Does this blog now have a Links page?#

This item has an enclosure. #

I am testing something here.#

I got nuthin to zay#

It's kind of screwed up when fellow independent developers who have little or no investment in Twitter as a platform gloat over its apparent collapse. Imagine if you had built on Apple and they were screwing around with their developer platform and in the process making their developers spin their wheels, or maybe go out of business. I've been in that place, with Apple, a number of times. It would be really poor form for a Windows developer to gloat. I hope friends who have invested in other platforms remember the Golden Rule. Today we're moving as fast as we can and burning out, to get out of the way of Twitter's careening dumpster fire. Next year it could be your turn. 💥#

The best new thing about "FeedLand" is the feed list. You can scan from top to bottom and see who updated, and by clicking on the wedge next to feed, you can see the five most recent posts. It's a new kind of feed reader. You can see how it works by clicking this link. That's my feed list. You can view anyone's list. For example here's Scott Hanson's list. You want to see a list of who has lists? No problem. All this without logging in. Unprecedented, goes far beyond feed readers. It's a group feed management system. New ground. Soon you'll be able to run your own server. It's getting close. #

Sounds like what pundits say about Chatgpt in 2023.#

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out why Caddy wasn't working with Drummer's websocket code. I was writing a post for the Caddy repo, asking for help, when I noticed it was working. I changed absolutely nothing. Didn't reboot anything, or change any configuration settings. So now we're much closer to being able to redirect to the new site and let the users start checking it out for real. #

One of the funny things about XML is that they pitched developers saying "Now you can create your own formats!" I'm sure they meant it, but once "RSS" was established, they tried to replace it with an incompatible format. Luckily, the W3C wasn't as powerful as Apple or Google, and their format didn't replace "RSS". But, imho, when you push an open tech and someone takes you up on it, you should help, not fight them, ie if you really meant it.#

James Cridland of Podnews created a modern feed with the podcasts from Trade Secrets, the show Adam Curry and I did in 2004-2005 during in the first wave of podcasting. I've loaded it into FeedLand. And James loaded it into Podfriend. It's great to have this stuff resurrected in a form that people interested in the formation of podcasting, journalists and historians we hope, can learn from. Thanks James! I hope he does the same with my Morning Coffee Notes podcast, which precedes Trade Secrets, and documents developments in the summer of 2004. #

"RSS 2.0" which was 20 years old last year salutes its parent, XML, 25 years old today. A powerful family of open technologies for interop.#

Miguel's epitaph for Elon Musk fits in 280 characters. Good work. #

Today's song: So Far Away. #

Alexa responds to things you say when you didn't say "Alexa," which contradicts everything Amazon says about privacy. If it doesn't listen, then how does it wake up exactly? BTW, Google does this too. Sometimes I'm recording a voicemail or a podcast using my iPhone and my Pixel 6 starts responding to what I am saying. It's funny, even cute, until you realize it wasn't supposed to hear any of that. #

Coming back from deep in the innards of FeedLand and Drummer, where both are learning HTTPS. Under development, not yet ready for users. But here's something cute. If FeedLand supports HTTPS in all its functionality, it will end up demanding that people with feeds support HTTPS too, and will fail for those who don't. If we continue down this path, I will be doing Google's work, helping them take ownership of the web. Here's the deal. Suppose you're displaying an item from a feed that includes an image. Suppose that image is served from an HTTP website, but your reader is running HTTPS. You won't see the image. The browser will refuse to load it. This came up when Scott Hanson tried to look at an item from Scripting News that contained a painting from René Magritte. Here's a screen shot. I'm trying to think of a way I could not give aid and comfort to the enemy. There might be a way. I don't want to betray the open web. I might be willing to do a lot of work so I don't force the owner of that site to support HTTPS (which I know he won't do because he is me). The old moral of the story -- give an inch, they'll take a mile.#

I did a quick review of Twitter's new API pricing, I can't spend a lot of time on it given that I'm paddling as fast as I can to get a new Drummer online that doesn't depend on Twitter logins. But the first problem I see is that they think (apparently) that each dev has a single app. Which for me is far from the truth. Heroku made the same mistake, they came up with what they felt was a fair price, assuming the developer made one big app. The problem is with a free product running for so many years, we made lots of really small apps. Why build something huge if the idea is small. The cost of staying with Heroku would have been totally diseconomic when full servers could run all my apps for $10 a month. Why should I pay Heroku $500 for the same thing, even though I had to do a lot of work to dig out of the hole. Now with Twitter, I think I'll just bow out, and let other people find out if this is workable or not. I'll leave my servers running, and if they stop working, we'll figure out what if anything to do then. None of the apps I've made that depend on Twitter are worth $100 a month to keep running. That's another story, because the Twitter ecosystem for cool utilities was practically non-existent. All that energy from now on clearly is going to Mastodon where there is no vendor who can turn the cart over, at least not yet (don't rule it out, it could happen).#

Today's song: Country Girl.#

We started testing the new release of Drummer earlier today. There are features that used to work in Drummer that won't work in the new version. I am shipping the first open source version of FeedLand at the same time, working on both -- and this is really precarious work. Drummer will work as an outliner. The scripting features will mostly work, the Twitter verbs obviously will not work. Your public files will be at different addresses. As I've said before I'm one person, doing the best I can. I expect people to be appreciative and supportive, friendly. Thanks in advance. 😄#

One of my favorite things on Twitter are the art channels. The curators post reproductions of famous works of art. And occasionally RT another art channel they feel is related to their artist, that their viewers would enjoy. It's a way to broaden the art you get to see. When they talk about how horrible Twitter is they leave out stuff like this. However, without use of the API these channels can't exist, and since each is a labor of love, it's unreasonable to expect them to pay for it. #

This Mastodon post is getting a lot of looks. #

I'm rewatching the HBO series Silicon Valley and loving it as much the second time as I did the first. They really do capture the insanity of the place. I swear I'm in a bunch of the episodes, or it feels that way.#

The new version of Drummer will be ready for testing soon, maybe even later today. If you want to help, please sign up by replying to this item, or watch my blog. As they say -- still diggin!#

A question for Brent Simmons. If you are off Twitter, where are we supposed to meet? What's our common ground? Serious question. Maybe it's Mastodon for now. Is that the best we can do, feature-wise and from a UI and open formats and protocols standpoint, in 2023? We've been at this for almost 30 years. 💥#

Brent and I both come from UserLand where we had excellent collaborative tools. Far in advance of what we're using on Mastodon. I've been using the instant outlines feature of Drummer lately to organize my work on this complicated corner-turn I have to do because (as Brent points out) Twitter has become unreliable. I'd rather take care of this now than put it off for much longer. I'm asking this question in a lot of places. Why have we let the web stagnate? Why be preoccupied with the machinations of Musk et al. Why don't we take advantage of the new freedom we have in light of their chaos to build new stuff! Taking features out of products seems like giving up to me, or perhaps it's lightening the load. We'll see I guess. #

I changed my Twitter bio, removing the phrase "I'm not trying to get rich or famous." I felt that was a bit holier-than-thou. And at times I most definitely am thinking about that. So it's a matter of integrity. My rule is when what you appear to be is different from what you are, you should change one or the other or both. Here's a screen shot that highlights the part I took out. I am still dedicated to fixing things that are broken, but there's no unawkward way to say that, so I removed it too for now. #

Today's song: Boombastic. #

Juno's dad on the kind of person who's worth sticking with. #

Making good progress converting "Drummer" to email-based identity. I had all the pieces written, but I wasn't sure at first how they fit together. This morning I started down a path and everything clicked into place. Like a ski boot into a binding. When the pieces fit together like this I call it "clean living" -- we didn't cut any corners when doing this for FeedLand, and the two products share a foundation, the bits were already there for Drummer. I hadn't worked on Drummer in almost a year. It took a while for the cobwebs to shake off. Nice to see you my old friend, who I've been using all this time. Anyway, I think we'll have a test version of this ready in a day or two. To deploy shortly after, with fingers crossed, praise Murphy. #

Update: I have been able to log on to "Radio3", so I crossed out the first part of the next post. #

Note to people who read the linkblog tab on Scripting News and in the nightly email. "Radio3", the tool I use for linkblogging, relies on Twitter identity. Twitter is not allowing me to log in. I see that's happening for other users too, but I've also heard of users who are able to log on to Radio3 via Twitter. Obviously I'm going to have to fix that app too. Until that happens, the linkblog will not be updating. Can't be helped. I'm not against Twitter btw, I see it as something that stretches back in time, and likely has some kind of future. It's struggling now, that's for sure. Maybe it'll come back together. I am most definitely not rooting against it, and it bothers me to see other people doing it. This isn't a sport, it's a world-level communication system that we use. While Mastodon has taken the Twitter idea for its own, it is not in any way a replacement for Twitter. In the past few days it's become painfully obvious how much we depend on it, and how it's negatively impacting my work when it's in trouble. I don't see any victory really for anyone in this other than people who get a charge from of other people's misery.#

I had to turn off drummer.scripting.com while I work on the new version that uses email for identity and is accessed through HTTPS. It would take too much time to try to keep both versions running at the same time. So I have redirected it to a temporary placeholder site, and when the new site is ready, it will redirect to that site. We will then have to figure out how to have your data meet you on the other side. So this will happen in several steps, of which this is the first. And in doing this I will learn how to do it for other sites such as Radio3, BingeWorthy, etc. If you have questions, see this thread. Please don't ask when will it be ready. This is still seat-of-the-pants unfortunately due to the randomness of the changes at Twitter. Also, your data is safe.#

I was getting "invalid token" errors from "Radio3", from Twitter. I tried logging off and logging back on and am not being allowed to. I see in the log that other users are getting that error as well. It could be Twitter's system has failed, or they turned us off.#

Thread: Twitter was sitting on an AWS-size opportunity. I tried to clue Jack into this, but he was always dreaming of really cool shit, and all we want is a simple package of services that work and have no patience for science experiments. Identity and storage that the user pays for and grants access to our apps. We'll do the creative stuff. Storage and identity has to be boring and reliable, and not subject to having the rug pulled out from us. It's something we need to build on, at the very lowest level of the stack.#

BTW, yesterday's problem with my Android phone was solved quickly by a number of readers. Thank you all very much. It was right there in the screen shot. Somehow Do Not Disturb mode got turned on. I never would have done that on purpose. This is a phone I use mainly for listening to podcasts and audiobooks and for 2-factor identity. Why does it turn off media? What kind of sense does that make. And from a UI standpoint, there should be some clue somewhere near the slider as to why that it's disabled. I tried to find the answer on Google and ChatGPT before broadcasting the question. Neither had any good advice about this. #

Speaking of audiobooks, Amazon's service, audible.com, which I used to subscribe to, is a huge ripoff. You have to be an active member to listen to the books you bought. So you can't, if you have too many unread books, suspend the service so you can start to catch up. For the most part Amazon is pretty good at not keeping money it isn't entitled to. If something goes wrong and you jump through all the hoops, they give you your money back. They want a long-term relationship, it seems. But this policy of Audible's seems to be the exception. As if they don't give a shit what you think of them. How very un-Amazon. #

The first big project I'm undertaking in the transition away from Twitter is "Drummer". In the new world, Drummer will manage identity for itself using email addresses, and thus it will use HTTPS. So the first step in the conversion is getting rid of all the hard-coded http URLs in the app. I'm sure they're not all gone yet, but the app does boot up without errors now both on a test server (which uses HTTPS), and the same code runs on the current Drummer site (which uses HTTP). You can help test it out by using Drummer with the JavaScript console open, and note any errors that have to do with HTTP and HTTPS and report them here. #

This is a screen shot of the Sounds panel of my Android phone. Note that the Media slider is disabled. This means that while the speakers work, I can't listen to any podcasts, audiobooks or music. How do I get the slider to be re-enabled? I've already tried restarting the phone a few times. #

Starting to do small things for the corner-turn away from Twitter. We no longer have RT icons on items on the Scripting News website. And there no longer is a button in the upper left corner that lets you log on and off of Twitter. Watch this space for more updates, and I'm also adding notes to the thread about changes people are making. #

When you build on corporate APIs you have to know there's a fair chance the owner will pull the rug out on you, as twitter is doing now. The only APIs you can trust are open APIs that aren’t owned by anyone -- like the web -- http, html, rss. You have to watch out because the bigco’s will try to own those too. Journos are oblivious. Can’t get their attention. To a large extent Google already owns the web. And they are throwing their weight around in much more consequential ways than twitter. But Google is invisble to the press. That will end some day.#

So journalists, there’s nothing surprising about twitter screwing with their api. But we should be nailing Google for trying to steal the open web.#

Do you have an app that runs on the twitter api? What is your plan for next week? I started a thread on the Scripting repo to gather comments. Let's not use Twitter for this one. 😀#

In 2001 downloading an MP3 song took 328 seconds. #

Introducing the shortest podcast ever. #

I can now settle the age-old debate about what is and isn't a podcast. If at the end of your show, and in promos, you say "Available where ever you get your podcasts," then it's a podcast! If you don't say it, then it ain't a podcast! To illustrate, here's the shortest podcast ever.#

Is this the best moment in Goodfellas?#

End of month archive. Here's the backup for January 2023. #

Eli Pariser: "First thoughts on Artifact, the new news reader from the Instagram guys. Right now it feels like a slick, maybe more personalized rewrite of Apple News. But not much serendipity—it’s all pretty narrowly tailored to what I indicated as my tastes, and I haven’t discovered much that’s surprising or interesting there."#

Artifact is like a new version of OS/2 after the web and Mosaic already existed. Kind of beside the point. We've moved beyond that.#

This week's 500 songs podcast is about the Monkees. I was right in the middle of their demographic when the TV show aired between 1966 and and 1968. I watched every episode. I had all their records. There was kind of a stink around them, perceivable even to an 11-year-old. People would say they weren't musicians, they weren't playing the instruments, and they were the kind of act only teenie boppers (like me!) could like. But Andrew Hickey in this episode dispels all that, explaining how they were a really important good musical group. They were friends will all the musicians of the day who we do respect. All but one of the Monkees is gone now. They were nice people apparently. It gives me a warm feeling to know they were better than who the cynics said they were. #

Today's song: Joanne. #