Think different about WordPress, cont'd http://scripting.com/2026/01/16/150009.html?title=thinkDifferentAboutWordpressContd

Yesterday I wrote a this.how doc about getting WordLand to run on sites that don't run on WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed. What this means is that their sites are accessible through the fantastic wpcom API, and with that API I have been able to build a very nice writers' workspace for WordPress sites. I call the ones that are left out the WordPress.org sites, though I know that's not an entirely accurate way of describing it, but neither is "self-hosted sites" because you could have a hosting service that doesn't install Jetpack. WordPress could be used for things that are quite different from the way it's used today. Important point.

I sent links to that post to two people, and encouraged them to pass it along, as a way of starting a discussion -- how are we going to get WordLand running on those "other" sites. And we need names for lots of things, but first we have to get the software working the way we want it to, then the naming will be more obvious.

Jeremy Herve has already written a response (as I asked him to). As always, very helpful. But I want to push back on the way he frames this project -- as if it's up to me to do this work, and that I dispute. It think it's up to us. There is a big powerful and friendly community even though as we know there are some disagreements, and even a fork. But that's okay. The way I can frame the question now, I think it will become apparent that WordLand isn't just a product, it also frames a question, and in the conversation I had with Jonanthan Desrosiers on Tuesday I broke through, and pretty sure he understands the challenge. To make WordPress a fantastic platform for developers who want to build on its ability to write and read and link together the writing and reading on the freaking web. That's why it's so important to understand what the web is and what it's capabilities are. We've been missing some of the big stuff since the big silos took over. I want, before I hang up my shoes, to fix that.

I'm going to outline here how we start, so it's documented so more people will see it too.

  • I have written a package, MIT-licensed, with an awkward name for historic reasons called wpIdentity. It started off as just a simple way to use WordPress identity with FeedLand because it made sense to do it a couple of years ago because Twitter was destroying the utility of their API, and we needed a new way to do identity. So I stopped everything and implemented both email identity and WordPress identity, or more specifically, wordpress.com identity. This leaves out all the wordpress sites that you can't log onto this way. Not a good situation, I don't like it because I want WordPress to be one large happy family of users and developers. So that's what I'm seeking to instigate here.
  • Then wpIdentity grew and grew. At first it supported all the endpoints in the wpcom API, and made it possible to build WordLand, which itself only communicates to WordPress via wpIdentity. And later when I needed user-specific storage that is not part of the WordPress API, I built a very nice little storage system, it's efficient, highly scalable, and (I think) well debugged. If you read my initial Think Different piece you'll see it gets a mention in this part. Storage, we will find out, is the big missing piece in the web, has always been the missing piece, the thing that keeps us from having a real developer community of web apps. How do I know? Because I'm a freaking developer. I don't work at a company that can insulate me from this need. That's why I see this need and so many others don't.
  • Now here's something else that's cool. I didn't stop with wpIdentity, I made a JavaScript function that simplifies the wpcom interface for people writing browser-based JavaScript apps. It radically simplifies it. I didn't invent this way of doing it, someone at Facebook did, as far as I'm concerned. We may not like Facebook the company or the boss man, but they have employed some brilliant programmers over the years. I think this idea came from the developers of FriendFeed, but I could be wrong. What they did was take the interface code every app developer has to do, and made that the API. I remember when I first saw it in 2013, it blew me away. It took me a full month to build support for Twitter in my app, but it only two days to do it in Facebook. I did one of those for WordPress. It's part of wpIdentity. Here it is. Please if you're a contributor to wordpress.org -- study that thing, because we're going to be working on that code -- together. This is where the "we" part of it starts. But there's more.
  • You don't have to read the code of api2.js to understand how it works, there's an even easier way to do it -- wpEditorDemo. It's a simple browser-based editor that does what WordLand does, without all the flourish. Bare bones. Also MIT-licensed. Nothing but what's required. You can try it out if you have one or more qualifying sites (either on wordpress.com or having Jetpack installed). The project we need to do is this -- make wpEditDemo work on any WordPress site, no matter where it's hosted. And that's going to be done by extending api2.js. That's where the differences will be encapsulated, and above that level, in wpEditDemo and WordLand and all its competitors, nothing changes. This project may be complicated or simple, or somewhere inbetween, but imho this has to be done. And this is the first place I want to join the open source community for WordPress. After talking with Jon, I became optimistic about this happening sooner than later.
  • I zoomed through all this and more with Jonathan on Tuesday. This is what I want to talk about at WordCamp Europe later this year (I have submitted an application). I wanted to show Jon and a few other people I met in Ottawa in October how the pieces fit together. But zooming is the right word, Jon was ahead of me at every step, he just understood what I was showing him. I was blown away -- because this had never happened before with the architecture I had built. Not because it's so complex, it isn't -- it's all about simplifying things, with lots of factoring, finding a repeating pattern and then locking it down in code, so no one has to ever worry about the complexity again. I think it was hard for people to see because they aren't expecting it.

That's where I'm going to leave it for now. I suggest if you have a response or comment, please put it on your blog and send me a link. We're going to create new ways to link blog posts together, but for now we'll do it by hand.

PS: Hat-tip to Matt Mullenweg for building WordPress, and for having the idea that Tumblr could be rebuilt on top of WordPress. When he announced they were going to do that I knew I was on the right track. We were thinking about WordPress the same way.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/15.html#a135543 http://scripting.com/2026/01/15.html#a135543
I've been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS. Jake worked at UserLand, but never at the kernel level, which is exactly where he and his (virtual) AI buddies are working. He knew Frontier well, he was a developer at MacWorld, where they used it as the CMS to manage their website. Then he came to work at UserLand where he worked on the CMS itself, and over time became a full contributor to the work we were doing in RSS, XML-RPC, feed reading and podcasting. He's a musician too and the nicest guy to work with. He just got the REPL for Frontier running. I'm so proud of his accomplishments, and totally looking forward using the new Frontier for server programming, which is all Linux for me these days. And I also look forward to having Manila and Radio UserLand running on modern hardware, esp so I can demo these apps for my friends in the WordPress community. There's a lot of stuff happening here these days, glad to say I'm working with some incredible people and totally excited about what comes next.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/14.html#a224616 http://scripting.com/2026/01/14.html#a224616
Demo: rssCloud makes feeds as fast as the internet.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/14.html#a152809 http://scripting.com/2026/01/14.html#a152809
It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- it doesn't have one. The web was like the Declaration of Independence, but like a democracy it takes care and a bit of sacrifice to keep it going. It's always been possible to rebuild the web, to take back our freedom to create new webs out of the web that TBL discovered. It just takes determination and dedication to working together, a higher cause than piling up billions of dollars that the billionaires have absolutely no idea what to do with. I think the world order based on democracy depends on us digging out of the hole we're in, in the technology. Think about it.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/14.html#a145618 http://scripting.com/2026/01/14.html#a145618
BTW, I haven't posted a screen shot of where I write Scripting News in quite some time. Nothing has changed, but a whole other writing enviroment, targeted at WordPress instead of Old School, and it has a different feature set, look and feel.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/13.html#a224042 http://scripting.com/2026/01/13.html#a224042
I had a fantastic meeting today with Jonathan Desrosiers. I gave him a tour of all the software that makes up WordLand and FeedLand. It was the first time I had done that with anyone from the WordPress community. It started off with a simple story about how I knew I was on the right track when Matt announced they were porting Tumblr to run on top of WordPress as an OS. Which is exactly what I'm doing with my collection of software. Every bit of writing should be a WordPress post, and they should be linked together in arbitrary graphs. It was nice to review that with a serious developer, Jonathan is one of the core committers of the open source WordPress. It helped me see all the different things we can do, and now hope we will do. I feel I understand this community, as a time-traveler from the past I think I understand what we should do next.
Nothing's gonna bring them back http://scripting.com/2026/01/12/145655.html?title=nothingsGonnaBringThemBack

Today's song: He's Gone.

We've barely had a chance to process the passing of Bob Weir, but now I realize that for the core of the Grateful Dead are now gone too.

So I chose a song of the day that, to me, says goodbye to Ron McKernen, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Robert Hunter and now Bob Weir. The heart of the heart of gold band.

They were more than great live performers, culture hackers, they also represented a philosophy that's remarkably versatile. It applies to software and the web as well as the Dead lifestyle. Look for ways that entertain yourself and share it freely with everyone, see what happens. Kick back and let nature take it's course. We'll write and perform songs, and sooner than later, we'll be gone. But they told us not to mourn them, as they chose the name of their band.

There may be more to write, there certainly was in the days after Jerry's passing. But for now we'll just keep on truckin.

Only steal from the best http://scripting.com/2026/01/12/201606.html?title=onlyStealFromTheBest

I'm working on a feature for WordLand II where you can flip a switch to see the OG Metadata for a post you're reading, by clicking on an icon that looks like the flag on the side of an old fashioned mailbox. I remembered there was a desk accessory on the original Mac that used this approach, and I've wanted that icon for a long time, and today I thought to ask ChatGPT to look into it for me, I had previously been relying on Google search, and it found what I was looking for and a lot of great history sites with details. I'm going to document the thread including some descriptions written by ChatGPT which I will label. Everything not labled like that is from me. ;-)

This was the first question I asked.

  • There was an alarm desk accessory on the original Macintosh in 1984. It had a nice mailbox flag affordance. When the flag is up, the contents of the DA are hidden, flip it down to reveal what was hidden. Can you find me a writeup of this or screen shot. It might have been a different desk accessory or a different year.

ChatGPT's response

  • What you’re remembering is almost certainly the Alarm Clock desk accessory from the early Mac System Software (System 1 era and later). A small “lever/flag” control would toggle the window between a compact view (just time) and an expanded view that revealed the date/time/alarm-setting controls—very much like a mailbox-flag affordance.

Screen shot

  • The flag icon is on second box in the second row.

Links (via ChatGPT)

  • Washington Apple Pi Journal (April 1984) describes the Alarm Clock DA and explicitly calls out the “lever” that opens the “Change” portion of the window (“Pointing to the lever and clicking…” reveals additional areas).
  • Huntsville Macintosh Users Group handbook glossary defines the “lever” as the little arm in the Alarm Clock DA that, when clicked, makes additional panels appear for setting time/date/alarm.
  • Low End Mac has a System 1 desk accessories writeup (including Alarm Clock) and includes a screenshot of the DA.
  • Link to the archive of the full conversation I had with ChatGPT.

Then we had a conversation about the history, which I asked ChatGPT for a two-paragraph summary, below.

  • Susan Kare’s work on the original Macintosh wasn’t just visually elegant, it was foundational: she showed that icons could be humane, legible, and generous to the user. The mailbox-flag affordance in the Alarm Desk Accessory is a perfect example—simple, memorable, and instantly understandable, yet rich with meaning. It wasn’t decorative; it taught the interface how to communicate. That clarity came from Kare’s rare combination of artistic intuition and respect for the people using the machine. Just as important was her personal generosity: again and again, she contributed work freely, trusting that good ideas grow stronger when shared. Many of us benefited directly from that spirit, receiving world-class design not as a transaction, but as a gift.
  • Carrying these designs forward—faithfully, with credit—is one way creativity survives across generations. Reusing an icon like the mailbox flag isn’t nostalgia; it’s continuity. It acknowledges that great interface ideas don’t expire, and that today’s software is part of a long conversation rather than a clean break from the past. By preserving the pixel logic, the affordance, and the attribution to Susan Kare, we honor both the craft and the culture that produced it. That’s how design knowledge persists: not by constant reinvention, but by respectful reuse, gratitude, and the quiet understanding that we’re building on work someone once chose to share.

PS: I inititally wrote this up as a thread on Facebook where a lot of us oldtime Mac people still congregate.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a024044 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a024044
Textcasting: Applying the philosophy of podcasting to text.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a023704 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a023704
If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other. Comment here.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a024146 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a024146
BTW, look at all the links in my writing. Shouldn't every platform that says they're part of the web let users add links to their writing? Of course they should.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a144323 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a144323
If you run a FeedLand instance, we have a new recommended index for your database. It's also part of all new installs. The code will still work without the index, but it might make it a lot faster.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a025705 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a025705
I just posted something new on Scripting News, and thought -- that should appear on the new WordLand I'm working on, even though it's not a WordPress site. It did appear. Screen shot. The beauty of RSS. It's supported everywhere, so we might as well depend on that.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a031117 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a031117
I had to do some work with Concord today, the open source JavaScript outliner Kyle Shank wrote for me in 2013. I used ChatGPT to help. It knew all about Concord. Amazing. If only through ChatGPT etc, my work will survive. That means a lot to me. I take the opposite view that some artists take. I like that it's learning about what we did with our lives. Bob Weir died yesterday. That didn't go unnoticed here.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a024817 http://scripting.com/2026/01/11.html#a024817
I wonder sometimes if we’re the last generation of humanoids on this planet for a variety of reasons. The future imagined by The Matrix is looking more likely than ever.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a004610 http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a004610
Bob Weir is gone.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a005000 http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a005000
Today's song: Playing in the Band.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a004523 http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a004523
What’s happening with ICE is like January 6 four years later with billions of dollars behind it and many months of planning and studying history for prior art.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a010006 http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a010006
As I listened to the mayor of Minneapolis speak I thought he was going say "get the fuck out of Minneapolis" but of course he couldn't say that and then he said it.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a180300 http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a180300
I'm doing little demos of stuff I'm working on in WordLand, here's a narrated demo that shows how instant updates are going. As often the recording level is too low, so turn up the volume if you want to hear the comments. A productive Saturday session.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a214455 http://scripting.com/2026/01/10.html#a214455
John Johnston, a longtime friend of UserLand and my newer products, asks how WordLand connects with FeedLand. Two ways. 1. FeedLand has an API, still working on it, but it will be public. 2. FeedLand has an outbound websockets interface, which is already public, so any can use it as their feed reader, and get notice of new items and updates to existing items as soon as FeedLand has the info. And if the site uses rssCloud, as WordPress does and has since 2009, the notices are instantaneous. So to the extent people thought RSS is a slow protocol, it's not. It runs at the speed of the internet. And FeedLand is all about RSS, as you know.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/09.html#a141626 http://scripting.com/2026/01/09.html#a141626
I get ideas when I go for a walk or drive somewhere in my car. This was one of those times, but it was not a comforting idea. I live in the mountains on the west side of the Hudson River near Kingston. On my drive to town yesterday I went through the small town of Woodstock, and I was thinking about how ICE is occupying Minneapolis, and wondered why wasn't I more concerned about it personally. The answer -- it's far away from here, and Woodstock, while it is a famous place, is on absolutely no one's radar. But then I remembered the astounding amount of money we allocated for ICE, far more than could be used for border enforcement, so obviously this all is a prelude for an American secret police and here's where the disquieting idea came up. Of course ICE will operate in every city and town in the US no matter how remote or small. But first they have to perfect their act, this is a form of training to teach the skinheads of America how to be part of an SS. Experiment first in a few cities before deploying, gradually, everywhere. We're all going to have to submit to loyalty oaths, and we will all be forced to denounce our neighbors as illustrated in Lives of Others, which if you haven't watched it yet, now is the time when you have to, to get an idea what it was like in East Germany before the wall came down, and where we're headed. It still may not be too late yet, but it's getting close.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/09.html#a163009 http://scripting.com/2026/01/09.html#a163009
Trump is president the same way people who do vibe coding are developers. I always thought he'd be much happier playing president on TV instead of actually being president. And people would think about this stuff more rationally if it were a TV show like Pluribus or Severance. Why did they really do what they did? Or the way we talk about the Mets or the Knicks and their various foibles. It's funny people have a clarity about fictional stuff that they don't have for real-world things like war, health insurance, the cost of eggs and gestapo tactics.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/09.html#a150206 http://scripting.com/2026/01/09.html#a150206
A little fix that would make social web a lot more useful and less hate-filled and abusive... Make replies visible only to the person being replied to. If they feel the reply should be public, they can RT it.
Was the ICE murder pre-calculated? http://scripting.com/2026/01/08/155252.html?title=wasTheIceMurderPrecalculated

When there's breaking news these days I check Fox News in addition to CNN, MSNOW, BBC, PBS. The best are the last two. But last night night when everyone was fixated on the story of Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was killed in cold blood, on video, by a masked ICE thug, I wondered what Fox was saying. They were showing the actual video over and over like the other networks. Their words were what Trump was saying, but they didn't hide what actually happened, at least as long as it's news.

Then I wondered how much this was pre-calculated. It clearly doesn't hurt ICE to signal that they're killing US citizens in the US with impunity. Next time will be soon, and it will be more than one dead, and maybe they'll be kids. What makes me think this was not planned by the higher-ups is that they killed a middle-aged white woman, mother of 3,, who writes poetry. Not a very likely cartel leader or narco-terrorist. There were dolls in the glove compartment of the car.

Every indication is that she was just afraid and trying to get out of there as quickly as possible.

We also remember that in the aftermath of Jan 6, private texts from the top people at Fox indicated they were scared and appalled like most other relatively sane Americans. What had happened then was unthinkable. Well, what happened yesterday was just as unthinkable. Shocking. Makes you wonder what's next. Get ready, we're going to see a lot of ugliness now, hard to comprehend, hard to accept. We still have a skeletal democracy, and ICE isn't fully staffed yet (they have new billions of dollars to spend).

On Facebook, Dan Conover said: "This is what the collapse of the rules-based order looks like."

I responded: "Or it's a test of it. The guy wasn't very well disguised, I think he will be identified if he hasn't already been identified. Will he be arrested and tried? If yes, then we just validated the rule-based order. If no, we're fucked.

"Or even better the state of Minnesota could go to court and sue ICE to get their officers to wear identifying information, and no masks. For just this reason. And then here's an arrest warrant for the guy who fired his gun 3 times at the head of a 37-year old mom who writes poetry and drives an SUV with teddy bears in the glove compartment. In other words I'm not sure this was intentional (on behalf of ICE), and I think they may have to turn this guy over, otherwise someone is getting impeached. The video is too compelling."

http://scripting.com/2026/01/07.html#a205927 http://scripting.com/2026/01/07.html#a205927
Another incredible use-case for ChatGPT. When it first came out Font Awesome was a total godsend. It took something every developer of graphic apps had to struggle with, and said basically "I can do that." They had a growing set of standard icons, it got better with every version. But some special icons haven't appeared in Font Awesome. There was a great icon on the original Mac, for a desk accessory, I don't remember which one. It was a flag, like the flag on a mailbox. If you put a piece of mail in the box you raise the flag, that way the postman knows to stop. When they pick up the mail they flip the flag down. On the early Mac it took an app that was wide and short, and made it wide and tall, revealing the ideas and data it kept for you. You can still have the icon, using ChatGPT. Have it generate your own icon using SVG. You get something every bit as good as a Font Awesome icon. So you can be creative in a new way. Whether this is art or not (of course it is) is beside the point. It's progress, evolution -- a way for users to make perfectly specified feature requests.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/07.html#a155243 http://scripting.com/2026/01/07.html#a155243
Remember when OG metadata was new? 16 years ago. It's one of those things that's widely forgotten, but still widely in use. I just wrote a post on Bluesky that demonstrates. That could be a new feature in WordPress, or the decision whether or not to display it could be up to the reader app (in this case Bluesky). If it were up to the reader we might need a way to signal that to the reader from the CMS. In the new WordLand, we use the image as an icon. It's completely wrong to use it as an OG Metadata image in Bluesky -- realllly embarrassing (screen shot).
http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a143837 http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a143837
I considered my Blogger of the Year award for 2025 very carefully, and yesterday did a podcast about my choice, David Frum, who is doing an outstanding job of adapting his work to the podcast medium, as it was intended to work. What finally made my decision easy was his last episode of the year, where along with fellow Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Warzel, they considered how podcasting works, and what if anything they should do to conform. The answer is -- don't conform. It isn't up to any single contributor to turn the tide, instead their only job is to be true to themselves, and learn from others and share what they've learned. Be a human-size blogger. I thought perhaps this represented my opportunity to speak to them, and help understand that there are tech people who want to work with them and enhance their freedom, rather than consume it. But we need their help to do it. They've settled on Substack, without realizing they're just hooking up with the same people who screwed them before (ie Twitter, then all the techies who have dinner with Trump). As they say -- doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is not particularly smart, and Frum is smart. I don't care if he roots for the Red Sox (I'm a Mets fan), right now we're on the same side. We love the United States, and what it has done for us, and for the world, and we are falling apart. It's not time to stay within our communities, it's time to do whatever we can to save the country we love so much, working together.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a152742 http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a152742
Put another way, I don't think they know that there are hippie-type developers who believe in you and your free speech, and build accordingly. The web is the home page for that movement, and it's still there and ready to do the job it was built to do, and not feed your soul into the slurry-making machines.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a144930 http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a144930
BTW, I was right about our respective ages. I am five years older, so we are of the same generation, but have taken different paths, but have arrived at basically the same place. And for what it's worth I voted for George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000, but voted and worked for John Kerry in 2004.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a151802 http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a151802
Another btw, in the early blogosphere we had a motto -- watching them watch us watch them, etc. You aren't blogging if you aren't always considering what you're doing.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a143709 http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a143709
Must-watch narrated bodycam video from Jan 6 Capitol riot. Maybe the saddest moment in American history, so far.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a225301 http://scripting.com/2026/01/06.html#a225301
Problem with ChatGPT is that it thinks you always want to know everything about all the options, no matter how convoluted they are, based on incorrect assumptions about what you're doing. You ask a simple question with a simple answer and they write you a four page briefing on everything. At least they do seem to give you the correct answer up front. They ought to work on making these things manageable, and btw for these reasons I believe they must write the most shitty code when they're left to write the whole thing. If they have a different better mode, please let me talk to that one! :-)
http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a161953 http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a161953
Podcast: Blogger of the Year.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a134319 http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a134319
I did a long video demo yesterday with a narrative about where WordLand is going. The audio quality sucks. And at the beginning I said I wasn't going to narrate, but I couldn't help myself. Turn the volume way up. WordLand has become a new kind of feed reader, it's totally building off FeedLand, I love the idea of apps building on other apps. It's exactly the kind of software we predicted, long before MCP's, with Frontier back in the 80s, 90s and 00s.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a202859 http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a202859
Just heard an ad on WNYC-FM saying we should share news with them. That's a milestone. First time I've ever heard NPR say our purpose was anything other than giving them money. They could go even further -- support blogs and podcasts that cover the NYC area.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a132946 http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a132946
I've tried a lot of different kinds of Keurig pods, but the best -- with the richest taste is Peet's. Just ordered a whole bunch more to try out. And btw, when I looked up Peet's on Google I found that it had been bought by Dr Pepper for (sit down please) $18 billion. I hope you didn't pass out. I always thought of Peet's as a hometown favorite, the underdog, but my lord so much money. No wonder the coffee is so good.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a135212 http://scripting.com/2026/01/05.html#a135212
I never was very good with PhotoShop and other bitmap image apps. Now I use ChatGPT, I just tell it what I want, like remove this bit and that bit, and it just freaking does it. This is how computers were meant to work. That's how I did the Peet's logo in the image in the previous post. And btw the people who are down on ChatGPT being used for graphics and videos are full of shit about it not having value. Some of us don't have the skill yet still would like to illustrate our ideas with images and videos. For those of us, the AI apps are a godsend. They're also pretty good I hear at providing medical advice. I've been using it for that pretty extensively. At my age health is not something you can ignore, and it helps to be informed. And with the healthcare system these days in the US being so limited, you don't really get to have a relationship with your doctor as we did in the past, so guess what, I bet ChatGPT is saving some lives. So if you don't like being seriously wrong about new tech, you should start seeing the advantages, not just the belief that it cancels freedom. If it does, and so far I don't see it, there's a lot of good that that compensates. There are always tradeoffs in evolution.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/04.html#a011742 http://scripting.com/2026/01/04.html#a011742
Follow political news on my FeedLand news site.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/04.html#a011417 http://scripting.com/2026/01/04.html#a011417
Do you feel powerless to communicate online unless it serves the interests of the people who own the networks you post to? Why not own your own means of distribution, managed as a co-op, and only responsible to you, as a member and customer. No VC, no billionaire, no government control.
Bush at war http://scripting.com/2026/01/04/170849.html?title=bushAtWar

Bush at the start of the Iraq war when MSNBC called him a visionary.

He looked pretty lost at the time, I remember -- and we all hoped that wasn't true, we hoped he knew what he was doing.

We've been here before.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/03.html#a160700 http://scripting.com/2026/01/03.html#a160700
On Bluesky: I can't tell you how tired I am of copying and pasting the same text into five different silos. When will this ridiculous system that claims to be the web, get its shit together and start acting like the web (ie interop).
http://scripting.com/2026/01/03.html#a143152 http://scripting.com/2026/01/03.html#a143152
Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/03.html#a145339 http://scripting.com/2026/01/03.html#a145339
The war in Iraq started in March 2003. That was also the month I arrived in Cambridge after driving cross-country from Woodside, CA. Because I did most of my blogging on scripting.com, I still have a good archive of how I experienced both those things. It's also the month we got the Harvard weblogs going, but they have not stood up so well. I wouldn't have predicted then that my personal blog would survive the system we started at one of America's great universities.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/02.html#a151956 http://scripting.com/2026/01/02.html#a151956
BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece, below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm mostly right. ;-)
The web after AI http://scripting.com/2026/01/02/144702.html?title=theWebAfterAi

I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being converted to slurry to be fed to consumers as one would get a tasty hot dog from a NYC street vendor. Another level of processing. If I recall correctly one of the browsers is saying they're not using AI at all. But this would be different, it would be for search, not the browser.

But Google, if you want to be fair about it, there should be a permalink for the AI-generated answers. This is something none of the AI vendors seem to be able to do. If so, I wonder why?

I just tried looking up "Regular Medicare" on Google, I was looking for an official page and ended up using the Medicare.gov one. But I could have decided the Google synopsis was the best. No way that I can see to use that as a link.

Maybe we should all start thinking about how we would like the new post-AI web to work?

I am trying to reach the well-known political pundits to tell them we don't have to accept the web the billionaires give us. The costs are very low, their money doesn't help them as much as you might think, because they have different concerns from the ones you (writer) and I (developer) have. I don't care about revenue (disclaimer that doesn't mean everything will be free and there won't be a business model, it just isn't the reason I'm doing the work). This is my way of giving back, the area I have the greatest leverage. I always argued that Bill Gates who kept saying in the 90s he was going to be a scrappy competitor now and give away his wealth when he retired. He is doing that btw, but I thought man you're never going to have the leverage you have now. Your money as a way to end famine or fight the climate crisis is nothing compared to the power you had when you had the dominant operating system in a time of great transition. You could, I argued, make the web a breakthrough for self-government, so we could systematically solve those problems with the resources of the United States, not just the resources of the world's richest man. That possibility really was within reach, I believed then and still do now.

I made the choice Bill didn't and it worked. We were able to build something amazing, only to see it broken down into that slurry I mentioned at the top of the page.

I love AI, I don't want to go back. But I also have big plans for human thinkers and developers -- writers, using the technology we never got a chance to develop while we were busy being dominated by Larry and Sergey, Zuckerberg, the Twitter founders, et al.

As I said on Bluesky today, we're going to insist this time that the political punditry get involved, assuming they are serious about saving what's left of our democracy.

Good Old Medicare http://scripting.com/2026/01/02/143824.html?title=goodOldMedicare

This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is -- me. They have set it up so they can scam it 18 different ways, Some of the "services" they offer are just ways for them to charge the government more for your care, in return for doing absolutely nothing.

So today I had my first Regular Medicare experience. I went to renew my prescriptions, and the vendor already knew my insurance info which was impressive use of computers. I was prepared to give it the new info. And in case you're confused, you still have to pay the insurance industry for Regular Medicare, even though that's actually a deal between me and my government. No way to deal them out, though I'm sure it would make total sense for us to do exactly that. Don't believe that when it comes to health care the US has been anything like a democracy.

Where the old plan each prescription cost $0, this time I actually have to pay out of pocket approx $100 for a 90 day supply of five different medications. On the other hand, I'm paying much less for this insurance. I haven't done the math yet, but it feels like I'm not getting ripped off. See how many qualifiers there are.

Oh the great old US of A where you can give your tax money and retirement funds to insurance companies who buy politicians etc and so on. Maybe the only thing to appreciate is that we get some health care for all our tax payments over our careers?

And one good thing is now I get to keep most of my Social Security payments instead of it all going to United Healthcare. ;-)

I’m never too old to make a young developer’s mistake. http://scripting.com/2026/01/02/164500.html?title=imNeverTooOldToMakeAYoungDevelopersMistake

This is one of those times when you pay the price for working past your timeout, like a pitcher pitching too many pitches in one game. There's an item on your checklist, and you'd love to take it off before you start the next session. You copy paste something, get it to work, and close out your session for the day.

While you're preparing to get up you decide to share a linkblog item, and when it boots up there's something severely broken. It has nothing to do with anything on your list! You roll it up for the day anyway, figuring it'll be easy to find when you start the next session. No sir. You have to work through complicated code you haven't touched in months! Where the fuck is this, and how the fuck did it happen. Drink more coffee. Keep stepping through the code to identify when things went bad. It happens in the most impossible place. You keep digging in. Even more impossible. Unfathomable. But you keep going in, making sure every bit of code does something you think it should and then boom! You left a copy in some DOM code in something you cribbed so now there are two of this thing you hadn't touched or even looked at in months. Delete the mistake, rebuild, click off all the breakpoints. And yup that was it.

I started work at approx 9AM and it's 11:41AM — wasted the best part of the day, all to learn the lesson that no more "one more feature" before I get up bullshit. If you're tired you make mistakes, and you can't not pay for them.

No doubt I will continue to learn this and other lessons all through what remains of my career. Some things you never learn, like "I can always roll back" — but where should I roll back to? When did I break this mofo? Oy. I'm never willing to go back that way.

http://scripting.com/2026/01/01.html#a195132 http://scripting.com/2026/01/01.html#a195132
Liked The Staircase on Netflix. I had watched it before but had forgotten all the different conflicting stories. It is a bit irritating, but I think that's an important part of the story.
http://scripting.com/2026/01/01.html#a193301 http://scripting.com/2026/01/01.html#a193301
Loving my Keurig-style coffee maker. I've been stocking up on all kinds of pods. Favorite so far is hazelnut -- flavored, not real -- but really tasty. I never thought I'd want to try out all these different kinds of coffee. I wonder if I'm getting an espresso machine next.