First, glad I wrote the political blog post yesterday. Enough is enough. I love Minnesota. I want to wear a Minnesota baseball cap today. I want to fly a Minnesota flag on my front lawn. And I want Congress to do their job and put a stop to this bullshit before Trump sends the US army into Minneapolis, putting our fine American soldiers in an intolerable place, to refuse to obey an order because it's obviously wrong. What Congress can do is make it an illegal order. Take the burden off the miltary.

Did you know I can speak in an uff-da accent? Brought to you by three wonderful years in Wisconsin at the UW in Madison. Fuck em Bucky!

Now, I've been on a project to get my eating habits down for more weight loss and better health. I have Facebook reels to thank for that. I've been listening to all the science and advice about keeping your bloodstream sugar from spiking while still eating well. And the more I listen to the advice, the more advice I get.

I love eating a bowl of oatmeal in the morning with some crushed walnuts, butter, raisins, and after it's cooked for five minutes in the microwave, some fresh berries mixed in. But I figured this isn't good. I've been taught that a savory breakfast is better. So I had a two-egg omelet with melted cheese and half an english muffin with butter. I couldn't even finish the muffin. I feel full. And I'm drinking my coffee made with my Kuerig.

It was a rough night last night. I'm so exhausted with feeling the whole world crumbling around us. Trump wants to take us back to the Robber Baron America of the 19th century. I hear that sucked. We have to get together and say out loud everywhere this is not cool. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, we elected you to check this kind of bullshit. If you don't do your jobs, Senators and Representatives -- we're going to vote you out next chance we get, I don't care if you're a Democrat.

The Democrats have a great opportunity now, I hear, to put an end to ICE. Do it, or else you're history, politically. You can't have a career going forward if you're on the wrong side of this one.

And btw, proof that life goes on -- I am so sick of snow. It had to come on a holiday weekend when there's no point trying to go skiing because the lift lines and crowds on the slope take all the fun out of it. And this is great skiing snow, light and fluffy. I hope some of it is still around later in the week.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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