I'm interested in the movie Darkest Hour. Specifically the scene where Churchill is surprised by a visit from the king, who we learned earlier is pissed off, while Churchill is morose and undecided on what to do. The King wants Churchill to know that he wants to fight, and that the people will be with him if he tells them what's really going on. I asked ChatGPT to summarize this scene in one good-size paragraph.

• The king tells Churchill plainly that he does not want appeasement, that he believes Britain must fight, and -- crucially -- that the people will stand with Churchill if he is honest with them about the danger they face. The King’s visit reframes Churchill’s dilemma: leadership is not about finding a clever compromise but about trusting the public with the truth and giving them something worth enduring hardship for. The moment restores Churchill’s resolve, confirming that he is not alone and that moral clarity, not political maneuvering, is what the country needs from him.

That's the leader we need now. Someone who can give a speech like the one Churchill gave on June 4, 1940 to the House of Commons, the We Shall Fight on the Beaches speech.

• "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

We need to make big changes in how things work based on having our limits tested and the guardrails broken, bringing us to the brink. We should be talking about that before the journalists turn this into a debate about what the next election should be about. It must be about everything. Nothing clever. This is what happened and this is what we have to do. For example -- Increase the number of Supreme Court judges, and give them terms of five or ten years, and have an age limit. The Justices must have a personal stake in the decisions they make. They should feel like servants, not gods. And really mean it about the 14th Amendment that says insurrectionists can't run for office. Come on, we were warned amply, and now we're having to deal with a Jan 6 every day in every state.

We all know where this is headed. We need a leader with the courage to name the problem before we're overwhelmed by it.

Good morning. I am wiped out from the storm that just went through. Did a bunch of shoveling this morning, still have more to do. About two feet of snow, some drifts much higher. The snow is light, but it packs down from the weight of snow that falls on top, so shoveling is hard work. I have, as a kid, shoveled out more snow. I remember how tired I'd get as a kid. These days, as an older person, the exhaustion comes in bit sooner. Not being able to get out to the world quickly was a bit claustrophobia-inducing, and the politics haven't helped my overall feeling of dread.

Part of the general feeling of dread this time of year with the crisis we're in in the US, wondering if I should be working so constantly on a project that doesn't seem too appreciated. Wondering if I'm not doing the same thing I've been doing for the last X years, working for our online freedom, only to learn people don't really want it. I think about this a lot. It's one of those things if you prepare for it, could be fine, but if you just glide along from crisis to crisis as we are doing with online stuff, you never get to do the fun stuff without paying too high a price, with too many limits on what we can do.

Later, while it was still snowing, I was able to drive to the post office, so civilization is still here, thankfully. We seem to have survived this mess, for a while at least.

I still believe in what I'm doing, but I'm not going to give it much more time before turning it over to the people.

Like now, the people do understand beyone what's said in public discourse, but no one stepping up in a leadership role has been willing to spell it out. I saw Ruben Gallego who is a fantastic speaker and clear thinker, be driven into a defensive argument with MSNOW interviewers, who had reverted to their usual low road, trying to corner him into saying something that would only be interested if quoted out of context. He refused, but also was reduced to talking bullshit, when they should have just let him speak for crying out loud. They don't get that they aren't the news, our need for real leadership is most important.

We need to make some big changes in how things work based on having our limits tested and the guardrails defeated. And part of what needs to be redone is the power of journalists to make us all net-net far more stupid than we actually are.

Nominated for best picture of 2025, ranked by Metacritic rating.

• One Battle After Another. 95
• The Secret Agent. 91
• Marty Supreme. 89
• Train Dreams. 88
• Sentimental Value. 86
• Hamnet. 84
• Sinners. 84
• Frankenstein. 78
• Bugonia. 72
• F1: The Movie. 68

Random ramblings with past experience dealing with tech power.

As I think about next steps for building out from WordPress to create a network of users and their writing, I wanted to review how XML-RPC came to be, when I did a podcast, I found real gaps in my memory.

Then just a minute ago as I was browsing around the discuss.userland.com archive I came across this post entitled How XML-RPC will Evolve. This was in November 1998, five months after XML-RPC for Newbies and the Frontier implementation were released.

It was a few years before the W3C came out with their equivalent of XML-RPC, and as promised, Frontier supported it.

In fact, what a coincidence -- I worked on that project with Jake Savin, and we're once again working together on a project that's related to what we were doing then. It's also interesting that there are people to play the role that the three Microsoft people played, inside the WordPress community. And there is no one that can make them wait, as the Microsoft team in 1998 was stopped by their huge organization. But they were lucky to have me, someone completely outside their management structure, to decide to go ahead and release it.

One thing you can be sure of is it'll take more time for them than it did for you. Also it'll be more complex, and take more work to support. And you never will be able to fully support what they come up with, by design. So you just say Yeah! Let's do it, and in the meantime go ahead and develop the market. When people ask about the threat, we're on board. I had learned this from the experience with Apple and AppleScript. Take it in stride, don't assume they win just because they're large. Just take the bullet. And know that even if you do everything as best as you can, there is a cloud over your future.

Matt once said to me it was political, referring to RSS. Yes it was, everything about cooperation is political. But important point -- politics can be constructive, it doesn't have to destroy things. Even if everything goes smoothly as it did with XML-RPC, it's all still political. Yes, I really liked working with the Microsoft people, and I would have worked with them no matter where they came from. But it really helped build my confidence to know it came from inside the biggest most dominant tech company at the time. What an odd combination. Just like going to Harvard was political. Same thing, I would have done all the same work if I were at a smaller school without such a strong rep, but we were able to get more done because we were based there.

And btw, Carney's story at Davos about dealing with the BigCo country follows the same pattern. We didn't give Apple or the W3C awards, but net-net they were about as impetuous as the country Carney was talking about. What he said there could have been a Davenet post from the 1990s.

PS: I think perhaps just for fun we should create an XML-RPC implementation of the wpcom API. I have just the thing to base it on.

PPS: At some point we're going to want to make it as easy to set up a WordPress site as it is to create a new Bluesky account, because the two things will be basically the same thing. Either one will get you access to a network of bloggers.

The ads I like on TV these days are the ChatGPT ads that show you how it makes your life better. In the first ad two college age people, brother and sister it turns out, are on a cross-country drive and have a great trip planned. You can tell they love each other, and have a casual familiarity and trust and laugh a lot, teasing, as the itinerary scrolls by too fast to read more than two or three lines, but you can see they're going to have a better trip than I've ever had and I've done a lot of cross-country trips with friends over the years.

The other ad, again with the young college-age people, this time a date, probably not the first date, at his apartment, and the guy is making dinner for his guest, and again, the plan scrolls by. He's making something nice, but not too much, and like the last ad, they're confident, young, full of life, and since they've used ChatGPT for just this purpose, they're probably going to have a great meal, and they'll go out again, for sure.

This is the perfect advertising for this stage of their business. They are the leading product, the Coca Cola of AI systems, so they don't need to compare themselves with anyone, they are the standard -- and now they take the opportunity to define it. It's about friendship, love, looking good, getting the girl, etc. But it's wholesome and American. I bet they run the same ad in Denmark, only the kids speak Danish and have blonde hair and they go to places in Denmark and eat simple but good Danish food.

I don't think Google or Facebook did these kinds of ads as they were rising to dominance. Apple did, Microsoft didn't. This will also change the press coverage they get. Journalists like to pretend that ads don't infulence what they think, but good ones like these do.

BTW, if Microsoft had done ads introducing themselves to the world as the future tech behemoth, they might have gone folksy -- like Smucker's jam. "With a name like Microsoft, it has to be good." You probably don't even think about it these days the name is so familiar, but MIcro + Soft is not the most inspiring name for a tech product. But then ChatGPT is a pretty awful name too. Four syllables, too many. Three is ideal. Imho ymmv. Doesn't matter now, everyone has learned to say it. And they need those ads to cement the bond with the people of the world.

Nobody wants to be told how to think. I think the best thing is to be friends with everyone you can. And maybe don't make a big issue about who people voted for, and relate as people and Americans. That's something to put in the bank.

Also if you let people relax around you, you may find out that someone you trust and like is actually antisemitic or racist. That's also something to put in the bank, this is not someone I want to trust if and when things get worse.

Things are changing radically now. so you may not have to do anything to wake anyone up. And it's good to reflect on your own attitudes and whether or not some of the things they say about you are fair criticism. We all put up barriers, and those don't ever serve us imho, esp in a democracy -- but they are esp nasty now.

The Knicks are on an epic losing streak. This feels very normal. Let the trades begin. Maybe if we ask nice, Thibs will return? And isn't it funny these days KAT makes Randle look pretty good. Sort of a bonus for the Minneapolis team, which is playing NBA in a war zone.

Time for Knicks fans to get out the paper bags.

Above is a picture from the 2015 Knicks, a team that was actually even suckier than the 2026 Knicks (at this moment). The guy in the lower right of that picture has the canonical look of a Knicks fan wondering how did this happen and when it will all end. The only revenge I get from the Knicks suckage is that most Yankees fans are also Knicks fans and they have sooo much more trouble coping with this than Mets fans. Heh. It's actually almost worth it when you meet one. ;-)

A possible theory is that the Knicks won that in-season championship that no one really understands. It could be that winning turns out to be a curse, in which case having the Knicks suck now is worth it. Then every NBA team every year will try to lose that series, for fear of what happened to the Knicks happening to them. Sports fans in case you didn't know tend to be mystics, we suffer through the mysteries of existence to explain things.

In 2019, I did an overhaul of XML-RPC, and created a reference implementation in JavaScript, both client and server (Node.js).

The missing links from yesterday's podcast.

• XML-RPC website.
• XML-RPC GitHub repo.
• JavaScript reference implementation.
• New JSON encoding.
• The original website was preserved.

This is a continuation of a piece I wrote in August 2025.

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 the project -- as if it's up to me to do this work, and that I dispute. It think it's up to us. WordLand isn't just a product, it's a challenge.

• To make WordPress a fantastic platform for developers who want to build on its ability to write and read and link together 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 hat, 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.

PPS: If people have a hard time understanding how I could do this -- remember: 1. I've had a lot of time. 2. I understand WordPress at a deep level. 3. I'm good at building and selling APIs, I've been fairly successful at it. And even better, the WordPress community has been a very good caretaker of this work. They support a remarkable amount of it, and it all still works, and they often wonder why the rest of the world doesn't love it like they do. I feel the same damn way. ;-)

PPPS: And thanks to Steve Jobs for thinking differently.

PPPPS: And to VW for thinking small.

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.

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.