New virtual swag to go with the moment. ;-)

Really Simple basketball.

Really Simple player 27.

PS: Go New York Go New York Go!

There's an account on Mastodon containing a flow of gift articles.

Because Mastodon supports outbound RSS, you can subscribe to it in any RSS reader.

But the RSS is not very good. Have a look.

So I built a little app in my new scripting language, with the help of Claude, and boom now I can read the output of the mangled feed.

I don't know what is responsible, probably has something to do with the account, and something to do with how Mastodon. But the information is being communicated.

https://giftarticles.feedland.org/

This is not finished, it needs some css and the normal structure of an HTML page. We will come back to it.

I am using Claude Code to create a toolset that makes it easy to write internet scripts at the same high level as Frontier.

I was looking for a little project it could do, and came up with this.

• I like Wikipedia, but I know it has trouble with transparency. In areas I know well I see one-sided articles that even include ads for products that totally don't belong there. Having an open system like that makes this kind of abuse impossible to manage, there's no one to do it. Esp in web standards, where people create fame for themselves basically by editing those pages, it can get really egregious. Here's a place where AI can help, it has an amazing ability to somehow sort out the truth amidst all the fighting.

I put together an app with the help of Claude that takes the name of a place, person or thing, and publishes a page on a static site. Each article has a date in its path, so it represents what was known about the item at the time it appeared on my blog.

It needs more development, like a template that says what it is, etc.

For nerds, this is what the script looks like, it's written in a more debugged version of the scripting language built into Drummer. Claude is good at that kind of work! There's no limit on the amount of complexity it can manage, and there's a lot of that in designing and implementing languages.

And here's an example of the type of page it generates.

One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that.

And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area.

If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is -- this -- CRUSH.

It's hard to escape this. Upton Sinclair said --“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there's some functionality on their side of the API. You're helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what is your strategy?

This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn't theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation.

Lots of other examples. It's very rare when they don't try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo's).

The problem is this -- the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we've been suppressed by the the BigCo's has meant we haven't built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn't tech? And can we change that? I want to.

If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that supports it, and if it's an area I know, i'm up for at least talking about how to get an open dev community growing around it.

PS: I wrote this on EMX and decided it also should be here.

I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix.

I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay for the service, not me, a one-person independent developer.

I doubt if they'll do it, but this is general advice to companies that provide online services that they want to get paid for. If you depend on developers, you're shutting out sole proprietors who don't want to get caught up in the VC world, or don't have a chance to.

In the early days of the web and in the PC/Mac platforms before that, a creative software writer could get going without having to fund their users' storage needs. PCs came with storage built into the hardware. And in the early web days everyone was something of a geek and could be relied on to find a place on their own, to store their writing (not a perfect system by any means).

It's been 31+ years since I started my blog and still I can't offer writing software easily, with one exception, with WordPress. This is something I'm not sure photomatt et al are focused on. It's why WordPress has so much potential to grow the web.

The thing many people don't realize is that WordPress unlike pretty much everything else does not lock users in. It's part of their ethos. They run their service as part of the web, not an exploiter of the web.

When Matt talks about being an open source company (true) he's leaving out something equally important, that it's part of the web, unlike most if not all of the other choices.

When I speak at WCUS in August, I'd like to invite Matt to come up on stage and take a bow. Because there's a reason why such a great community has grown around his product, but we haven't been focusing on it and encouraging independent developers to see WP as part of the web that welcomes them, and does not lock the users or developers in.

PS: This will appear on my blog later today. I've started using twitter again to write early drafts of blog posts, and I especially like that they've eliminated character limits for paying customers. Nothing wrong with charging for services that people *want* to pay for.

PPS: I'm posting here again because it's more alive than Bluesky, by a lot, and Bluesky is just as much of a ripoff as X, except they haven't sold out to a billionaire yet. They should work with the web instead of trying to replace it, then I'll feel more at home there.

I'm using EMX more than Bluesky, consciously -- realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There's no discourse to keep me there so I'm giving it less of my bandwidth.

I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the Tesla haters were seemed to be gone, so I chimed in that I am one, and have just returned. I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah I got trolled. Won't be doing that again.

hate == love + betrayed. You can't hate something you don't also love. If you go back before last year's election, I was borderline about Musk, happy to loved the car without thinking of him every damn time I drove it. Maybe I should start writing about it again. I promise it will be a very different story.

Also EMX is what I'm calling Elon Musk's X. I think calling it Twitter now is not right. But I don't see X as the name of a service or product. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but most good names have 2-4 syllables with 3 generally thought to be ideal. Look around you, see how things are named. That imho is why we like Claude better than ChatGPT.

I didn't write about the Knicks prior to last night's game because I had no idea what to write.

The Knicks in the Finals is something I had a hard time understanding, even thinking about. To me the Knicks are soulful losers. They're like once-future hall-of-famer Carmelo Anthony surrounded by people who shouldn't even be in the NBA, but otherwise are lovely individuals. When they asked Melo what his goal was he said it was to win a championship, but the reporters never followed up with the obvious question -- "Really?" They did make the playoffs, three times, in the Age of Melo, and they made it to the second round one of those three seasons, but that was it as far as Melo's championship aspirations went. He should've been on one of LeBron's teams, like JR Smith and Iman Shumpert, both Knicks alumni in the Melo period, who were fine players and did win with LeBron at Cleveland.

Going into the game last night I thought maybe the pundits were right, that the real NBA Finals was the previous round between the San Antonios and the Oklahoma Cities. But last night that was debunked. At what point did I realize this? It wasn't until the game was over, ABC announcer Mike Breen said at the exact moment the game was over "..their 12-game win streak" which revealed that I had little faith the streak would be preserved. I thought 11 was pretty great, but 12? Until that exact moment -- unthinkable.

In the first part of the game when San Antonio looked like they might rout the poor unprepared Knicks, I thought okay, but couldn't we just concede so we don't have to watch? In that moment I appreciated what the Clevelands must have been feeling as they shrunk to nothing faced with the Knicks onslaught? How about if we all go home now at some point they must all have been thinking.

I'm a Mets fan first, and I bring the Mets philosophy to every sport, including the NBA and software. I'm here for the game. Sure I love it when we win, but if the Knicks went down in the final test, I'd still be a happy camper. Look they made it to the freaking Finals! Some Mets fans say the team slogan is You Gotta Believe. I say Wait Till Next Year! Same for the Knicks. Same for every software product I make that no one bothers to try out.

This Knicks team is classic. Every one of their players would be a star on any other team, including the bench players. Some of them whose contracts expire at the end of the series will certainly go to other teams. But what a thrill to have this group all on the same team and that team is my lovely Knicks.

Last night's game was a lesson, you should always be open to the possibility of winning because sometimes you do.

PS: My friend Dave Carlick sent me a text overnight: "I watch the Knicks rooting for you. How tribal is that?" I had a longish reply. "I wrote a piece this morning after reading this comment, and of course I am rooting for the Knicks in some sense, but a win here is about more than winning -- it's a transformation. I've heard other people say this and the Knicks are us -- in a city that has disagreements about everything the only thing everyone is on board with are the Knicks. We're really comfortable with the Knicks as losers, and this has already become an unequivocal change. It's a whole new situation. Unless something really weird happens now, the Knicks will be great next year too, and the year after. So it's like witnessing a moon landing Dave. Underneath that of course I'm rooting for success, the same way we rooted for it for the initial moon landing in 1969."