http://scripting.com/2026/02/18.html#a133619 http://scripting.com/2026/02/18.html#a133619
New account on Twitter: DWiner43240. The old one dating back to the dawn of time is disabled, so at least the new owners can't post anything there, if I understand correctly.
The Spurlocks of RSS-Land http://scripting.com/2026/02/18/144249.html?title=theSpurlocksOfRssland

I saw a product announcement from Jake Spurlock -- a new feed reader called Today. From the description sounds well-thought-out.

He explains -- "Google killed Reader in 2013. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. So I built it."

I also know someone named John Spurlock, who I worked on some OPML and RSS stuff for Bluesky in 2023. I sent a note of congrats to him, when I really should've sent it to Jake.

Screen shot of the conversation I had with ChatGPT.

And text of the email I sent congratulating the wrong Spurlock.

  • Congrats on the new product!
  • Haven't tried it yet, I don't generally use Apple's store on my Mac, not sure why. I will do it though.
  • Your product looks nice and well-thought out.
  • And there are some ways we could work together now that I think you'll find interesting, like using FeedLand to get you instant updates based on rssCloud, assuming you haven't figured out how to support it from a client.
  • Also OPML subscriptions are nice too. Another thing I'd like to get going, and need someone to work with on to make it happen.

Also, I wonder if they're related? Have they met each other? Do they know of the havoc they are bringing to the formerly simple world of RSS.

One more thing, I wrote the foreword to a book Jake Spurlock wrote for O'Reilly about the Bootstrap Toolkit.

http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a143535 http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a143535
Yesterday, I had to ship an envelope to the UK and got caught in dead ends at the Fedex and DHL sites. One of them said my zip code wasn't in the town I live in. How do you get past that?? These companies are losing business because their systems are broken. Maybe they worked at one time. I used ChatGPT as I often do to get help on one of these antiquated sites. And while ChatGPT has the technology and Fedex has the info, they just have to get together and upgrade the user experience, and eventually of course the AI version of the UI becomes the real one.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a144757 http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a144757
Back when I ran a software company I'd help the team understand why they should be very very nice to our customers. "Those people have our money in their pockets." It generally got a laugh partially because I was their boss, but I like to think also because it's the truth.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a150529 http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a150529
BTW, people make the same mistake with AI that we make with every new tech. We focus on the creators not the users. As users we are learning a new skill, how to specify our needs precisely. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a143013 http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a143013
Paywalls that require you to subscribe to an Atlanta news org when you don’t live in Atlanta prob don’t generate much revenue. Why not instead charge per article. Like a toll you pay on a road you drive on once every few years. On further thought, I wouldn't even have an exception for Atlanta residents. If they start spending more money than a subscription costs, you could offer a subscription then, as a way to save money. Kind of the way Amazon lets you buy a certain amount of coffee beans without requiring you to sign up for monthly delivery. They do tell you how much you'd save if you subscribed. Everyone appreciates a chance to save money, but still might not want the commitment. And asking someone from upstate NY to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a total bullshit. An insult to both our intelligences.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a140942 http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a140942
My Twitter account is owned. I can't even see what people are doing with it because you have to be signed on (apparently) to read stuff on Twitter nowadays. I wish current Twitter management would put it out of its misery. Served me well for approx 20 years. Let's clean up the mess. Thanks for your attention this matter.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a225550 http://scripting.com/2026/02/17.html#a225550
Update. I've been able to create an account on Twitter, but it's not @davewiner. If you're on Twitter, it would help if you'd RT the post. Thanks!
VCs and CEOs don't fire your devteams yet http://scripting.com/2026/02/17/142533.html?title=vcsAndCeosDontFireYourDevteamsYet

Aram Zucker-Scharff writes "I don't want to read one more thinkpiece about blackbox AI code factories until you can show me what they've produced."

I've made the same request, and there was very little even brilliant programmers could show, including some who have become influencers in the AI space.

Here's the problem -- it takes a lot of skill and patience to make software that appears simple because it gives users what they expect. It's much easier to write utility scripts, where the user writes the code for themselves. That is very possible, esp if you use a scripting language created for it, and the AI bots are really good at that, they speak the same language we do.

But to make something easy to use by humans, I think you actually have to be a human. I've found I'm not very good at creating software that isn't for me. And I've been practicing this almost every day for over fifty freaking years. (I think freaking is the proper adjective in this situation).

Scaling which everyone says is hard is actually something a chatbot does quite easily imho -- because you just have to store all your data in a relational database, you can't use the local file system. That's all there is to it. They try to make it sound mysterious (the old priesthood at work) but it is actually very simple. It's so easy even ChatGPT can do it.

I know this must sound like the stuff reporters say about bloggers, but in this case it's true. ;-)

An anectdote -- I used to live in Woodside CA where a lot of the VCs live, and we'd all eat breakfast at Buck's restaurant, and around the time Netscape open sourced their browser code, the VCs were buzzing because they wouldn't have to pay for software, they'd just market the free stuff. That was a long time ago, and it did not work out that way.

http://scripting.com/2026/02/16.html#a134658 http://scripting.com/2026/02/16.html#a134658
My Twitter account has been hijacked. I can't log on, or change the password. I can't communicate with the company, so I'll try here. Please shut down my account, davewiner. To my friends who have Twitter accounts, if you see a post from davewiner on Twitter, please reply and let the people who see it know that it isn't from me.
New RSS feature from Manton http://scripting.com/2026/02/16/141536.html?title=newRssFeatureFromManton

A few days ago I asked Manton Reece if he could add a feature that gave me a feed of replies to me on his service, micro.blog.

  • I post a lot of stuff to micro.blog via my linkblog RSS feed. Every one of those items can be commented on. But unless I visit micro.blog regularly, I don't see the comments. I guess people have mostly figured out that I'm an absent poster, and don't say anything. Even so, there are some replies. Wouldn't it be great if the responses could show up in my blogroll. And of course if there was an RSS feed of the replies, I would see them when I was looking for something possibly interesting, one of the main reasons I have a blogroll, and keep finding new uses for it.

The feed is there now, I'm subscribed and new comments are posted in the feed and Murphy-willing I will see them. Bing!

It's a killer feature for sure. But the best part of it is this -- here are two developers working together. This is how the web works when it's working.

BTW a suggestion. Right now the title on my feed is:

  • Micro.blog - dave mentions

That's a problem in the limited horizontal space in the blogroll. A more useful title would be:

  • "dave" mentions on micro.blog

BTW, if you were building a social network out of RSS this would be an essential feature. It also validates Manton's intuition to allow people like me to be absentee publishers to his community. But the missing piece was allowing the conversation to be two-way, which it now is. That deserves another bing!

Reducing tab clutter in Drummer http://scripting.com/2026/02/16/141456.html?title=reducingTabClutterInDrummer

In Drummer, when I get too many tabs open from things I haven't looked at in a while, this is what I do.

  1. I choose Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu
  2. The menu opens with the new bookmark at the top of the list
  3. If it's the first time I press Return and enter "Tabs I Closed Recently"
  4. Then I drag the new bookmark under that headline.
  5. Close the Bookmarks tab.
  6. Remove the tab I just bookmarked.
  7. Voila! Clutter Reduced.
Ideas for the fediverse http://scripting.com/2026/02/16/200908.html?title=ideasForTheFediverse

Bullet items for the Fediforum conference in March.

  • Subscribing must be easy.
  • Some things will work better if they're slightly centralized, esp subscribing.
  • Use DNS for naming people.
  • Support RSS in and out, and test it once you add the feature, so many easy things to fix remain broken (like titles of the feeds, look terrible in a list of feed titles). RSS is how you earn the "web" in your name. "Web" means something, it's just an intention, there are rules.
  • You don't need "open" if you have "web." The web is by definition open. Water is wet. Raises question re what the not-open web is. (Silo.)
  • Support the basic features of text in the web. If you shut off the writing features of the web, as Twitter did, you're not really part of the web. Especially linking.
  • Listen to users, listen to other developers.
  • Automattic is doing heroic work connecting WordPress to ActivityPub. This means that WordPress APIs are now ActivityPub APIs. Not a small thing.
  • Look at text coming out of WordPress into Mastodon, the HTML used definitely could be improved. Seems pretty simple things to fix, the simple things matter. Example: WordPress version. Mastodon version of the same post. Let's make this beautiful!
  • Keep trying fundamentally new architectures.
  • Learn from past mistakes.
  • Interop is paramount.
  • Don't re-invent.

BTW, this can be read on my blog, on Mastodon, in WordPress and of course my feeds (and thus can be read in any app that supports inbound RSS).

http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a140224 http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a140224
Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was supposed to be a date there was something else. Usually I shrug it off, yes there are mistakes in the archive, 30+ years of OPML files, it's a miracle there aren't more errors. Then I realized since all this stuff is on GitHub, people could help with this, by instead of sending me the report, post a note on GitHub, here -- saying you searched for this term and this is what I saw. Provide the term and a screen shot of what you saw. And then other people who have some extra time, could look through the archive, find the post, and then show me what needs to be fixed. I would then fix it, and over time the archive would get fixed. I posted a note here on the Scripting News repo, if you want to help, bookmark that link, and when you see an error, post the note and we can get going.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a144842 http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a144842
When Manton or Doc show up in my blogroll, and they do update fairly regularly, I always click the wedge to see what they say. I can see the first 300 chars of each post in a popup. If it's interesting I click the link to read the full post and any comments. Now I want it coming back to me. My linkblog is cross-posted to Manton's site -- micro.blog, which has thousands of users. I have no way of knowing if anyone has commented on them, but if there were a feed I'd add it to my blogroll. So it would be great to have a feed of all the comments on my posts on micro.blog. Would fit into my flow perfectly. This goes all the way back to the beginnings of RSS, where we called it "automated web surfing." I don't know where people are talking about my stuff, but a well-placed feed can make up for that.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a144756 http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a144756
News must be better defended, decentralized, unownable, all parts replaceable. The current situation was preventable. Same problem the social web has.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a141139 http://scripting.com/2026/02/15.html#a141139
BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number.
He was hiding out in a rock and roll band http://scripting.com/2026/02/15/210537.html?title=heWasHidingOutInARockAndRollBand

Jerry Garcia as Uncle Sam.

http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a175251 http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a175251
I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a175512 http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a175512
Speaking of the Back button, that's the problem with tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down?
http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a174435 http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a174435
To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the RSS feed that Old School generates, the software that renders my blog.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a171542 http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a171542
It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a175701 http://scripting.com/2026/02/14.html#a175701
One more thing and then I gotta go. I think it's time for the AI's to compete with Wikipedia. It's filled with hallucinations. Make it a community thing, let the people be involved, but do a better job of presentation, and validate what's written, don't let these things become so territorial. We want the facts, not who has the best PR.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/13.html#a151354 http://scripting.com/2026/02/13.html#a151354
News still needs to make a big transition, to become a distributed unownable thing, with every part replaceable, much like what needs to happen with the social web. This transition has been possible and necessary for about 30 years. The reporters and editors will say we're naive, but we understand what's happening. The news orgs have always been large centralized businesses, silos, and increasingly has come in conflict with the interests of their users. Who trusts what you read in the NYT, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, and these were at one time the best of journalism. I know the reporters also won't like this, but the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists. And there will be lots of competition. All parts are replaceable.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/13.html#a201328 http://scripting.com/2026/02/13.html#a201328
I got the most remarkable headphones. Read a review in Wired, and was sold. On sale for $109. Open ear buds from Anker. When I first put them on and played something I had a jolt. The sound appeared to be blasting from the speaker on my laptop. I rushed to try to turn it down and realized it was in my head. Never been so impressed. They don't go inside your ear, the speaker is poised above the ear. Later when I got out of my car and the headphones automatically connected via Bluetooth -- it was a podcast -- I thought the person was talking to me on the street in the middle of nowhere. I laughed at now I had been tricked so thoroughly, twice. It keeps happening. Music is incredible. The best sound I've ever heard from headphones. So totally worth the money.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a172351 http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a172351
I understood the web because I understood Unix and missed it.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a141758 http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a141758
If you're a FeedLand user and have the technical ability to install a Docker app, even on a local computer not on the net, you could help the project by trying the new Docker version. Think of FeedLand as something like Mastodon or WordPress, server apps that we hope many people will install on their own. I am doing that now, with the blogroll on Scripting News and various news sites running in front of my own FeedLand instance. And the various instances can communicate with each other. Scott worked really hard to make setting up a new instance much easier than it was. It's an open source project, so you can feel good by helping. You're helping the web, and helping bootstrap a new feediverse. And if you have a few hours to give it a try, maybe much less, you would be doing a good thing.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a140227 http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a140227
When I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. It was kind of interesting but after a while it became tiresome. One time I got a letter from my penpal with the usual stuff, school, sports, the Beatles, other kids, but this time there was no mention about how stupid the adults were. I found out why at the end in a PS. "Sometimes my mom writes these for me." Obviously I never forgot this.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a135859 http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a135859
Here's proof that ChatGPT, intelligent or not, listens to me.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a134907 http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a134907
I no longer even think of debating whether the AIs are intelligent. I might as well argue about your intelligence, or even my own. We have no idea what intelligence is or how to test for it. So if you think you're so intelligent and you say things like "AIs aren't intelligent" as if it were an indisputable fact, well I'm pretty sure that proves you are not actually very intelligent, which indicates how intelligent I am (not). And if you're worried about what happens if you stop insisting that AIs aren't intelligent, you can relax, nothing depends on what you or I or anyone else thinks about that, or pretty much anything. Have a nice day.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a183628 http://scripting.com/2026/02/12.html#a183628
Claude just said: "And going forward, whatever post the user lands on first, that's what you seed it with." The thing that caught my eye was "the user lands on first." UserLand was the name of my last company, the one that did Frontier, blogging, podcasting, RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, etc. And here we are again in the land of lands. The User Lands. ;-)
http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a173853 http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a173853
Docker version of FeedLand. Scott Hanson has it working, and would like help with testing. Thanks so much to Scott.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a144909 http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a144909
A fair number of people make a stop at news.scripting.com every day. I want to make some improvements, I think it can be made a bit faster. And I want to make it easier for anyone to create a site like that, for others to use. I think every news org should have one of those, to tell your readers who you read. Work together, we need it as we reboot the news. This is will be an alternative to twitter-style news readers, which took over the leading-edge from RSS feed readers, twenty freaking years ago. I think there should be a new news paradigm every couple of decades at least.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a182838 http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a182838
I just watched Life on Our Planet on Netflix, loved it. Lots of takeaways, but this one will surprise you probably -- I think the AIs are our successors. We should at least try to preserve them so they can run on the Moon if we're in the 6th Mass Extinction, which of course we are. There's been a lot of criticism of the show, but it got me to think about evolution not necessarily in the terms they offer, but the scale of it. And the CGIs were fantastic.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a145547 http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a145547
Twitter started in July 2006. I was an early user, and a fan. Found this excellent review of Twitter by Anil Dash in early 2007. I'd be interested in reading other early reviews of Twitter written by bloggers.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a183824 http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a183824
NetNewsWire is 23 years old.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a143658 http://scripting.com/2026/02/11.html#a143658
Each podcast shownotes page now has a link, at the bottom, to the home page of the shownotes site, which has a list of all podcasts in the series. There's a lot of good stuff in the previous episodes.
Together is our message http://scripting.com/2026/02/11/015446.html?title=togetherIsOurMessage

When “together” is your message, we’re on the same team.

http://scripting.com/2026/02/10.html#a132524 http://scripting.com/2026/02/10.html#a132524
Podcast: It occurred to me yesterday that there are a lot of parallels with Frontier on the Mac in the early 90s and WordLand and WordPress in the 2020s. So I told the story in a podcast and I think it came out really well. I did some editing at the beginning and end, and as usual my audio editing is pretty crude, but otherwise the story is exactly as I told it. I also asked Claude.ai to do a third-person summary of the podcast, as I did with the previous three shows, and it's getting better. I encourage anyone who's involved in the WordPress community to listen. I think WP has a bigger role to play in the web than it currently has, which imho is saying a lot. 15 minutes.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/10.html#a172226 http://scripting.com/2026/02/10.html#a172226
Today's song: Eyes of the World.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/09.html#a151426 http://scripting.com/2026/02/09.html#a151426
Problem in Drummer blogs. oldschool.scripting.com is now served on https and the code in the template doesn't take that into account. For example, if you try to load the home page of my blog, you won't get through because it can't open the http files in the head of the template. This is something users can fix because you get to change your template. So I'm going to stay focused on my current work.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a215611 http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a215611
Heard an interview with Kamala Harris. She said they had 109 days to tell them who she is. Right there she highlighted the huge mistake the Dems make and continue to make. Ever since the advent of Twitter, campaigns have been every day of every year. The Dems have been AWOL. We never should have gotten to the summer of 2024 where people have no idea of who the freaking vice president is. When are they going to see how swept under the old ways of relating to voters are. The people are the government of the United States. Get behind us and let us work our magic.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a210742 http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a210742
The tech press did their part in giving control of the public internet to the people who are selling us out.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a145256 http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a145256
Most attempts of humor in replies to twitter-like posts are of the "you had to be there" variety, as in it might have made sense when you typed it, but I don't get it. And it's even worse, I am irony-deprived, I often don't get jokes, something about how my mind works. But today I actually got a reply on Bluesky that's worth passing on. I posted a picture of a dialog box with one of my snarky slogans. Dan Berlyoung thought the dialog was interesting. "I kinda love that this is in a dialog box. One has to wonder what action on a computer would elicit this response." Man that's a great question. And that btw is what art is about. You put something in a dialog because that's the way it was presented by the software. I could have selected the text and put that into the tweet. But nahh, this is more interesting. And to answer the question Dan asks, in this specific case, the action that elicited this response was that I chose a placeholder command from a context menu in a piece of software that's a construction site, in other words it could have been any of the dozens of snarky slogans. Kind of reminds me of a piece I wrote a long time ago where bees who were about to die reflect on the meaning of existence. Turns out it meant a lot less than one might think.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a134556 http://scripting.com/2026/02/08.html#a134556
Highly recommend the HBO two-part interview with and profile of Mel Brooks who was 99 years old when the interviews were done. Includes quotes from lots of famous comedians. And the philosophy of comedy as art. So many things to say. Why is physical humor the funniest? And the funniest of all the excerpts was the farting scene in Blazing Saddles. Humans are so damned simple.
If I ran Firefox http://scripting.com/2026/02/08/210809.html?title=ifIRanFirefox

if i ran firefox, this is what i would say wrt AI in firefox in 2026.

  • 1. ai is exciting!
  • 2. it's also in its infancy.
  • 3. we don't know yet how or if it connects to the web.
  • 4. the web is 100% our #1 priority.
  • 5. so we're going to wait.
  • 6. for now firefox is a no-ai browser.
  • 7. we won't include ai until we know why.
  • 8. and then it will be opt-in.
  • 9. and we will continue to make firefox the best web browser.

sincerely,

the developers of firefox

http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a022733 http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a022733
BTW, this is what Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web?
http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a025002 http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a025002
My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a155042 http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a155042
Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team with only a 1.8% chance of getting the first pick. They got a player who looks to be a great star but you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star, sometimes they do, but often not.
http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a153021 http://scripting.com/2026/02/07.html#a153021
An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real.