Rebecca Solnit: "I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."

I changed the header graphic on Scripting News today to raise a question with NYC voters. Bill de Blasio was mayor. He was elected with great vision, but the politics of NY are not in sync with the ambitions of dreamers. The police union didn't like him. I'm sure they would prefer someone more like the current mayor Adams. So they turned their back to him when he spoke at a funeral for two murdered cops.

I was a resident of the city at that time, and saw it not as disrespect for de Blasio specifically, rather for the people who chose him, the people of the city. I grew up in that city, and the cops are not nice people. They have a job to do and a chain of command. But they don't like the people, and they don't generally respect the mayor. Same with other New York unions.

The mayor's job in NYC is to keep the unions from revolting. I can't imagine they'd have much respect for the Democratic Party nominee. Like it or not, this is the city NYers live in. I am old enough to remember when John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, back when there were such things, was the newly elected mayor in 1966 and was greeted by a transit strike, shutting down subways and buses. The unions walked all over him. Welcome to NY.

There's a lot of pent up resentment and you can't just wish it away. The mayor, for better or worse, owns it.

I think NYC and NYers will fare better with a Mayor Cuomo.

This isn't the first time I've stood up for him on this blog. He did resign in disgrace, humiliated, but I never will forget his leadership during the darkest times of Covid. Cuomo and Donald McNeil at the NYT and Dr Anthony Fauci were the bright beams of intelligence and compassion. You may think differently, but I haven't forgotten.

House of Dynamite is a fantastic movie, it deserved the great reviews it's getting, and I found it easy to watch, though a lot of reviewers said it wasn't. It's exactly the kind of movie I like -- political thriller with ideas rich with intrigue. Great acting and writing. It's the 2025 version of Fail Safe. Both are like stage play, but this one examines the story from all angles, very skillfully, so the story is told iteratively.

The president in this story is throughtful and deliberative with no time to think.

It's provocative because the person who would make that choice now just destroyed part of the most famous building in the country on a whim, presumably to show us he has the power to destroy things, which you will not doubt even slightly when you watch House of Dynamite.

As you watch the movie, hold the thought in the back of your mind. What would Trump do. There was a time when we chose presidents based on our willingness them to have them decide whether or not to launch the nukes. We lost that perspective, but the problem never went away.

I see that the WordPress world is getting interested in adding AI features. I had some ideas a few years ago, about how I would like AI to be hooked up to blogging, and the ideas have developed a bit in the years since.

As a writer I want most is every bit of writing I’ve published turned into any kind of book I want at any time.

An example of a book lurking in the archive of my blog.

A user’s guide to FeedLand.

Knowing the AI would pull a users manual together on command, I’d feel more comfortable writing about it on my blog. As it is there’s a lot of good info between other blog posts.

I think it’s a great time to invest in new ideas for writers.

I have pretty good search on my blog, but so much more is possible.

Imagine a series of book types you could ask your AI friend to build for you from your own writing.

Eventually all user's guides will be assembled by AI. In the case of software products it should have already happened, though I'm just as behind the curve as everyone else is in this regard.

And of course the first docs to be produced that way would be A user's guide to WordPress.

Tell the people who make AI's -- I want a way to have apps run in your browser that has direct connections to the AI engine, and it connects via the user's credentials, not the app devs (though you are entitled to know who the developer is). When I explored the idea of making apps for ChatGPT, this was the roadblock, I have to become a reseller of your service. Can't you figure out how to let the user pay directly? I just want to make tools, not be in the retail AI business. Feh.

This is the same problem web devs have, we have to become resellers for Amazon S3. Why can't Amazon, who already has an account for every freaking person in the world, let the user own their own data, which I believe they would reallllly like. I don't want access to it, I just want to make great tools for them to use. And they're free to use other products with the data. This helps encourage data format standards. It's why the PC software market was so much more vibrant than the web developer market.

I keep trying to explain this to people who aren't web devs, but in a position to help, and make a shitload of money, but all I get is blank stares, and "we don't do that."

Yesterday I did some research into how weblogs.com, in 1999, tracked changes in the blogs it was following. This was a precursor to feed readers. There was a main output file called changes.xml, a reverse chronological list of sites, not feeds, feeds didn't exist yet.

What the home page of weblogs.com looked like in June 2000.

A page that explained what weblogs are.

A snapshot of changes.xml from weblogs.com on Dec 13, 2003.

A search of scripting.com for changes.xml.

You can ask ChatGPT to tell you about changes.xml. I did, it was able to put together all the random bits that are now gone, it found them somewhere and I got a much better answer than I would have gotten if somehow all my docs had survived, and most of them did not. This btw is one of the great features of ChatGPT. Truly a miracle.

BTW, here's a transcript of my talk with ChatGPT about this stuff. Sometimes these links don't work for everyone. I wish they would get that working, dear friends at OpenAI. This is how your word of mouth builds.

This is a product i created a few years back but it went off the air when Twitter exploded for app devs, now it's back and still lovely.

BingeWorthy screen shot.

I presented WordLand for the first time publicly, the new one with a timeline, so it more clearly shows how we can build a beautiful social network just from open formats and protocols.

No user lock-in, every part replaceable, and open to developers to add functionality without having to reimplement the whole thing. These are all the things I think that have stood in the way of innovation in the web for many years.

A social network that starts out with no centralization and open in every sense has a much better chance of being decentralized than one that starts out centralized and swears they're going to stop doing that -- someday, fingers crossed, etc.

Here's the link to the slides promised below.

I've been going back and forth on slides. I always do this. In the end I hate slides because I digress while going through them and skip ahead, end up wishing I hadn't used them. So I decided to compromise. I'll do the first three in some detail, and digress and go down tangents as I see fit.

The three main slides.

1. Accomplishments of WordPress.
2. Why podcasting retained its independence.
3. Demo of WordLand.

There were 20 or 30 more slides after that.

So what I'll do is this. Present the first two in some detail, then page through the rest quickly and come back and do the demo. Also publish a link to the deck on my blog so people can scroll through them at their leisure. And once the demo is done, I'll answer questions.

I have an idea that we can have a blogosphere that is as functional as podcasting. We just need users to get started, to get the idea off the ground. We don't have to accept the limits, we can have the full web if we want it.

One more slide from the presentation.

The accomplishments of WordPress.

And with that I'm off to Ottawa, seeking fame and fortune. 😄

PS: One more slide for the road.

Well, I think I'm done. I've got the outline for the slides complete. I can't possibly talk about all the stuff that's in the slides. Once I leave tomorrow I think perhaps I'll post a link for the slides and maybe offer a place to comment. Maybe.

I get very nervous about these things and then remember when I've prepared as much as I have for this, the talk goes quickly and people generally are nice, though I've been ambushed a few memorable times. Let's see -- Austin, Cambridge, San Francisco and Nashville come to mind. ;-)

In Austin it was because I was privileged. I was being honored because it was the 25th year of my blog, and I was one of the keynoters. I told the promoter his people wouldn't like me, and then I forgot I said it when it happened. I was stuck, I didn't want to get into a public argument with anyone. (Had I wanted to rebut, I would have said everyone in this room is privileged, just look around at how well fed and educated everyone is. We all flew in here. We live in a rich country where we are the elite of the elite. Now STFU, in my dreams.)

There have been times when I welcomed an argument...

In San Francisco, I was invited to lead a panel from the music industry about how great Napster was. This was probably in 2000 or 2001 when Napster was at its peak. It was an ambush. All the panelists made me the issue, and then they voted to kick me off the stage. I stayed there and waited until they exhausted their rage, and then asked them a question about music and Napster. Acted like nothing had happened. I had earned my place there, I was a very early industry adopter of Napster. I loved what it did for us. Imagine until then you either had to buy an album to listen to music, build a collection, or wait until it was played on the radio. (What is radio? Kind of an early form of podcasting.) People were talking about music in supermarkets and airports. This could not be stopped, I was sure of it, and they were acting like babies. I stood up and prevailed.

In Nashville, I was invited to be a sort of keynoter for a conference that was patterned after BloggerCon. I did not organize it, but I led a session, which was attended by a famous right wing blogger who I had invited to the Harvard BloggerCon. He brought a bunch of his friends, and they each said no one was listening to them but we were listening to them. I eventually sat down and let them have a session dominated by a few people repeating themselves. It was boring.

Finally I was set up by the promoters of a CMS conference which Berkman hosted at Harvard. I was the master of ceremonies. No one told me that one of my most virulent trolls was there, and when he got up to rage at me I asked him to sit down, but Charlie Nesson who was the senior educator there, and kind of naive about internet trolls, said he should speak his mind. I should have walked out at that point. I knew what was coming. It really shook me.

In Nashville a columnist in a local paper who said I caused the riot, btw. I swear to god I always take my discussion leader role seriously. I gave them all a chance to talk and they all said the same thing, almost as if they had been told to say it.

Let's remember how the web could have worked.

The ideal is to write in our blog space, and publish everywhere.

That's what we have been trying to do since Twitter came along.

Write on your main blog, cross-post everywhere it belongs.

This could have worked, and it still can.

But it can't work until we get agreement on what text is. This will be much-discussed at WordCamp Canada this week, based on what WordPress is doing and what Evan Prodromou will speak about and of course what I am speaking about.

Getting back on track is as simple as agreeing what text is on the web. For that we have two very good models: HTML and Markdown.

Here's my slide.

Working on my slides for WordCamp Canada next week.

I don't think I'll actually use the F-word in the slide.

But it makes me laugh when I see it.

It's funny because it's true.

I was just catching up on tweets and saw an announcement earlier this week that Matt Mullenweg is going to lead a town hall discussion at WordCamp Canada next Friday in Ottawa. A week from today. I find that exciting. I'll in the room for sure, and blogging it. Why not? ;-)

I am presenting the day before, where I'll do a demo of the new WordLand, explaining how it's now twice the product it was last time you all saw it. It is still centered on WordPress as the place where all the user's writing is published. And somehow through the magic of software, we manage to make it into a social network. And the cool thing about the whole stack of software we build on, all of it is replaceable and of the web, in every sense.

There are things that Bluesky and Mastodon can do that WordLand can't. But there are also many many things we can do with the structure that WordLand creates that the others can't touch. There's a simple reason for that, if implementing something, no matter how attractive, without limiting the web-ness of the system, we didn't do it. This is the social network of the web. That means all the pieces connect with each other in fantastic unforeseeable ways. And anyone can discover these connections. That was the joy of the early web, the thought "Hey I think I can do that" and when you try, it works! We're back there again, if the people come. The technical challenge is still there but now is smaller. Getting people to look and fall in love (hopefully) is the big challenge.

After WordLand 0.8 is ready, real soon now, who knows what's next? That's the glory a bootstrap. Every step tells you where to go next. That's how you know you're hitting a target.

I don't know if Matt will be there for my demo, I hope he is. He and Automattic and the community have created a fantastic platform. Finding WordPress has a super powerful API that I didn't know about is like finding a new web. Let me know if you see it too. ;-)

So thanks Matt for your great contribution. I hope to be able to thank you for that personally in Ottawa next week. Perfect timing.

Cross-posted from the WordCamp Canada site.

Note this is for the 0.8 release of WordLand coming soooon. Not in the current released product.

A friend asked for this feature a few months back, before we had a Markdown mode in WordLand.

As I'm reviewing the product for first beta I realized I could now implement the feature he asked for.

How to..

1. Copy a URL to the clipboard.
2. Open WordLand, bring it to the front.
3. Go into Markdown mode by clicking the M icon. It turns green.
4. Select the text you want to be a link.
5. Paste the URL copied in step 1.

It creates the link for you, in Markdown syntax of course.

To see it in HTML, just flip the Markdown button off.

I call this feature Cute Paste. :-)

A video demo.

Fascinating blog post from Jason Shellen, tech entrepreneur, formerly with Blogger and Google. Here’s my perspective on part of the story he tells about RSS and Google Reader.

Netscape gave us RSS 0.91 and it was good enough to create a new powerful layer on the web. Then Netscape blew up and a bunch of repeated efforts to kill it from big companies. I’ll leave it to others to say why, but they tried over and over to extinguish the spark. Independent developers were stubborn, we kept using the original format, and in the end the independents prevailed.

Don’t ever think bigco’s are the answer. They almost always suck the life out of open systems. If you have something good going: work together. It’s the antidote to bigco dominance.

If you suck up to the bigco thinking they’ll let you in, maybe they will for a short while. But what you’ll be left with may not be worth the cost.

And just because you have a job at a bigco doesn’t make you hot shit. Maybe for a moment.

This theory has a name, it’s described in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and its lesson applies in tech and in the political disaster the US has become.