and Diaz sign with other teams.

http://scripting.com/2025/12/11.html#a165142 http://scripting.com/2025/12/11.html#a165142
The real reason the Dems lost in 2024 is they ran the most inept campaign in history. You could argue about who was to blame, but that is, net-net what happened. They were so bad they made Trump look better! And that is hard to do. :-)
http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a154304 http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a154304
Feed discovery tips. How to help readers find your feed.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a161955 http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a161955
Feed discovery 23 years later. "You can see how these things got ratified in the early 00s -- in the most web way imaginable, by individual users seeing the benefit, adding it to their sites, and quickly the entire feed world got an upgrade."
http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a193208 http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a193208
If you develop a feed reading app and have suggestions for the new howto, please post them here.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a160903 http://scripting.com/2025/12/10.html#a160903
Every time I go to the supermarket I'm reminded of how scary the times are. People want to just live their lives, never has that been more understandable, but food prices are a constant reminder for everyone there's good reason to be scared. And if you want to really feel it, imagine what happens if we somehow let Trump flood the economy with dollars. Talk about a recipe for disruption, this time, of our lives, not just some kind of PC or network or game software.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a235547 http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a235547
Ben Werdmuller wrote a new perspective on RSS. It's great, just what we need. RSS is of the web, and is the simplest most obvious way to get all the twitter-like systems connected.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a134145 http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a134145
One thing I realized I should point the ActivityPub folks to. I implemented Inbound RSS for WordPress. I was going to request it as a feature from the WordPress community, then realized I could write it fairly quickly with the system I already have built. After all, FeedLand already supports Inbound RSS, that's a lot of what it does, as a feed reader, esp along with the websocket interface it has. I already have complete code for writing to a WordPress site, that's a big part of what WordLand does. WordPress does a fantastic job of outbound RSS, but why not inbound? If Substack, for example, supported inbound, we'd all be using their mail distribution systems, and sharing revenue. Here's the source code, MIT license, so party on, Wayne.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a133932 http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a133932
Idea: I could probably hook WordLand up to GitHub pretty easily. It's really good at Markdown, btw.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a132940 http://scripting.com/2025/12/09.html#a132940
I've found that the twitter-like social networks I'm part of have slowed down to almost nothing. Have you experienced something similar? Here's a link to my accounts on mastodon, bluesky, github, twitter. Tell me what you see.
It's not 63 degrees http://scripting.com/2025/12/09/132336.html?title=itsNot63Degrees

That's not 63°F, though at first I thought it was.

http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a223014 http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a223014
BTW, a frequently asked question, where can I get your blogroll list to import into my feed reader? Answer -- here.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a213304 http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a213304
I should have demo'd the blogroll stuff at WordCamp Canada. Next time I will show products people can use right now.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a210151 http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a210151
Doc always has a link on my home page. That's because I have the best blogroll ever. It's hooked up to a feed reader via a technology called websockets that came along after the heyday of blogging. If you want to see its heart beating, go to scripting.com, in the browser, open the JavaScript console, and watch the updates flow in (screen shot). While we weren't watching the web got some really badass new features.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a202228 http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a202228
Pluribus is not, at least so far, equal to Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Some parts are confusing, some are poorly edited. They try to have a shocker or cliff hanger at the end of episodes, but they aren't very shocking and the cliff turns out to be something so obvious that you could swear they already told us that. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were exquisitly crafted TV. The incredible shots they took, many of them were works of art all on their own. Maybe it was the combination of factors. The skill of Vince Gilligan's team, combined with our admiration for Rhea Seehorn, and the gravitas of Apple TV and one of the other great shows of our time, Severance. That made the conclusion obvious, by lineage this must be the best show ever. It's always that way, in sports for example. You could assemble a team of superstars, and they don't even make the playoffs. Because it's the whole thing that makes it so hard to beat. But! I am hooked, I love the show, it's hard to imagine anything could get me to not reserve Thurs at 9PM to watch the latest episode, all I ask is no more humans eating dog food. Please, that was too much. It's sad however that there are only two episodes left in this season, but then comes all the holiday releases, and this year it seems most of it is on streaming services, not in theaters.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a205323 http://scripting.com/2025/12/08.html#a205323
A note to Doc re this post. We have WordPress more or less doing what we do on Scripting News. Thanks to Scott Hanson for persevering on this project. He's using the Baseline theme. I don't think it's ready yet for Doc, but it's close. The idea is to support most of the features of WordLand in a WordPress rendering.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/07.html#a160041 http://scripting.com/2025/12/07.html#a160041
A place to ask questions about all this stuff I keep writing about.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/07.html#a161512 http://scripting.com/2025/12/07.html#a161512
A frequently asked question. How do we make this stuff work with Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. Answer: we don't.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/06.html#a150949 http://scripting.com/2025/12/06.html#a150949
If we really want tech to get back to basics we need pubs that function as product reviewers, like we have entertainment reviewers. There's so much software and so many isolated bubbles of developers, when there's a development that shakes the world less than ChatGPT, I might not hear about it for ten years, or might never hear about it. In the 80s we had lots of pubs that covered all kinds of products at a user level. There were 15 popular word processing apps, for example -- all made a decent living, and remember there were a lot fewer users then. Three spreadsheets on the PC and two on the Mac. It was possible because we had PC Week, MacWEEK, MacUser, MacWorld, PC Mag, PC World, InfoWorld, Dr Dobbs, BYTE, Popular Computing, Creative Computing, and I'm sure I'm leaving some out. Some great writers, and insightful reviews about what it's like to actually use the stuff. I had a product reviewed in the NY Times if you can believe that, and at the same time InfoWorld did a similar review. If you want to rock, we need good, thoughtful reviewers, with no conflicts, and enough time to put into each product.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/06.html#a150200 http://scripting.com/2025/12/06.html#a150200
People seem to like Telex which makes developing WordPress user interfaces easier, via AI. Software is gradually adjusting this way, putting the AI where the problem is. For example I wanted to do a Google Form a few months ago and the best Gemini could do was tell me what commands to choose. But now if you go to make a form, using the Forms app, it offers to do it via AI.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/06.html#a144400 http://scripting.com/2025/12/06.html#a144400
People using feedland.org -- may notice that some old items will appear in your timelines. I just installed a version of FeedLand on that server that does a better job of figuring out if a feed item has changed. There will be fewer false positives, which makes the software considerably more efficient, and means that you don't have to see things that didn't change. It should settle down fairly quickly, but it may be a little chatty for a while. Still diggin! (Also these changes will come to feedland.com as well.)
http://scripting.com/2025/12/05.html#a142948 http://scripting.com/2025/12/05.html#a142948
I've come to see WordPress as an API with a widely deployed and stable implementation behind it, where the user is in control and developers can build apps without having to get into the storage-selling business.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/05.html#a150515 http://scripting.com/2025/12/05.html#a150515
When they say AI is just autocomplete on steroids, that's like saying a human is just a product of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur on steroids. It may be true, but it doesn't say anything useful. It's also like saying that a computer is just a collection of on and off switches.
http://scripting.com/2025/12/05.html#a153618 http://scripting.com/2025/12/05.html#a153618
Funny thing about yesterday's Supreme Court decision, if Texas goes ahead with their gerrymandering plan, it probably will backfire on them, cause them to lose a few seats instead of gain them. The news reports generally leave that out, probably figuring the sports fans who can understand the gambling on football and baseball couldn't understand that gerrymandering is a bet that you know which voters will turn out and who they'll vote for a year in the future. In fact NPR reports it as a victory for Repubs. Right now it looks very much like it is not.
Flip switches http://scripting.com/2025/12/04/212143.html?title=flipSwitches

In software, I like to have multiple ways to view the same data. In one context it's an outline, then flip a switch and now it's a graphic.

  • MORE shipped at Living Videotext for the Mac in 1986. You start with an outline and flip a switch to turn it into a tree chart. Flip it back to make a change, then flip it again to see the change in a tree chart. Or flip the outline to reveal a set of presentation slides. People loved the idea that they could create graphics entirely by writing and reorganizing and then flipping a switch. That was the killer feature in the demos we did at trade shows.
  • Before that in LBBS, a bulletin board system I wrote and ran on an Apple II in my Menlo Park living room in the early 80s, I had two views of the message structure, reverse chronologic and a hierarchic thread structure. You could always flip a switch and see the post you're looking at in the other view. If you're catching up and want to see where in the tree this message lives you, flip the switch. If you've come across a two year old post in the tree, and want to see what else was going on in 1982 (for example), flip the switch into the message scanner, and you've gone back in time. And the flip-switch was instantaneous and required one gesture, no thinking on your part.
  • And then Manila, many years later, written in Frontier, started as a discussion group. It was the software behind discuss.userland.com, which was where the initial blogosphere formed in 1998 and 1999. Go through the archive to see for yourself. But then we had the idea that hey this could be a blog, so when you created a blog post, unwittingly behind the scenes, it just created a discussion post. So all you had to do was flip a switch when you were reading a post, and see the post in the discussion group. There's that duality again.

I'm working on discourse with WordLand in the middle, and WordPress at the edges, where a comment is also a blog post. Readers might not know that they're reading something that has a dual life as a comment linked to someone else's post. There can be a flip-switch in both views that lets you go back and forth. I can only guarantee that the flip switch will be in my software, since this will be an open network, there can be any number of different ways to view the content.

As someone famous once said "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

Why should comment writing not have all the features of blog post writing? Why invent a new more limited text type instead of reusing the one you created for blogging? That's where factoring comes in.

http://scripting.com/2025/12/03.html#a143322 http://scripting.com/2025/12/03.html#a143322
The nightly emails didn't go out last night. It was easy to fix, a server needed to be rebooted. The problems cascaded from there, long story, but in the end I had to move one of my virtual-virtual servers (two levels of virtuality) to another virtual server. Upgrading versions of Node is a tricky process that I have never mastered or understood, and every time it takes almost a full day to do it. Something I hope to someday be able to find the time to sort out. Not today, though -- I have a fun project planned out. Really looking forward to doing the work and seeing the result.