NBA playoffs, Knicks lose again http://scripting.com/2026/04/24/134026.html?title=nbaPlayoffsKnicksLoseAgain

After last night's game I remember I now remember why I was so relieved last season when the Knicks were eliminated in the semifinals of the NBA playoffs. It’s a freaking exhausting sport. And the sad truth is the Knicks are getting beaten by Atlanta. Or maybe it's not so sad, because then I can tune into the playoffs with a detached interest, and save my kvetching for the Mets, and there is plenty to complain about there, LGM.

I almost never question a coach's decisions, because they have complicated jobs I'm just a schmuck in the cheap seats but -- why didn't they put their top defenders, Mitchell Robinson or KAT and on the court with 12 seconds left with the Knicks ahead by 1. Instead they put in all these fast small players, as if they were planning on giving up a bucket and then quickly running down the court with what little time remained and scoring a quick one to win the freaking game. Why not just hold them right there and run out the clock and win the game?? It all happened so fast. (I asked ChatGPT about this theory and it says I'm wrong, they put in the small players because they can switch more easily, and that's likely how Atlanta was planning to defend their shooter.)

The Knicks were out of timeouts, so they couldn't stop the clock. So I guess kind of predictably, esp the way things were going last night, the Hawk with the Hot Hand, CJ McCollum, gets the ball, dribbles a bit, and nails the shot that wins the game and now the Knicks are down 2-1 in a series they were supposed to win handily.

I didn't and don't buy the idea that the Knicks are destined to appear in the finals this year, when you boast about it, or expect it, god has a way of goofing on you. The Knicks don't have it, because as great as Brunson is, he sucks all the energy out of the rest of the team, and when he's having a bad night, there really isn't an alternative. It's not a good configuration. As in the Melo years, Brunson doesn't make it as the captain. Melo had the size and talent, but he's sweet labrador retriever, the sidekick of the engine of the team, somone like LeBron, Steph Curry or Giannis. It's not just about skill and hard work, it's about how do you get the team to follow you. That isn't something you can learn, you either have it or you don't. And of course I will torture myself in this mode, wondering in vain how my Knicks will fare in this quarter, or that game -- until I get to retire from the NBA for the year, and instead get a belly ache about the Mets.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/23.html#a134603 http://scripting.com/2026/04/23.html#a134603
I've written about Firefox many times over the last 20 years or so.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/23.html#a213243 http://scripting.com/2026/04/23.html#a213243
Why Firefox? There's a moment now when the web could benefit from leadership. There's a chance to rebuild text in the web around the use of AI systems. But almost every company that could be a leader in this space isn't thinking about what they can do for the web, instead are focused on their corner of it. For a company like Firefox whose product everyone understands is at the center of what the web is, they keep avoiding this obvious role. The assumption I guess is they need revenue and there's no money to be made from selling browser software. But there is a lot of money to be made, imho, recurring revenue, offering services to users that can foster growth of the web, for which Firefox can lead in developing great features in an open way so other browser companies can share from their innovation. That's the Firefox I got to know in the waning days of MSIE when it was plagued by malware and we all needed, desperately, a good alternative. The one written by Blake Ross, Dave Hyatt and Joe Hewitt. We have to step out into entrepreneurial space, and I guarantee you there's money to be made here, recurring revenue and trust by users will be something that will be highly valued. But we all have to do it together, something the tech industry doesn't have in its DNA, and it's high time we got some of that.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/23.html#a214835 http://scripting.com/2026/04/23.html#a214835
Let's say you're in Claude Code and you think of something you want to post on your blog. How many steps before you're ready to click the Post button and get back to work? I don't think there's a way to create something that works this way, you'd have to switch out of Claude or ChatGPT. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do it right there? (Update, I just worked it out with ChatGPT, apparently it is possible to do this.)
http://scripting.com/2026/04/22.html#a134121 http://scripting.com/2026/04/22.html#a134121
I like reading Joost's blog. I'm subscribed and it's in my blogroll.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/22.html#a135436 http://scripting.com/2026/04/22.html#a135436
Yesterday I threw a question out there. "If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?" I left out specifics, because any specifics I provide might cut off interesting answers. There are three elements in the question: web, platform and writers. The answer must say something about all three. Another way of saying the same thing -- "You're using the web to make the platform to serve the writers."
http://scripting.com/2026/04/22.html#a230456 http://scripting.com/2026/04/22.html#a230456
Had lunch today with Neal Smoller, our local pharmacy owner. Brilliant young guy who's totally energized by Claude Code.
New maestros in software http://scripting.com/2026/04/22/230043.html?title=newMaestrosInSoftware

I wonder how many people are working on clones of existing software with an eye toward making a much more evolvable and customizable version with AI at the core of the model.

You can make the same software easily, with Claude's help, and if you think about the things users want to customize, you can give them a toolkit for doing exactly what they want in prompts, as opposed to code, plugins, etc.

So you don't vibe-code it, you start with an app that's designed to be beautiful on the inside, easy to understand for a new maestro of software, but something they can evolve with prompts so they can be working on something else intently.

We provide beautiful code for aspiring symphonists to learn from.

I remember when I first got my hands on the Unix source back in 1978. I was blown away by what was possible. I had largely been a Fortran programmer up till then. The pieces don't fit together so well on their own, I learned, you have to move them into place and for that a lot of trying-things-out has to happen.

Why am I thinking about this? I have friends who are not programmers who are pretty close to where I was then, waiting to see how real software is made. And they can have that experience soon. I love where we are now in tech.

BTW, on its own Claude writes some really shitty code. ;-)

http://scripting.com/2026/04/21.html#a002656 http://scripting.com/2026/04/21.html#a002656
If the web were a platform for writers, how would it work?
http://scripting.com/2026/04/21.html#a003631 http://scripting.com/2026/04/21.html#a003631
BTW the "open" web has a chance to come back around the AI rewrite of all our software that's underway now. If we build the new systems entirely around web connections, with each part replaceable, we can have as much "open" as we want. Products like Bluesky will look like they bet on the wrong horse if we all have choice everywhere. It's not as strange as you think. Opportunities come along every time things change as radically as they are changing now.
ChatGPT images update http://scripting.com/2026/04/21/002948.html?title=chatgptImagesUpdate

I gave the new ChatGPT image maker a whirl, it's supposed to be more thoughtful and realistic.

The prompt: “A turkey in plastic with supermarket label with text and fine print. The branding is Really Simple brand Turkey. The motto, ‘turkey for simple people.‘“

A really simple brand turkey from ChatGPT.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/20.html#a130804 http://scripting.com/2026/04/20.html#a130804
I applied to speak at WebCamp Europe but didn't make the cut. I did see that Jonathan Desrosiers is giving a talk about the web, and his pitch is right on. Please go listen to him if you're in Kraków in June. I have been developing software around the ideas of building the web, software that runs on top of WordPress, which imho should be playing a much bigger role in the web. I have a track record here of actually founding new tech ecosystems, but as time goes by people forget how this stuff is made, I think. I'll probably try again with WordCamp US and of course Canada again, I had such a good time there last year.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/20.html#a115806 http://scripting.com/2026/04/20.html#a115806
I asked ChatGPT if the term glass palace had been used to talk about pre-PC computer data centers. Yes.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/20.html#a130418 http://scripting.com/2026/04/20.html#a130418
How do you subscribe to a feed in Feedly? Had to ask Google. Click on Follow Sources in the sidebar. It never occurred to me that Subscribe would become Follow. The screen that comes up when you click doesn't offer a clue of how to subscribe to the URL I have on the clipboard. I did enter the URL of the site's feed but that didn't work, and it brought up a screen where they want money. I think I understand what happened here.
Why UserLand was the right name http://scripting.com/2026/04/20/120705.html?title=whyUserlandWasTheRightName

I'm creating new software in ways I never would have conceived of last year. I see solutions to one of the most significant code management problems we used to have, our inability to remember how our code works, unless the app is very small and they never seem to be. This is why you don't see much inspiration in app updates after a couple of years. Everyone has moved on and no one who remains can figure out how it works. But that has changed now, bigtime.

The next product I develop should be able to continue to evolve much more easily thanks to Claude Code.

"Hey Claude, people want this feature to be optional (or configurable). Here's how that should work."

In a human-based development organization, even if you ran the show, you might wait a very long time and it might never come. With Claude, I can have the new functionality before I know what to do with it.

I called my second company UserLand. The idea was that we'd develop software for users, always be thinking of them, and listening and give them more and more power to shape the way their computers worked. It was what I felt was missing from software in the 80s, a focus on the users creating their own future. So back then we designed the software for them. We were hoping they'd get to implement it too.

Now we're going to try again. 😄

http://scripting.com/2026/04/19.html#a162045 http://scripting.com/2026/04/19.html#a162045
A format like RSS needs to be loved.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/19.html#a153209 http://scripting.com/2026/04/19.html#a153209
I'm doing a programming project with Claude and it's great, like a puzzle, finding out what works for me and building something I normally wouldn't have time to maintain, but -- Claude has nothing but time for stuff like that. I'm building it to pass off, a common code structure that we both understand and I know how to evolve because I design my code for evolution. And it's going well. But then I realized it's the same Claude I ask general questions of so I tried this. "I would love to pass off wpIdentity to an open source development organization. The ideal would be the WordPress's community. Is there any precedent for this, one community acquiring a new product?" You can try typing that prompt in yourself and see what you get. One thing I learned is that the Apache Foundation was set up for this. And Claude is pretty firm that WordPress is not set up for that.
A really simple coffee mug http://scripting.com/2026/04/19/161627.html?title=aReallySimpleCoffeeMug

A few months ago, some guys from Netscape came out with a way to get AI to pay called Really Simple Licensing or RSL.

I was really put off by the way they took the name that everyone knows came from me with no help from anyone. Maybe I could have done something about it, instead I found a way to have some fun.

With Really Simple versions of granola, spaghetti, ketchup, cola, ravioli, baby shampoo and books. And it's time for another one!

Introducing the all-new Really Simple Coffee Mug!

BTW, I don't think RSL was a good name. Simplicity is not its main selling point, it's money! It's about making you rich. If I'm not mistaken.

But syndication, in 2002 -- was getting much more complicated than it needed to be. So "Really Simple Syndication" was supposed to be a little funny because it was not like the acronyms that tech usually comes up with.

It didn't pretend to be anything but a syndication format. Complexity is the enemy of good software. You have to work at making something no more than it is. It's a struggle. And you don't add complexity wihtout having a really good reason for doing it.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/18.html#a132001 http://scripting.com/2026/04/18.html#a132001
The people who call themselves Mets fans who are sad when the Mets don't make the playoffs are really Yankees fans.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/18.html#a141538 http://scripting.com/2026/04/18.html#a141538
Last week I released a new toolkit that includes docs for your AI programming partner. Ask it to read the docs, and then tell it about the editor you want. It works with WordPress sites via the wpcom API via the wpIdentity server. A new frontier. ;-)
http://scripting.com/2026/04/17.html#a191852 http://scripting.com/2026/04/17.html#a191852
If I were running WordPress, my first priority would be to get something exciting out that even non-WordPress users would talk about. Then do it again. Ideally it would be something that reporters would like, that they could see themselves using. As you know, my Big Idea is give people choice of editors, for writers. But I just thought of a technical thing they could do and might make no sense, but how about running Claude skills. So anything a Claude app can do a WordPress plugin can do. I just built my first skill, and they can be Node.js apps. That's a pretty broad range of features you can support inside WordPress. Also ask users to tell you what would turn them on. Couldn't hurt, sometimes they have ideas that you as a developer never would think of. I made a few million dollars from an idea a user gave me once. Not kidding.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/17.html#a143954 http://scripting.com/2026/04/17.html#a143954
Scott Hanson who works with me on all my projects is doing his WordPress development using Codex. Here's a plug-in they wrote. Loving this. So we're all turning this corner. There are so many things I want to do, but keep hitting bumps. I recover and come back, so far. I go slowly. The bot wants to run at a breakneck pace, which I know from tons of experience gets you a worthless result. One of the byproducts of my current project is a /opml skill that reads and writes .opml files in a way that's compatible with all the apps that use OPML. Pretty sure of that since I published the first OPML file in 2000 or so. Not sure how I'm going to release the skill, but I want everyone to have it.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/16.html#a121936 http://scripting.com/2026/04/16.html#a121936
WordPress has remained mostly constant for its whole life, at least from the point of view of this outsider. But now the world its embedded in is turning upside down and WordPress must change, but no one really knows how that change will manifest.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/16.html#a120645 http://scripting.com/2026/04/16.html#a120645
The opmlProjectEditor explainer needed a light edit. It should make a lot more sense now if you're a newcomer. Perhaps the most important thing is that it now includes an example that you can open in Drummer to see how it works in an outline editor. OPML has become a really important format for apps that use RSS, but it's far more broadly adaptable. It's a good package for a whole app, and you can teach your tools to use the common structure to make it easier to share it with others, to keep a repo current, and to deploy the resulting code.
WordPress is a monoculture http://scripting.com/2026/04/16/122951.html?title=wordpressIsAMonoculture

I've been designing and developing software like WordPress for over thirty years. I have stong opinions about where the product should have gone, but mostly I've not been talking about that, because I don't want to interfere with what Matt is doing.

I've known him since he was a teenager in Silicon Valley, a boy wonder to whom the web has always been there, whereas to people my age, it was a miracle that came along to put down all the dominant BigCo's who made it impossible for individuals to create.

But I've never believed in open source the way Matt does, as I explained last week. I think there needs to be competition in the writer's UI for WordPress, and in all other areas of the user interface. I think that's what it suffers from. There isn't enough diversity. Creativity is crowded into a very small space, plug-ins. Because there's an API that covers the full functionality of product, there's no technical reason it has to be this way. I believe in competition, because it encourages listening. People don't listen to their friends, I've discovered, but people do listen to their competitors.

The community is paralyzed, it can't fix basic problems that have been there forever. Gutenberg was a good idea for a site designer and a not-good approach for writers. But it should always be a choice for writers, if they like Gutenberg. There should be no single recommended editor for WordPress.

Imho, there are ways to navigate this landscape, but it's going to require immediate and radical restructuring.

WordPress is not the last hope of the web and the web is not going to disappear in our lifetimes. Everything is built on it. People who say it's about to disappear are alarmist purveyors of clickbait. You'll still be able to ship apps for the web five and ten years from now. But WordPress is an important part of the web, and I don't mean because it runs a certain percentage of all the sites, which is imho a meaningless stat. It's a uniquely valuable API and an implementation that's debugged and scales and is profitable, and can sustain a large organization supporting it. It's one of those things we could lose, but we'd be much poorer if that happened.

WordPress is unique in the products that came to us from Silicon Valley. It's universally useful and it doesn't lock you in.

If a product like EmDash were to be the successor it claims to be, well there goes all the open stuff, because I don't think they have it in their blood the way Matt and WordPress do.

My conclusion after being a software developer since the early days of Unix and personal computers, and at times being part of the Silicon Valley -- there have to be a variety of UIs for WordPress, where all our work is compatible, regardless of what our tools look like, the approaches for users could be radically different. It's been a monoculture, and imho that's the problem. Break it apart, yet retain the compatibility -- that's the most powerful position possible in tech.

PS: After writing this piece, I looked for early references to Matt on my blog, and came across this piece he wrote in 2006. He totally understood what was going on in RSS land. Here's another Matt post from 2010, which after reading I concluded that he saw WordPress as I saw it and still do, as the rightful heir to the legacy of Twitter. And Matt and team did develop the API he talks about in 2010 as hypothetical, it's there now, ready to lead us out of the darkness.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/15.html#a145650 http://scripting.com/2026/04/15.html#a145650
Today the work with Claude is much better, though when we got started it was even worse than yesterday. The key to getting on track was to figure out why it worked so well in previous projects and fell apart with this one. In each of the others, I passed off an existing project for it to convert or build on. This time we started with something it had created without a "starter." So I took all the random bits we had and organized into the opmlProjectEditor format we had specified back in early March. It's how all my projects since 2013 are organized, so it's a good fit for me, and also for Claude. So now I'm going to pass back a package that's ready to be worked on collaboratively. The other thing is I switched to the Opus 4.6 model from Sonnet 4.6. So I've made it to 11AM and feel like I've already accomplished something today. The problem was yesterday we were spinning our wheels, and that doesn't work for me. I'm a very directed developer. ;-)
http://scripting.com/2026/04/14.html#a173058 http://scripting.com/2026/04/14.html#a173058
A glitch in the matrix. The app that keeps daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com has been offline since Friday, so I'm republishing all the posts since then. They will all appear to have been posted today on daveverse. As they say -- still diggin!
http://scripting.com/2026/04/14.html#a160308 http://scripting.com/2026/04/14.html#a160308
I updated sally.scripting.com to support https, and updated it with posts from scripting.com in 2023-2026. I was using it as an example of prior art of user interface for Claude. I figured restoring this app on my own would be penance for believing that Claude was anywhere near as smart as I am. Not even close. Not today at least. Grrr.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/14.html#a154738 http://scripting.com/2026/04/14.html#a154738
I've come to the conclusion, perhaps temporarily, that Claude can't work on a programming project with an experienced developer. It doesn't check its work, it'll think it's found the problem, makes a change, or worse causes you to do a lot of work so it can make a change. It doesn't use the information it gives you, can't even remember what was in a bug report less than one screen above. I could have done the work I coached it through through the morning, with a thoroughly inadequate result, in an hour at most. At least today it couldn't learn from prior art, and couldn't follow basic instructions. It's weird though because I'm really suprised how little it knows about the scientific method or even has been trained in how to work with others. I seem to recall situations where it was extremely good at reading code. Not a totally wasted session, let's see what I can learn from it.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a132241 http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a132241
Written in Gutenberg: With great respect for Claude.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a132018 http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a132018
We reached a milestone this morning, completing the project to add a Gutenberg version of the wpEditorDemo app. Claude did the programming on the new version. It required changes to the server app, which I made. It took 2.5 days to do the work, which was more than I thought it would. A lot of was learned. Now I'm figuring out what my next project will be.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a132644 http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a132644
Screenshot of the just-released Gutenberg demo app.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a112627 http://scripting.com/2026/04/13.html#a112627
Heard a report on NPR re why the Dems might win the mid-terms in November. They mentioned gas prices but not concentration camps for immigrants. They mentioned inflation but not the military occupation of Minneapolis and DC. They also forgot to mention that Trump keeps threatening to nuke Iran.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/12.html#a150327 http://scripting.com/2026/04/12.html#a150327
BTW one thing you haven't heard, because the press is so self-centered, is that as you get deeper into the AI environment, you get smarter. Not just better informed, that's what the web has been doing for 30+ years. The AI stretches your mind the way PCs did initially. It makes you smarter. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the (virtual) people we want working with/for us. There are very few human people who seem interested in collaborating. They all want to blaze their own trail, and if you want to improve their product you have to reproduce the whole freaking thing. The web had a different philosophy, adopted from Unix, not the tech industry. We want to work with others. And we do. And it seems there's an opportunity to cast the entire AI push in the same light, so that the individual developer has the power to make industry standard products. Without the usurpious business models of the Silicon Valley VCs.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/12.html#a132440 http://scripting.com/2026/04/12.html#a132440
The demo for Gutenberg is at demo.gutenberg.land. Easy to remember, and makes the point. If you want Gutenberg instead of WordLand, you can have it. Hopefully this reinforces what my goals are here. I do not want to favor any one kind of editor. I want every kind of editor here. I want there to be a web of great editors that runs on the web.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/12.html#a132354 http://scripting.com/2026/04/12.html#a132354
BTW, when playing around with Gutenberg, I wonder why it doesn't allow me to move blocks around as if it were an outliner? Or maybe it does and I don't know the UI for that? John Johnston says yes it does work like an outliner.
Government is also enshittified http://scripting.com/2026/04/12/011604.html?title=governmentIsAlsoEnshittified

The logic of Cory Doctorow's enshittification model applies to government too.

Both political parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money.

The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have nothing to do with anything.

In both cases they work for the benefit of the funders, only.

It's just a business. And users and voters realize that, but they feel powerless to do anything about it.

Voters attach to any company or person who sounds like they get it and agree and want to fix it. In politics as in tech there are people who actually do want to fix it. We thought that the web would do that for politics, but the users gravitated to the enshittified spaces. And the developers all acted selfishly and wouldn't work with each other. Now the hope is that with AI tools, individual developers can maintain codebases as big and complicated as the ones maintained by the VC-backed companies. No one talks about this. We should.

Programming in overdrive http://scripting.com/2026/04/12/123700.html?title=programmingInOverdrive

I've now done two projects with Claude Code. I added a feature to the server running behind WordLand, and adapted wpEditorDemo to work have a second example, using Gutenberg as the editing user interface. Haven't released the Gutenberg app yet, that should happen today, Murphy-willing.

I had never written a Gutenberg app before, btw. Claude figured all that out. For most of the project I didn't look at the JavaScript app it created. When I finally did look I was delighted to see that it used the same coding style as I use, developed over many years. It's like programming in overdrive.

I had to do the testing for Claude in the second case because it can't test apps that run in the browser. So it was giving me checklists of things to do and I'd report back on what happened. Still, a lot faster and easier than doing it on my own. It's a very good, tireless and super well-informed programming partner.

Not sure what my third project will be, probably going to stick with something small. The big move will be working with FeedLand in this mode. There are a bunch of changes that should make it run faster. Also might be possible to make it easier to install for people who are using AI tools. And since most of the action takes place on the server, I think I can get Claude to do better testing than I, a human can do, one who gets tired pretty darned quickly. That's when things get really interesting, not that the whole thing isn't really interesting, most interesting dev work I've done since the early days of the web.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/11.html#a135440 http://scripting.com/2026/04/11.html#a135440
I'm working with Claude today to finish Gutenberg Land. Figuring it out as we go along. It can't run the app itself because it's browser-based. I look forward to a project that runs on a server so it can run it locally and we can really make things hum. This, if I guess correctly, is how Jake is working with Headless Frontier. He just got the Frontier debugger working. Why? I asked, given that we have bigger more immediate priorities, like getting Manila running on Digital Ocean (what a trip that will be) -- he explained that's because he wants the AI bot to use the freaking debugger.
Deshittifying the web, day 2 http://scripting.com/2026/04/10/161721.html?title=deshittifyingTheWebDay2

The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about making WordPress boom with new apps for writers that run in the web ecosystem, not as plug-ins, in JS running in the browser, or on the desktop, any desktop, that would work too. Probably would be fine to put an MCP shell around it so it can be in AI-internal scripts.

I'm into writing tools. Proud of it. I'm a writer and a developer. Did I become a developer to create tools for writers or the other way around? At this point the answer to both questions is yes.

I'm basically offering to host a potluck party where people bring an app that works alongside WordLand but works differently from WordLand. Mine is a simple wizzy editor with a Markdown flip-switch. But everyone likes a different kind of editor. There is no single best editor for the web and since WordPress is of the web that applies here too.

If this work is ragingly successful it should have the adoption of XML-RPC in 1998, where devs were competing to get support for their favorite platform before all the others. Here's the list as of 2003. It was exciting and fun, kind of like how things are now.

So back to the AI connection. I started a session with Claude this morning and asked it to look at wpEditorDemo. Let's write a developer's guide and an AI guide, I said to my AI friend. This was a direction Don Park, a very longtime human friend suggested.

Claude and I spent the remaining time this morning creating a Gutenberg editor that works alongside WordLand. The two apps share files through the wpIdentity server that connects to WordPress.

So you can edit the text with either or both editors. If you use both you'll have to stick to Markdown. But you could use the Gutenberg editor for documents or sites where Gutenberg is better or required. This is so key. The document is yours to do with as you please. It's the web way for text to work. No lock-in. So important because almost everywhere else on what remains of the web, the ability to write and publish comes with a cost: lock-in. That's why writing on the web sucks so much.

I know Matt thinks open source is everything and that always bothered me a little.

  • I loved that the NYT came on board with RSS 2.0 in 2002 that made it grow like a weed in all the right places, but it wasn't open source, though they didn't hide the source. They made an incredible contribution to the web which is largely unsung.
  • Same with NPR and podcasting. It never would have booted up as fast or well and stayed open on the web without the help of WGBH and Tony Kahn. Again, not open source.

What you do need are partners who let people bring their text any way they want and don't make people type it into their defective editors, which deliberately constrain you -- to their shitty little silo.

To my WordPress friends -- WordLand is not seeking to replace Gutenberg, it just wants a place alongside it. And to open the doors for a myriad different approaches to writing on the web, all working beautifully with WordPress.

This should blow open the doors of the writer's ecosystem of the web, adding a whole new level, like adding air travel alongside trains and cars. And it should show how inadequate the current best writing environments are.

We'll have the Gutenberg editor for you to try out along with developer docs later today or tomorrow, Murphy-willing.

All made possible by WordPress and Claude.ai. What a time we live in! All of a sudden the web works again even if people have lost hope, because the AIs do the work either way. ;-)

Update: Here's a screen shot of the Gutenberg demo app.

Let's make WordPress boom http://scripting.com/2026/04/09/182024.html?title=letsMakeWordpressBoom

New ways to write with WordPress as the back-end.

Build an API that combines what wpcom does and storage.

Recruit devs to create products for this environment.

  • Gutenberg will be one of these editors.
  • I will provide WordLand which is a wizzy html editor that has a flip-switch Markdown mode.
  • MarsEdit can join the club if possible.
  • Leaflet would be great too.
  • Any app that requires text editing is a good idea.

Here's the really cool thing -- we can all edit each others' docs.

Put another way, the docs belong to the users, and they let access them.

The storage is so we can build smarter better editors, more fun, color, interactions, cool toys for writers.

And yes, btw -- they are on the web, and there's an RSS 2.0 feed with rssCloud support.

And for that we can create all kinds of amazing readers, I want to do one with SVG now that I know how to do that thanks to ChatGPT of course. SVG is another breakthrough waiting to happen.

We're right there now. Ready to go. We start with text editors and build from there.

There's a new place to put WordPress, under our apps. It's remarkably good for that.

We are all Good Germans now http://scripting.com/2026/04/08/145504.html?title=weAreAllGoodGermansNow

I don't know about you but I thought there was a pretty good chance Trump would detonate a nuke somewhere yesterday, and the fact that we did not get him out of there in time to prevent it, says we went along with it. You can decide what that means.

I've had several friends over the years who are German. My age or a little older. People who grew up with the shame of being German in the postwar years. Friends. People who weren't born when the atrocities happened. We were friends and when I could I tried to assure them that I know they weren't there when it happened. It didn't matter, as far as they were concerned it didn't absolve them of the shame. It had become their birthright.

American friends, what we allowed to happen yesterday, even though we were adequately warned, says we went along with it. If we wanted to stop it now, I believe we could, and we still can.

PS: Good German is an ironic term. Wikipedia's explainer nails it.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/07.html#a174054 http://scripting.com/2026/04/07.html#a174054
Hacker News isn't a software masterpiece. All the pieces have to be there to make something as real as HN happen.
This would make quite a movie http://scripting.com/2026/04/07/172427.html?title=thisWouldMakeQuiteAMovie

The president of the United States is spinning around acting like a NYC real estate jumbo who accidentally was elected president and after only five years in office has realized a whole new level of trolling. It started with cable news, then went to Twitter, then masked American gestapo killing protestors on TV for everyone to see, and then starting a war with Iran of all countries.

I'm sure his generals suggested that at the same time as they were bombing Iran proper, that they should send in a few boatloads of Marines to occupy the Strait of Hormuz. When the Iranians weren't so desperate, it might have been relatively easy to take it over. I'm sure we've spent billions over the years on what to do if we had to attack Iran, not like now when things like this are done on a whim.

Anyway, what a movie. The audacity of the writers. One things for sure we'll all be watching at 8PM Eastern to see if he blows up the world tonight or whatever.

The voice of America channel on Bluesky.

Vibe coding is still an unknown http://scripting.com/2026/04/06/121738.html?title=vibeCodingIsStillAnUnknown

I recommend this post on vibe coding.

There's a lot more to development than coding.

I've tried vibe coding myself, and while it's sometimes relaxing and fun, it's pretty hard to get the output to match what you had in mind.

I think people find it amazing that they can create code, not just that the machine can create it. I know what that's like because I get a rush from creating images, something I never had a skill for, so all of a sudden being able to express myself with drawings was a breakthrough for me. ;-)

I've spent a few decades making commercial quality software in a variety of contexts, and so far I wouldn't rush to get rid of my dev teams based on the idea that the bots can do their work.

I think more realistically we have powerful new tools that we as yet have not learned how to use, but it's pretty exciting to see what may be possible.

The discourse about WordPress http://scripting.com/2026/04/05/130334.html?title=theDiscourseAboutWordpress

I love all the new discourse about WordPress.

It was so quiet until this week, now I'm getting a much better view of the landscape.

I started developing seriously around WordPress almost three years ago. I've been developing this kind of software since the late 80s if you can believe that.

What's missing on the web -- software for writers.

I believe more all the time that WordPress is the natural way to store and present writing on the web and hook up to all the social webs, to actually redefine what a social web is. There should just be one social web, btw -- not 18. If there are 18 and they don't interop, then none of them deserve to call themselves the web. There is only one web, by definition.

The WordPress community has been very introspective, but it's time to make a difference for the whole web, and imho it is prepared to do that.

I want something inbetween the tiny little text boxes of the twitter-like apps, and the block editor (aka Gutenberg) of WordPress. I think there should be a dozen great editors that work with WordPress and then hopefully every CMS that comes along. Collectively, WordPress has taken too much territory -- writing is very different from site development and administration. I want to start the development of that ecosystem, and help new products get to market with interop and driven by what users/writers want.

I wrote this at bullmancuso yesterday, it was worth repeating here. And if you used to follow me on Twitter, please sign up again from that link. It's my new home there.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/04.html#a232607 http://scripting.com/2026/04/04.html#a232607
Sometimes I put test posts on my blog. This is one of those times. Still diggin, amazingly -- in 2026. What makes this post different is that 1. It's a singular item, ie there is no title, and just one paragraph. It's a collection of sentences not paragraphs. 2. It has a right margin image. I have to test this specific case. It has to go on a certain length so that the image that appears in the right margin doesn't leak over to the next item, and the image should be small so it doesn't require so much text to keep it out of the next post. And now I believe I have entered enough text.
When Trump appeared on Twitter http://scripting.com/2026/04/04/154327.html?title=whenTrumpAppearedOnTwitter

Excellent podcast discussion with John Stewart and Heather Cox Richardson. I desperately wanted to get in the conversation. I think they missed something important and came soooo close. Trump isn't only a TV star, he's a blogger. Comes naturally to him. Why wasn't Obama transformative in the same way? First black president. You get to be the first black president by being utterly brilliant and infinitely careful. There wasn't a single spontaneous moment in his presidency, though there were scripted moments when playing that role. And some amazingly brilliant speech-making. He's perfect, but that's because there were severe limits on what he could get away with.

On the web the ethos is "Come as you are, we're just folks." That's not Obama.

Who also had to be hugely careful? Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Not Joe Biden who's famous for his gaffes.

Trump doesn't give a shit what you think, that's why he's so good on Twitter. Trump was a TV star but right now it's more important to be a natural born blogger.

I was beating this drum ever since Trump appeared on Twitter. We need to be much better at this. We're still in the hole. At least Newsom knows there's a problem but imho he isn't the answer. We need someone who's bitter and funny, like Joan Rivers or Don Rickles. You don't need to understand government or politics, just show up and be a kind of lovable asshole 24 hours a day.

People could relate to Trump. Trump, even though he's not a great dancer, doesn't mind doing it if you think it's funny. He's a total entertainment package. Very random.

Wouldn't hurt for the next Dems to to find someone like that. Hopefully not to run for president.

HCR said Trump was Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs -- I LOL'd totally.

http://scripting.com/2026/04/03.html#a154534 http://scripting.com/2026/04/03.html#a154534
WordPress could have an active developer community creating writing tools for WordPress users. I also want WordPress to form the foundation of a new social network, one that supports all the writing features of the web. With really nice user interfaces for people to choose from. That's a new ecosystem. It may form around ChatGPT and Claude etc. Or it could start with WordPress. I think I can get this bootstrapped, but I need people to work with. That's the summary of what I'm about at this point in 2026.
http://scripting.com/2026/04/03.html#a140913 http://scripting.com/2026/04/03.html#a140913
Feature request for WordPress. If an item doesn't have a title, you can do better than (no title) in the Posts list. Grab the first N chars of the body, or add a tool tip with the same text. I write a lot of "singular" posts, ie posts without titles. This is what I see on the Posts page.