I updated my website to fix a broken URL, restoring my 11-year-old app that makes convenience bookmarklets for the bookmaking service Pinboard. The app and bookmarklets still work, if you're logged in to Pinboard. The app is built on Perl and the bookmarklet is built on the Javascript library Jquery (an old version, I'm sure) and everything still just works. My URL was broken because I migrated hosts without remembering to install two perl modules (two easy commands on the server to fix that). It's nice to know that some platforms age gracefully. Perl did not break my app, not did the authors of the Perl modules I built it on. Jquery continues to resolve its old library URL, Pinboard continues to resolve its bookmarklet URLs (which are API calls). On the Web, this is no small thing (unfortunately). #
It is beautiful and crisp in New York” this morning. And quiet. I love calm days in New York. And I love days without much on the agenda. We have cheeses, chips and guacamole, hummus and veg. We’ll throw a duck in the oven later and make some mushroom pasta and roast potatoes for the vegetarians. #- Obviously I’ll keep an eye on things as we all do but right now the science for a healthy adult under 50 to get a Covid booster looks weak to me. The CDC permits these boosters but (for healthy adults under 50) does not recommend them. (Update - This has changed, see below.) Said a New York Times story six days ago:#
- The extra shots are unlikely to offer much benefit to adults under 65, who remain protected from severe illness and hospitalization by the initial immunization, the experts said. #
- “Overall protection remains high for severe disease and hospitalization,” said Dr. Sara Oliver, an epidemiologist at the C.D.C., told the scientific advisers meeting on Friday. #
- Wrote former longtime NYT health reporter Donald McNeil last month: #
- Dr. Michael J. Ryan, the widely admired head of the W.H.O.’s emergency program, has acidly observed that booster doses amount to “handing out extra lifejackets to people who already have lifejackets while leaving others to drown.”#
- Although he is correct, most Americans are convinced that their lifejackets are leaky. Speaking rationally to them is no more effective than speaking rationally to vaccine denialists.#
- McNeil does think the effectiveness of the original vaccine will eventually wane for non seniors so it’s something I will keep an eye on. For all the issues surrounding my shot — J&J — its profile was one of strengthening protection in the initial months rather than diminishing protection. As a UCSF infectious disease expert put it, “After one dose, across all populations, even in older people, the antibody response and T-cell response were excellent and increased over time.” A lot of people underestimate the J&J vaccine. #
- I want my health decisions to be guided by reason rather than fear. #
- Update, Jan. 21: After the CDC strengthened its position on boosters for healthy adults under 50, I went ahead (a couple of weeks ago) and got the shot at a local independent pharmacy (which on a weekday took less than 10 minutes to complete the whole appointment, and maybe 1-2 minutes to receive the actual shot). Today NYT reports on a study showing:#
- "Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization with the Omicron variant fell to just 57 percent in people who had received their second dose more than six months earlier, the authors found. A third shot restored that protection to 90 percent."#
- #
- For some definition of “small.” :-)#
- Today I’m reading about datalog, which (in some applications at least) is a much less popular competitor to SQL, the language and keystone of an implementation of relational algebra that drives most online data storage today. Some of the ideas in datalog resemble things I’ve heard associated with RDF and the Semantic Web, two technologies that are somewhat marginalized in the context of the web at large, but with some very sharp and accomplished enthusiasts (Rich Hickey, the charismatic inventor of Clojure, refers positively to RDF in several of his talks, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, is also behind Semantic Web). #
- Thinking about this particular type of marginalization — where lack of popularity is conflated with lack of intellectual merit, or looked at differently, where the fancy of an elite fails to gain near term traction in the marketplace — reminds me of reading Time magazine as a teenager in the early 90s. In particular, the issues and articles exploring how communications would be digitized. #
- In Time, the internet was literally marginalized. I remember it had a little box in the margins of a much bigger article that was mostly about how the cable companies were going to invent an “Information Superhighway.” There was also a lot of space devoted to other big corporations that might beat them to it, like the phone companies, or medium sized businesses who might do it, like Microsoft or AOL (Microsoft was smaller then). #
- The little internet box in the margins of Time’s article about the future of communications treated this global network as a curiosity. Even back then it was actually doing more of the things people imagined from an “Information Superhighway” than anything from the cable or phone companies. But it wasn’t popular enough to be taken seriously. Only academics and certain computer and defense researchers — only some of the smartest most experienced information technologists in the country, in other words — were on the internet or cared much about it. It wasn’t flashy at this point either. It was almost all text — telnet, gopher, ftp, WAIS, Usenet, email — these were all text systems. If you used them, you could probably imagine something like the web we have today. Berners-Lee, who was at a particle physics lab called CERN, imagined this and he wasn’t the only academic to do so. But to an outsider all these predecessor technologies looked geeky, hard to use, and maybe a little boring. “Oh boy, I can see what books the university library has from across town or the other side of the world. Huzzah.”#
- The box specifically focused on how the internet was popular at universities and challenging to use for novices. It talked about the text interfaces, open protocols, diversity of information, global reach, and panoply of technologies. It noted that it had been around for a long time. It wasn’t rude about the internet, and was clearly written by someone who knew it. But the context and subtext made clear the implied takeaway — this is a geeky toy that hasn’t gone anywhere and isn’t flashy or graphical or easy enough for the masses. #
- It’s funny how I remember this so clearly decades later. But I was curious about this stuff. My dad took me to a Mac user group meeting or two at UCSD and at one of them I saw demos of HyperCard stacks on CD ROMs and I felt like I was looking at the future of journalism and publishing and information flow and was very excited about it. #
- There is a former Sun engineer named Bryan Cantrill who has spoken about the power of a small focused group in today’s technology landscape. The internet can make you feel very small and unpopular (the other person has 3M followers or 5000 likes or 400 GitHub stars and you have very few especially in comparison). But it also connects dedicated small groups and enables them to work together very very well, especially now. Bryan talked about this in the context of SmartOS, a great little server operating system, and the BSD variants, three Unix derivatives that compete with the much more popular Linux. #
- I think the replacement for Twitter and Facebook will come from a small group like this. More importantly, things we cannot anticipate, in this information sharing space but in various other spaces, will also come from small smart groups that look like they are playing with toys for extreme geeks or other people at the margins. Being smart is not always enough to invent a better solution to a problem, but neither is being popular, big, or rich. Dedication matters, persistence matters, time matters, and openness matters. As Chris Rock once said, life isn’t short, life is [annoyed tone] loooooooong. #
- One of the reasons I've been thinking about Facebook today is that Instagram blocked a post of mine yesterday and it really pissed me off. #
- Instagram, for me, has been a rare bright spot in going online over the past few years. Not due to anything the company has done really but because I have some kind and generous friends and colleagues on there who send positive vibes (or at least "likes", haha) when I post pictures, mostly of my kids.#
- Instagram seems to have created a positive space, with its focus on pictures and, admittedly, with some of its UI decisions. A positive space at least for some users, like me.#
- Anyway Instagram decided a picture of my 4 and 7 year olds shirtless in public in Brooklyn was unacceptable nudity and blocked it. I clicked some "appeal" button then immediatley posted a picture of a note, telling my friends I would be deleting my account soon because of this.#
- I then did some digging into Facebook's "community guidelines" and found that technically I did break the rules! You are not allowed to post any "uncovered female nipple" from a child. Even for a 4 and 7 year old outside on a summer day cooling off the way boys are free to do. I find that sexist and dumb.#
- Then an unexpected thing happened, the appeal worked basically instantly and my photos went up. So I sheepishly deleted my "I'm leaving Instagram" note, calculating that I get a little more emotionally out of Instagram, as of today, than it drains from me.#
- The next day I got a nice Instagram mention from my fitness instructor, who I think is just great.#
- What a melodrama! I resent even that I care enough to write a post like this. I hate being in the position of having to care what a corporation thinks about a picture I took of my kid in public. I hate that we as users have to constantly do cost/benefit calculations about whether it's worth the humiliations doled out by so many big platforms. Do I quit Amazon because they censored the review where I said "this [cheap] caviar is great but turned my poop blue"? (True story!) Do I quit Apple because they might report me to the cops for that same picture of my kids, if and only if I have iCloud Photo turned on? Do I use Amazon Web Services even though they were among the first to sell out Julian Assange?#
- Anyway, all this is a way of saying, if a worthwhile effort comes along to make an open nice version of Instagram, I'm definitely helping out. How hard can it be? :-) #
- (very hard)#
- Since my previous burst of blogging in September I edited this story at The Intercept where we published Facebook's blacklist of banned people and groups and dove into how this list works and more importantly how it affects people not on the list (you can't praise certain people on the list, but the list itself has been secret).#
- Since that came out, I've been talking to people internally and externally about this story and (of course) about Facebook more generally , including the recent group journalism project around some secret Facebook documents released by a whistleblower who used to work at the company.#
- One theme that comes up over and over is that it's frustrating people have to care so much about how Facebook behaves, including its rules on what it bans and allows, and how well or poorly it enforces those rules, and about its privacy practices, etc etc.#
- We have to care because the open web has not caught up to Facebook (~17 years after its founding), which is to say, we as a society have not, in an open and sustainable way, caught up to Facebook. People feel trapped on Facebook, or trapped into talking about and caring about Facebook, and it becomes like pressure in an Instant Pot. It's a huge powerful thing, which causes people to get worked up about it.#
- Key point, if there were enough competition for Facebook, and if there were more open formats and systems for sharing information across social networks, and standards that made it easier to build new social networks, and maybe if there were some laws ensuring we could control and transport our personal data in an interoperable way — in this fantasy world, so many people wouldn't need to get so exercised about Facebook. I honestly don't want anyone telling a private company (or nonprofit, or group of friends, or church, or bowling league, or whatever) who they should be banning or even (most of the time) who they should not be banning.#
- I agree with the critics who say that journalists as a group have been way too eager to egg on censorship on Facebook and other platforms, and reductive in talking about how Facebook is used. The solution will never come from Facebook, or from focusing on Facebook. It will come from all of us collectively — at the level of policy, technology, and civil society, at minimum.#
- I enjoy Drummer but I'm not a big fan of this change, which makes blogging in Drummer less fun for me. #
- Background: Drummer is an outline based blogging system. You create an outline in the web app, then publish it. I love this. You can just fluidly drag things to re-arrange them. To make a new post you could literally just hit the Enter key which is right there on your keyboard. You could take a tangent four levels down in a post and just quickly drag it up to the top level so it becomes its own post. It felt powerful and cool.#
- With this change, you need to click a special "plus" icon to make a part of the outline be on the web. Otherwise, if you just hit enter, or drag some part of another outline up so it's a the top level, it won't publish for some reason. I'm not sure the reasoning behind the change, maybe because I was away from Drummer for a bit.#
- I miss the fluidity. This change to me makes Drummer feel less like outlining, which I love, and more like regular modal blogging software, which I don't so much love :-)#
- On September 18, I wrote that I was surprised blogging platforms don't detect when one of your posts is mentioned elsewhere and notify you, in the manner of Twitter's mentions pane. Andy Sylvester, a developer, helpfully pointed me at a w3c recommendation called Webmention, which calls itself "a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site.#
- Well, I guess I find Webmention not simple enough :-)#
- In my original post, I linked the HTTP referrer header, because it seems like this should be enough for someone to create a mentions pane with. Browsers supported this for years. It told the destination web server which page you came from, if you clicked a link on that page. But apparently the only people who really used it were advertising brokers and others who prey on privacy, so now it's been basically disabled, browsers only send the top level domain that linked to you, not the path to the specific post / content. #
- And if you want this functionality that was baked into the web from the start, you have to rebuild the infrastructure yourself with something like Webmentions. I find it a little depressing.#
- Oh well. #
- Anyway, silver lining, if I understand correctly, a website can opt-in to real referrers again, setting a header that will cause browsers to send the full path when a user clicks a link on that site. That seems easier than setting up the sending of Webmentions, but doesn't help you properly detect inbound mentions.#
- PS Webmentions were created presumably because they are richer. The spec says "a response can be an RSVP to an event, an indication that someone 'likes' another post, a 'bookmark' of another post, and many others." Sounds complicated.#
- PPS Andy Sylvester has a Drummer blog. Thank you Andy.#
I updated the header image on this blog. That's where I was on vacation the month I started blogging in Drummer. You can perhaps imagine why I was so prolific :-)#
Taibbi: “All over, ‘smart’ lost its luster. ‘Smart’ bombs turned out mainly to be efficient machines for creating civilian casualties, ‘intelligence’ became a synonym for grotesque security oversights and mass law-breaking, and commercial media especially became a place where the ordinary person could see the almost total moral uselessness of advanced degrees. In one of Sandel’s most interesting passages, he talks about the conclusions the average person drew from watching the increasing vapidity of ‘ what passes for political argument’ in public discourse: ‘Citizens across the political spectrum find this empty public discourse frustrating and disempowering. They rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view…’”#
Dave: Facebook is at least seven things. Journalists don’t distinguish. (Me: I think it’s worse than that. I think journalists for the most part ignore the user community, except when they can use it to tell a preconceived story, for example about disinformation. I think Facebook’s connections to the rest of the web barely register as a story, except when news publications are suffering. The story of how Facebook impacts communities at a human level is very interesting but will require time and patience that is mostly lacking in journalism.)#
- It’s interesting to me that Twitter can tell me whenever someone mentions my tweet, but no blog or web platform can tell me when someone mentions a post, even though the enabling technology is baked into the web. #
- It’s also interesting to me that I wasn’t able to find a namespace extension to RSS for likes or re-shares, even though these have become ubiquitous online social patterns, even implemented on some blogging platforms. I’m surprised no one has created this. (It makes sense it wasn’t built in when RSS started, because the social platforms and patterns didn’t exist yet. But there is a namespace extension mechanism, and at least one “social” open format (namespace?) adopted once by some blog platforms, though it does not do likes or re-shares.)#
- (None of this is a complaint about this or any other blog platform. I’m just surprised it has not been done. When I used to think about building my own publishing platform this was a feature I envisioned. Maybe I can build it some day, maybe as an extension to something else.)#
Leighton Woodhouse: “Foucault … believed that the modern state is not an edifice that looms, metaphorically, over its citizens, as it was in the feudal era, but one that permeates us through our culture, in our daily lives, in our very minds. It’s generated from within the society that the state is tasked with administering — specifically, by its intelligentsia.�� #
- I’ve been reading a very good book about Finnish independence and civil war. Time after time, the Reds snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For all their talk of revolution, they were too timid to enact one. They wanted history to take care of it for them (as they believed their their guiding Marxist theories foretold). Their biggest mistake was backing down from the general strike that preceded and helped precipitate the civil war. They had a genuine surge of worker revolutionary sentiment on their hands. Instead of feeling empowered, they felt scared. Fundamentally, they did not trust the workers. Fundamentally, at all pivotal moments, they acted like the bourgeoisie they supposedly wanted to overthrow. #
- (I’m talking here specifically of the socialist political leadership, mostly the SDP elite. The revolutionary workers councils and red guards and union members were all much more strident, although at one key moment one of the councils did lose its nerve as well, as I recall.)#
- This makes me think of Bernie Sanders. In his backbone and ideological consistency, Sanders is a giant among senators and within the whole Congress. As a presidential candidate he repeatedly prioritized preserving personal relationships and his self conception — what I believe he’d call his principles — over winning.#
- He pulled the punch when asked about a second order Hillary Clinton coverup, and was applauded. But the scandal (however minor, relatively) pointed to a real and repeated issue for the candidate, and a more eager opponent seized on it to decisive effect in the general election. #
- He put his friendship with Joe Biden over his opposition to much of what Biden stood for, and refused to meaningfully draw contrasts between his (often much more popular) positions and Biden’s. This despite accepting huge amounts of individual donations from ordinary people who wanted him to win. In the end the establishment (of course) still conspired against his candidacy to an extraordinary degree, for the second time. #
- None of which is to say he’s a bad person or politician — he’s admirable, in fact — but he’s not a good model for a winning leftist presidential candidate. To be honest someone like that will resemble Trump in many aspects of their campaign approach, along with Bernie and others. #
- The example of Finland in 1917/1918 makes clear the cost of niceties, decorum, and using ego and precious maxims to guide tactics. It is a ruin. #
Lotta strands in old Duder’s head. #
- A pundit the other day accurately referred to one of the U.S’s most recent wars as “debased.�� I think that’s also an accurate way to refer to the state of our nation right now. #
- I think the path toward restoring unity and progress in my country runs inevitably through massive improvements in how we collectively synthesize and communicate information. We need a much more trustworthy process for distributing knowledge. #
- The current stage of our pandemic is obviously fueled by poor knowledge transfer. It’s not just the misinformation available online — it’s also the way the drugs industry has indeed corrupted our medical establishment and regulatory system, the history of deception by our elected officials, the history of basic errors by journalists, and the poor quality of medical journalism, including routinely failing to provide context for studies and events. Even if journalists and authorities happen to be right about the vaccine (which for the record they mostly are), the history of being very wrong in other contexts (like opioids) lends credence to bad information. #
- Starting twenty years ago, two successive national hysterias, and a stream of misinformation from authorities, coupled with poor fact checking by journalists, led us into two misguided wars (only one brave politician dared oppose the first). #
- Every election I have been alive for expresses the fundamental dysfunction in this country between poorly communicated truths and misleading or outright false information propagated by the corrupt and unwitting. The reason money plays such a large role in our political process is that truth is so fungible in this country — political ads gain power as trust in various informational institutions (like journalism) erodes, often for good reason. #
- For many years I focused on the journalism industry, because I know first hand it has a huge problem with quality, including accuracy and other nuance, and other elements of trust. It is also poor at clarity, context, and providing information with greater shelf life. #
- But I now see this problem goes beyond any one industry. We are collectively responsible for educating one another, and education is a lifetime thing. That word doesn’t just mean schools. As Philip Greenspun began teaching us in the late 1990s, education is a huge part of what happens on all kinds of websites and other information systems. Journalism, when done well, is education. Ditto Wikipedia, StackOverflow, SeriousEats, and many more entities. #
- In California, where I lived for many years, the government subsidizes continuing education for adults through a strong community college system (and excellent two tier system of four year universities). #
- In other countries, the government owns and funds news media, including public television networks. They even fund political campaigns, while capping or forbidding donations and limiting expenditures. #
- Journalism in this country has, and has long had, a massive quality problem. It is basically run by people too hidebound and insulated to care, even 25+ years into the age of mass internet (they do care even more now about clicks, views, ratings, and selling hard to cancel subscriptions, for better or worse). #
- But this country doesn’t need to rely nearly so much on journalists any longer, just as it doesn’t need to rely so much on tv networks, cable networks, or YouTube. With the right efforts, funding, and focus, this country from the government down can rehabilitate its information system on a huge scale. I point to some possible areas of focus a bit here but this needs everyone’s imagination and effort. It would be very good for this country and is long overdue. #
- PS The work Dave has been doing building and advocating open platforms and formats for many years is going to be an important part any healthy change to our information system, from where I sit, key to all this. (In fact to me this goes without saying, but I should probably say it.)#
- Kristen Breitweiser lost her husband 20 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. The activism she has done since has been remarkable. Through meticulous research and tenacious work pushing Congress and the national security establishment, she and fellow 9/11 families sparked the creation of the 9/11 commission and helped enact a series of federal reforms. #
- Today at The Intercept we publish her call to unseal intelligence to bring 9/11 co-conspirators to trial. She points out that for all the infringement of civil liberties since 9/11, for all the torture and war, which she condemns, not one 9/11 conspirator has been fully prosecuted in our courts. In fact, the “bare knuckle” treatment of prisoners has actually hindered the pursuit of actual justice for victims’ families. #
- It is a powerful piece by a relentless person with hard-won wisdom: #
- My Husband Died on 9/11. I Am Still Waiting for a Trial of His Killers. #
Terry Albury: “The reality of what I was a part of hit me in a way that just shattered my existence. There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the F.B.I., that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin. And I did that. I helped destroy people. For 17 years.”#
- These past two days have been the most beautiful in NYC this year. Many of my fellow local journalists seem to have spent them denouncing people on Twitter. My kids pulled me out of all that. They wanted to join me on my daily run. Nothing like pushing a double-wide stroller around Prospect Park at 6mph to snap you back into sunny, sweaty reality!#
- It also helped that I had a 5am shift at the local co-op. Up at 3:30, and walking through Park Slope in the wake of Ida an hour later. The low ebb of the neighborhood at that hour is lovely. Not empty, just slow, even peaceful, which you don't get much, even in Brooklyn, even in the park. Anyway, apparently the co-op's basement, where the food backstock is kept, flooded during the storm. Not the worst impact of the storm by a long shot, some New Yorkers lost their lives. #
- At the co-op, the water didn't touch the food because everything is kept at least six inches off the floor, usually on plastic pallets that are everywhere down there. They had drained it by the time my shift started, but were still dealing with the residual water. Eventually they'd have to clean the floors with bleach. But it was too early for any of us member workers to help. The truck traffic (my job is usually unloading pallets of produce coming off the trucks) was light due to the weather, and pecifically due to accidents that backed up post-storm traffic. #
- This is pretty much my life — the square mile or so around my apartment in south Park Slope ("South Slope") Brooklyn. I love it. This sort of focus is very healthy for me. The pandemic has intensified these confines, which can feel claustrophobic, mostly within the walls of my apartment, and only from time to time. But one thing I've learned about New York in the seven years since I moved here is that most New Yorkers live "small" lives, geographically, like this, even before the pandemic. It doesn't mean your life isn't very rich and "big" in other ways. But until I moved here I had no idea how far 10 blocks really feels, once you live here. That's maybe a 10 minute walk. At a certain point you develop this attitude of, "how much better could something be, some store or restaurant or whatever, that it's worth going beyond the three or four blocks I'm really comfortable visiting?" Especially when in those three or four blocks, in New York, there can be quite a lot.#
- I like to think I picked a good little area for myself. South Slope still has a soul. Pete Hamill, whose journalism inspired me when I was kid, grew up two blocks down, and briefly lived about a block up my street. He wrote a whole memoir about this neighborhood (and about his relationship with alcohol). My landlord, who must be 90, knew Pete since they were kids. You won't find many New Yorkers who will speak well of their landlords, but mine is a decent guy, at least these days, who helped promote and develop this corner of Brooklyn. There is a great gym across the street at the old armory, a spectacular YMCA, that our outgoing mayor had a hand in saving, and where I was sort saved myself, although that's a story for another day. We have three great bars, which is important, each distinctively great - the Double Windsor for good food and beer and people a little like me; Farrell's, the oldest bar, and with a crowd of people a little unlike me (a lot of cops, for example); and American Cheese, a total dive that's open late. #
- There's Cafe Grumpy, my coffee shop since our first morning here, fresh off a cab ride from JFK, with a seventh month old and no plates or silverware, our coffee pot left behind in Berkeley.#
- And then there's the park, the irreplaceable Prospect Park. And the co-op. And the new cheese store. And the new bakery that's the one thing the food critics like in our neighborhood (it is indeed good). And on and on. It's nice to have a neighborhood. Sure beats Twitter.#
- When I was in college I used to read Dave Winer's Scripting News. I'd read his DaveNet email newsletter, and his Wired column of the same name. The term "blog" did not exist yet, but I knew I wanted something like Scripting News. I wanted it for my college paper, where I was an editor (eventually the editor in chief), and I wanted it for myself. #
- Recently, amid a lot of toxicity on Twitter, and feeling the need for some kind of outlet in my middle age (midlife crisis blogging?), I started to look for a way to blog in that Scripting News style, where you don't need to give everything a headline like on most blogging tools, and where it's wired up to a good easy authoring environment, like an outliner. But also where you can give more depth and context than on $#%ing Twitter. I didn't really find it and made some plans to build something myself some day, maybe, eventually....#
- Then I saw Dave has a new tool, built to write Scripting News style. I saw this.... on Scripting News. Which is 25 years old, give or take!#
- Today, I finally have it for myself. Two decades in, I can blog like Scripting News. Cooool.#
- There is a big temptation for computer geeks like me to bikeshed — I think that word means, like, faff around — with blogging software. Like when I started to learn about tis new tool, Drummer, I started thinking thoughts like#
- Can I make this run on my own domain name?#
- How do I customize the header image?#
- Can I make a new name for the blog, not just "blog?"#
- I'm sure I can and will "fix" some of this stuff in time. But also, who &$(*ing cares? For my ego it would be nice if it was on ryantate.com with a custom image blah blah blah. But I'd waste a lot of time and energy instead of just writing. So today I tried just writing. I think it went pretty well. Whether the writing is any good or interesting to anyone is another question. But at least I didn't faff around with tool sh*t. I wrote. I used the blog tool to blog. Mission accomplished.#
- PS My other blog (prior blog?) is here. Even older posts are here.#
- PPS I did eventually figure out how to make a new name for the blog.#
- PPPS Dave says the answer to the questions above is "yes" for each.#
I updated my website to fix a broken URL, restoring my 11-year-old app that makes convenience bookmarklets for the bookmaking service Pinboard. The app and bookmarklets still work, if you're logged in to Pinboard. The app is built on Perl and the bookmarklet is built on the Javascript library Jquery (an old version, I'm sure) and everything still just works. My URL was broken because I migrated hosts without remembering to install two perl modules (two easy commands on the server to fix that). It's nice to know that some platforms age gracefully. Perl did not break my app, not did the authors of the Perl modules I built it on. Jquery continues to resolve its old library URL, Pinboard continues to resolve its bookmarklet URLs (which are API calls). On the Web, this is no small thing (unfortunately). #
It is beautiful and crisp in New York” this morning. And quiet. I love calm days in New York. And I love days without much on the agenda. We have cheeses, chips and guacamole, hummus and veg. We’ll throw a duck in the oven later and make some mushroom pasta and roast potatoes for the vegetarians. #- Obviously I’ll keep an eye on things as we all do but right now the science for a healthy adult under 50 to get a Covid booster looks weak to me. The CDC permits these boosters but (for healthy adults under 50) does not recommend them. (Update - This has changed, see below.) Said a New York Times story six days ago:#
- The extra shots are unlikely to offer much benefit to adults under 65, who remain protected from severe illness and hospitalization by the initial immunization, the experts said. #
- “Overall protection remains high for severe disease and hospitalization,” said Dr. Sara Oliver, an epidemiologist at the C.D.C., told the scientific advisers meeting on Friday. #
- Wrote former longtime NYT health reporter Donald McNeil last month: #
- Dr. Michael J. Ryan, the widely admired head of the W.H.O.’s emergency program, has acidly observed that booster doses amount to “handing out extra lifejackets to people who already have lifejackets while leaving others to drown.”#
- Although he is correct, most Americans are convinced that their lifejackets are leaky. Speaking rationally to them is no more effective than speaking rationally to vaccine denialists.#
- McNeil does think the effectiveness of the original vaccine will eventually wane for non seniors so it’s something I will keep an eye on. For all the issues surrounding my shot — J&J — its profile was one of strengthening protection in the initial months rather than diminishing protection. As a UCSF infectious disease expert put it, “After one dose, across all populations, even in older people, the antibody response and T-cell response were excellent and increased over time.” A lot of people underestimate the J&J vaccine. #
- I want my health decisions to be guided by reason rather than fear. #
- Update, Jan. 21: After the CDC strengthened its position on boosters for healthy adults under 50, I went ahead (a couple of weeks ago) and got the shot at a local independent pharmacy (which on a weekday took less than 10 minutes to complete the whole appointment, and maybe 1-2 minutes to receive the actual shot). Today NYT reports on a study showing:#
- "Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization with the Omicron variant fell to just 57 percent in people who had received their second dose more than six months earlier, the authors found. A third shot restored that protection to 90 percent."#
- #
- For some definition of “small.” :-)#
- Today I’m reading about datalog, which (in some applications at least) is a much less popular competitor to SQL, the language and keystone of an implementation of relational algebra that drives most online data storage today. Some of the ideas in datalog resemble things I’ve heard associated with RDF and the Semantic Web, two technologies that are somewhat marginalized in the context of the web at large, but with some very sharp and accomplished enthusiasts (Rich Hickey, the charismatic inventor of Clojure, refers positively to RDF in several of his talks, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, is also behind Semantic Web). #
- Thinking about this particular type of marginalization — where lack of popularity is conflated with lack of intellectual merit, or looked at differently, where the fancy of an elite fails to gain near term traction in the marketplace — reminds me of reading Time magazine as a teenager in the early 90s. In particular, the issues and articles exploring how communications would be digitized. #
- In Time, the internet was literally marginalized. I remember it had a little box in the margins of a much bigger article that was mostly about how the cable companies were going to invent an “Information Superhighway.” There was also a lot of space devoted to other big corporations that might beat them to it, like the phone companies, or medium sized businesses who might do it, like Microsoft or AOL (Microsoft was smaller then). #
- The little internet box in the margins of Time’s article about the future of communications treated this global network as a curiosity. Even back then it was actually doing more of the things people imagined from an “Information Superhighway” than anything from the cable or phone companies. But it wasn’t popular enough to be taken seriously. Only academics and certain computer and defense researchers — only some of the smartest most experienced information technologists in the country, in other words — were on the internet or cared much about it. It wasn’t flashy at this point either. It was almost all text — telnet, gopher, ftp, WAIS, Usenet, email — these were all text systems. If you used them, you could probably imagine something like the web we have today. Berners-Lee, who was at a particle physics lab called CERN, imagined this and he wasn’t the only academic to do so. But to an outsider all these predecessor technologies looked geeky, hard to use, and maybe a little boring. “Oh boy, I can see what books the university library has from across town or the other side of the world. Huzzah.”#
- The box specifically focused on how the internet was popular at universities and challenging to use for novices. It talked about the text interfaces, open protocols, diversity of information, global reach, and panoply of technologies. It noted that it had been around for a long time. It wasn’t rude about the internet, and was clearly written by someone who knew it. But the context and subtext made clear the implied takeaway — this is a geeky toy that hasn’t gone anywhere and isn’t flashy or graphical or easy enough for the masses. #
- It’s funny how I remember this so clearly decades later. But I was curious about this stuff. My dad took me to a Mac user group meeting or two at UCSD and at one of them I saw demos of HyperCard stacks on CD ROMs and I felt like I was looking at the future of journalism and publishing and information flow and was very excited about it. #
- There is a former Sun engineer named Bryan Cantrill who has spoken about the power of a small focused group in today’s technology landscape. The internet can make you feel very small and unpopular (the other person has 3M followers or 5000 likes or 400 GitHub stars and you have very few especially in comparison). But it also connects dedicated small groups and enables them to work together very very well, especially now. Bryan talked about this in the context of SmartOS, a great little server operating system, and the BSD variants, three Unix derivatives that compete with the much more popular Linux. #
- I think the replacement for Twitter and Facebook will come from a small group like this. More importantly, things we cannot anticipate, in this information sharing space but in various other spaces, will also come from small smart groups that look like they are playing with toys for extreme geeks or other people at the margins. Being smart is not always enough to invent a better solution to a problem, but neither is being popular, big, or rich. Dedication matters, persistence matters, time matters, and openness matters. As Chris Rock once said, life isn’t short, life is [annoyed tone] loooooooong. #
- One of the reasons I've been thinking about Facebook today is that Instagram blocked a post of mine yesterday and it really pissed me off. #
- Instagram, for me, has been a rare bright spot in going online over the past few years. Not due to anything the company has done really but because I have some kind and generous friends and colleagues on there who send positive vibes (or at least "likes", haha) when I post pictures, mostly of my kids.#
- Instagram seems to have created a positive space, with its focus on pictures and, admittedly, with some of its UI decisions. A positive space at least for some users, like me.#
- Anyway Instagram decided a picture of my 4 and 7 year olds shirtless in public in Brooklyn was unacceptable nudity and blocked it. I clicked some "appeal" button then immediatley posted a picture of a note, telling my friends I would be deleting my account soon because of this.#
- I then did some digging into Facebook's "community guidelines" and found that technically I did break the rules! You are not allowed to post any "uncovered female nipple" from a child. Even for a 4 and 7 year old outside on a summer day cooling off the way boys are free to do. I find that sexist and dumb.#
- Then an unexpected thing happened, the appeal worked basically instantly and my photos went up. So I sheepishly deleted my "I'm leaving Instagram" note, calculating that I get a little more emotionally out of Instagram, as of today, than it drains from me.#
- The next day I got a nice Instagram mention from my fitness instructor, who I think is just great.#
- What a melodrama! I resent even that I care enough to write a post like this. I hate being in the position of having to care what a corporation thinks about a picture I took of my kid in public. I hate that we as users have to constantly do cost/benefit calculations about whether it's worth the humiliations doled out by so many big platforms. Do I quit Amazon because they censored the review where I said "this [cheap] caviar is great but turned my poop blue"? (True story!) Do I quit Apple because they might report me to the cops for that same picture of my kids, if and only if I have iCloud Photo turned on? Do I use Amazon Web Services even though they were among the first to sell out Julian Assange?#
- Anyway, all this is a way of saying, if a worthwhile effort comes along to make an open nice version of Instagram, I'm definitely helping out. How hard can it be? :-) #
- (very hard)#
- Since my previous burst of blogging in September I edited this story at The Intercept where we published Facebook's blacklist of banned people and groups and dove into how this list works and more importantly how it affects people not on the list (you can't praise certain people on the list, but the list itself has been secret).#
- Since that came out, I've been talking to people internally and externally about this story and (of course) about Facebook more generally , including the recent group journalism project around some secret Facebook documents released by a whistleblower who used to work at the company.#
- One theme that comes up over and over is that it's frustrating people have to care so much about how Facebook behaves, including its rules on what it bans and allows, and how well or poorly it enforces those rules, and about its privacy practices, etc etc.#
- We have to care because the open web has not caught up to Facebook (~17 years after its founding), which is to say, we as a society have not, in an open and sustainable way, caught up to Facebook. People feel trapped on Facebook, or trapped into talking about and caring about Facebook, and it becomes like pressure in an Instant Pot. It's a huge powerful thing, which causes people to get worked up about it.#
- Key point, if there were enough competition for Facebook, and if there were more open formats and systems for sharing information across social networks, and standards that made it easier to build new social networks, and maybe if there were some laws ensuring we could control and transport our personal data in an interoperable way — in this fantasy world, so many people wouldn't need to get so exercised about Facebook. I honestly don't want anyone telling a private company (or nonprofit, or group of friends, or church, or bowling league, or whatever) who they should be banning or even (most of the time) who they should not be banning.#
- I agree with the critics who say that journalists as a group have been way too eager to egg on censorship on Facebook and other platforms, and reductive in talking about how Facebook is used. The solution will never come from Facebook, or from focusing on Facebook. It will come from all of us collectively — at the level of policy, technology, and civil society, at minimum.#
- I enjoy Drummer but I'm not a big fan of this change, which makes blogging in Drummer less fun for me. #
- Background: Drummer is an outline based blogging system. You create an outline in the web app, then publish it. I love this. You can just fluidly drag things to re-arrange them. To make a new post you could literally just hit the Enter key which is right there on your keyboard. You could take a tangent four levels down in a post and just quickly drag it up to the top level so it becomes its own post. It felt powerful and cool.#
- With this change, you need to click a special "plus" icon to make a part of the outline be on the web. Otherwise, if you just hit enter, or drag some part of another outline up so it's a the top level, it won't publish for some reason. I'm not sure the reasoning behind the change, maybe because I was away from Drummer for a bit.#
- I miss the fluidity. This change to me makes Drummer feel less like outlining, which I love, and more like regular modal blogging software, which I don't so much love :-)#
- On September 18, I wrote that I was surprised blogging platforms don't detect when one of your posts is mentioned elsewhere and notify you, in the manner of Twitter's mentions pane. Andy Sylvester, a developer, helpfully pointed me at a w3c recommendation called Webmention, which calls itself "a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site.#
- Well, I guess I find Webmention not simple enough :-)#
- In my original post, I linked the HTTP referrer header, because it seems like this should be enough for someone to create a mentions pane with. Browsers supported this for years. It told the destination web server which page you came from, if you clicked a link on that page. But apparently the only people who really used it were advertising brokers and others who prey on privacy, so now it's been basically disabled, browsers only send the top level domain that linked to you, not the path to the specific post / content. #
- And if you want this functionality that was baked into the web from the start, you have to rebuild the infrastructure yourself with something like Webmentions. I find it a little depressing.#
- Oh well. #
- Anyway, silver lining, if I understand correctly, a website can opt-in to real referrers again, setting a header that will cause browsers to send the full path when a user clicks a link on that site. That seems easier than setting up the sending of Webmentions, but doesn't help you properly detect inbound mentions.#
- PS Webmentions were created presumably because they are richer. The spec says "a response can be an RSVP to an event, an indication that someone 'likes' another post, a 'bookmark' of another post, and many others." Sounds complicated.#
- PPS Andy Sylvester has a Drummer blog. Thank you Andy.#
I updated the header image on this blog. That's where I was on vacation the month I started blogging in Drummer. You can perhaps imagine why I was so prolific :-)#
Taibbi: “All over, ‘smart’ lost its luster. ‘Smart’ bombs turned out mainly to be efficient machines for creating civilian casualties, ‘intelligence’ became a synonym for grotesque security oversights and mass law-breaking, and commercial media especially became a place where the ordinary person could see the almost total moral uselessness of advanced degrees. In one of Sandel’s most interesting passages, he talks about the conclusions the average person drew from watching the increasing vapidity of ‘ what passes for political argument’ in public discourse: ‘Citizens across the political spectrum find this empty public discourse frustrating and disempowering. They rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view…’”#
Dave: Facebook is at least seven things. Journalists don’t distinguish. (Me: I think it’s worse than that. I think journalists for the most part ignore the user community, except when they can use it to tell a preconceived story, for example about disinformation. I think Facebook’s connections to the rest of the web barely register as a story, except when news publications are suffering. The story of how Facebook impacts communities at a human level is very interesting but will require time and patience that is mostly lacking in journalism.)#
- It’s interesting to me that Twitter can tell me whenever someone mentions my tweet, but no blog or web platform can tell me when someone mentions a post, even though the enabling technology is baked into the web. #
- It’s also interesting to me that I wasn’t able to find a namespace extension to RSS for likes or re-shares, even though these have become ubiquitous online social patterns, even implemented on some blogging platforms. I’m surprised no one has created this. (It makes sense it wasn’t built in when RSS started, because the social platforms and patterns didn’t exist yet. But there is a namespace extension mechanism, and at least one “social” open format (namespace?) adopted once by some blog platforms, though it does not do likes or re-shares.)#
- (None of this is a complaint about this or any other blog platform. I’m just surprised it has not been done. When I used to think about building my own publishing platform this was a feature I envisioned. Maybe I can build it some day, maybe as an extension to something else.)#
Leighton Woodhouse: “Foucault … believed that the modern state is not an edifice that looms, metaphorically, over its citizens, as it was in the feudal era, but one that permeates us through our culture, in our daily lives, in our very minds. It’s generated from within the society that the state is tasked with administering — specifically, by its intelligentsia.�� #
- I’ve been reading a very good book about Finnish independence and civil war. Time after time, the Reds snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For all their talk of revolution, they were too timid to enact one. They wanted history to take care of it for them (as they believed their their guiding Marxist theories foretold). Their biggest mistake was backing down from the general strike that preceded and helped precipitate the civil war. They had a genuine surge of worker revolutionary sentiment on their hands. Instead of feeling empowered, they felt scared. Fundamentally, they did not trust the workers. Fundamentally, at all pivotal moments, they acted like the bourgeoisie they supposedly wanted to overthrow. #
- (I’m talking here specifically of the socialist political leadership, mostly the SDP elite. The revolutionary workers councils and red guards and union members were all much more strident, although at one key moment one of the councils did lose its nerve as well, as I recall.)#
- This makes me think of Bernie Sanders. In his backbone and ideological consistency, Sanders is a giant among senators and within the whole Congress. As a presidential candidate he repeatedly prioritized preserving personal relationships and his self conception — what I believe he’d call his principles — over winning.#
- He pulled the punch when asked about a second order Hillary Clinton coverup, and was applauded. But the scandal (however minor, relatively) pointed to a real and repeated issue for the candidate, and a more eager opponent seized on it to decisive effect in the general election. #
- He put his friendship with Joe Biden over his opposition to much of what Biden stood for, and refused to meaningfully draw contrasts between his (often much more popular) positions and Biden’s. This despite accepting huge amounts of individual donations from ordinary people who wanted him to win. In the end the establishment (of course) still conspired against his candidacy to an extraordinary degree, for the second time. #
- None of which is to say he’s a bad person or politician — he’s admirable, in fact — but he’s not a good model for a winning leftist presidential candidate. To be honest someone like that will resemble Trump in many aspects of their campaign approach, along with Bernie and others. #
- The example of Finland in 1917/1918 makes clear the cost of niceties, decorum, and using ego and precious maxims to guide tactics. It is a ruin. #
Lotta strands in old Duder’s head. #
- A pundit the other day accurately referred to one of the U.S’s most recent wars as “debased.�� I think that’s also an accurate way to refer to the state of our nation right now. #
- I think the path toward restoring unity and progress in my country runs inevitably through massive improvements in how we collectively synthesize and communicate information. We need a much more trustworthy process for distributing knowledge. #
- The current stage of our pandemic is obviously fueled by poor knowledge transfer. It’s not just the misinformation available online — it’s also the way the drugs industry has indeed corrupted our medical establishment and regulatory system, the history of deception by our elected officials, the history of basic errors by journalists, and the poor quality of medical journalism, including routinely failing to provide context for studies and events. Even if journalists and authorities happen to be right about the vaccine (which for the record they mostly are), the history of being very wrong in other contexts (like opioids) lends credence to bad information. #
- Starting twenty years ago, two successive national hysterias, and a stream of misinformation from authorities, coupled with poor fact checking by journalists, led us into two misguided wars (only one brave politician dared oppose the first). #
- Every election I have been alive for expresses the fundamental dysfunction in this country between poorly communicated truths and misleading or outright false information propagated by the corrupt and unwitting. The reason money plays such a large role in our political process is that truth is so fungible in this country — political ads gain power as trust in various informational institutions (like journalism) erodes, often for good reason. #
- For many years I focused on the journalism industry, because I know first hand it has a huge problem with quality, including accuracy and other nuance, and other elements of trust. It is also poor at clarity, context, and providing information with greater shelf life. #
- But I now see this problem goes beyond any one industry. We are collectively responsible for educating one another, and education is a lifetime thing. That word doesn’t just mean schools. As Philip Greenspun began teaching us in the late 1990s, education is a huge part of what happens on all kinds of websites and other information systems. Journalism, when done well, is education. Ditto Wikipedia, StackOverflow, SeriousEats, and many more entities. #
- In California, where I lived for many years, the government subsidizes continuing education for adults through a strong community college system (and excellent two tier system of four year universities). #
- In other countries, the government owns and funds news media, including public television networks. They even fund political campaigns, while capping or forbidding donations and limiting expenditures. #
- Journalism in this country has, and has long had, a massive quality problem. It is basically run by people too hidebound and insulated to care, even 25+ years into the age of mass internet (they do care even more now about clicks, views, ratings, and selling hard to cancel subscriptions, for better or worse). #
- But this country doesn’t need to rely nearly so much on journalists any longer, just as it doesn’t need to rely so much on tv networks, cable networks, or YouTube. With the right efforts, funding, and focus, this country from the government down can rehabilitate its information system on a huge scale. I point to some possible areas of focus a bit here but this needs everyone’s imagination and effort. It would be very good for this country and is long overdue. #
- PS The work Dave has been doing building and advocating open platforms and formats for many years is going to be an important part any healthy change to our information system, from where I sit, key to all this. (In fact to me this goes without saying, but I should probably say it.)#
- Kristen Breitweiser lost her husband 20 years ago in the 9/11 attacks. The activism she has done since has been remarkable. Through meticulous research and tenacious work pushing Congress and the national security establishment, she and fellow 9/11 families sparked the creation of the 9/11 commission and helped enact a series of federal reforms. #
- Today at The Intercept we publish her call to unseal intelligence to bring 9/11 co-conspirators to trial. She points out that for all the infringement of civil liberties since 9/11, for all the torture and war, which she condemns, not one 9/11 conspirator has been fully prosecuted in our courts. In fact, the “bare knuckle” treatment of prisoners has actually hindered the pursuit of actual justice for victims’ families. #
- It is a powerful piece by a relentless person with hard-won wisdom: #
- My Husband Died on 9/11. I Am Still Waiting for a Trial of His Killers. #
Terry Albury: “The reality of what I was a part of hit me in a way that just shattered my existence. There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the F.B.I., that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin. And I did that. I helped destroy people. For 17 years.”#
- These past two days have been the most beautiful in NYC this year. Many of my fellow local journalists seem to have spent them denouncing people on Twitter. My kids pulled me out of all that. They wanted to join me on my daily run. Nothing like pushing a double-wide stroller around Prospect Park at 6mph to snap you back into sunny, sweaty reality!#
- It also helped that I had a 5am shift at the local co-op. Up at 3:30, and walking through Park Slope in the wake of Ida an hour later. The low ebb of the neighborhood at that hour is lovely. Not empty, just slow, even peaceful, which you don't get much, even in Brooklyn, even in the park. Anyway, apparently the co-op's basement, where the food backstock is kept, flooded during the storm. Not the worst impact of the storm by a long shot, some New Yorkers lost their lives. #
- At the co-op, the water didn't touch the food because everything is kept at least six inches off the floor, usually on plastic pallets that are everywhere down there. They had drained it by the time my shift started, but were still dealing with the residual water. Eventually they'd have to clean the floors with bleach. But it was too early for any of us member workers to help. The truck traffic (my job is usually unloading pallets of produce coming off the trucks) was light due to the weather, and pecifically due to accidents that backed up post-storm traffic. #
- This is pretty much my life — the square mile or so around my apartment in south Park Slope ("South Slope") Brooklyn. I love it. This sort of focus is very healthy for me. The pandemic has intensified these confines, which can feel claustrophobic, mostly within the walls of my apartment, and only from time to time. But one thing I've learned about New York in the seven years since I moved here is that most New Yorkers live "small" lives, geographically, like this, even before the pandemic. It doesn't mean your life isn't very rich and "big" in other ways. But until I moved here I had no idea how far 10 blocks really feels, once you live here. That's maybe a 10 minute walk. At a certain point you develop this attitude of, "how much better could something be, some store or restaurant or whatever, that it's worth going beyond the three or four blocks I'm really comfortable visiting?" Especially when in those three or four blocks, in New York, there can be quite a lot.#
- I like to think I picked a good little area for myself. South Slope still has a soul. Pete Hamill, whose journalism inspired me when I was kid, grew up two blocks down, and briefly lived about a block up my street. He wrote a whole memoir about this neighborhood (and about his relationship with alcohol). My landlord, who must be 90, knew Pete since they were kids. You won't find many New Yorkers who will speak well of their landlords, but mine is a decent guy, at least these days, who helped promote and develop this corner of Brooklyn. There is a great gym across the street at the old armory, a spectacular YMCA, that our outgoing mayor had a hand in saving, and where I was sort saved myself, although that's a story for another day. We have three great bars, which is important, each distinctively great - the Double Windsor for good food and beer and people a little like me; Farrell's, the oldest bar, and with a crowd of people a little unlike me (a lot of cops, for example); and American Cheese, a total dive that's open late. #
- There's Cafe Grumpy, my coffee shop since our first morning here, fresh off a cab ride from JFK, with a seventh month old and no plates or silverware, our coffee pot left behind in Berkeley.#
- And then there's the park, the irreplaceable Prospect Park. And the co-op. And the new cheese store. And the new bakery that's the one thing the food critics like in our neighborhood (it is indeed good). And on and on. It's nice to have a neighborhood. Sure beats Twitter.#
- When I was in college I used to read Dave Winer's Scripting News. I'd read his DaveNet email newsletter, and his Wired column of the same name. The term "blog" did not exist yet, but I knew I wanted something like Scripting News. I wanted it for my college paper, where I was an editor (eventually the editor in chief), and I wanted it for myself. #
- Recently, amid a lot of toxicity on Twitter, and feeling the need for some kind of outlet in my middle age (midlife crisis blogging?), I started to look for a way to blog in that Scripting News style, where you don't need to give everything a headline like on most blogging tools, and where it's wired up to a good easy authoring environment, like an outliner. But also where you can give more depth and context than on $#%ing Twitter. I didn't really find it and made some plans to build something myself some day, maybe, eventually....#
- Then I saw Dave has a new tool, built to write Scripting News style. I saw this.... on Scripting News. Which is 25 years old, give or take!#
- Today, I finally have it for myself. Two decades in, I can blog like Scripting News. Cooool.#
- There is a big temptation for computer geeks like me to bikeshed — I think that word means, like, faff around — with blogging software. Like when I started to learn about tis new tool, Drummer, I started thinking thoughts like#
- Can I make this run on my own domain name?#
- How do I customize the header image?#
- Can I make a new name for the blog, not just "blog?"#
- I'm sure I can and will "fix" some of this stuff in time. But also, who &$(*ing cares? For my ego it would be nice if it was on ryantate.com with a custom image blah blah blah. But I'd waste a lot of time and energy instead of just writing. So today I tried just writing. I think it went pretty well. Whether the writing is any good or interesting to anyone is another question. But at least I didn't faff around with tool sh*t. I wrote. I used the blog tool to blog. Mission accomplished.#
- PS My other blog (prior blog?) is here. Even older posts are here.#
- PPS I did eventually figure out how to make a new name for the blog.#
- PPPS Dave says the answer to the questions above is "yes" for each.#