daveverse

Dave's WordPress home in the Fediverse :-)

Blog: https://daveverse.wordpress.com/

Last Notes

2025-01-22 13:22:43 GMT

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I own a Tesla, it’s time to divest[Mark Cuban asked](https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lgbutbllnk2b ) for ideas of things we can we do to make things better over the short term.
Here's one. As a [Tesla Model Y owner](https://daytona.scripting.com/search?q=tesla ), I've had enough. I'm a child of Holocaust survivors. Musk doing a Nazi salute behind the seal of the president is too much. In memory of my parents and grandparents, I have to do something.
Thus the question, how do I get rid of the car, so that it doesn't become someone else's car. To remove one Tesla car from the road, in a way that might inspire others to do the same. I'd like to communicate to other Tesla owners and Tesla shareholders that it's past time to stop supporting this company.
The best answer I've come up with so far is a program where the car is disassembled and recycled, and the parts are not sold to Tesla.
I don't now the business reality of this, but if I could be certain the car would disassembled and the parts recycled, I would contribute it without expecting any money in return. I would be willing to take a total loss.

2024-12-15 09:43:44 GMT

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AOC #1 kickass DemThe other day I asked which Dems kick ass, the #1 response was AOC.
When I heard her speech at this year’s DNC I said I hope I get to vote for her someday for something. Since I live in ny state that could be for Senator or governor or vice president or president hopefully in 2028, Murphy-willing. 🤪
#1

2024-11-25 17:29:39 GMT

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Tariffs don’t necessarily get passed on to consumersA tariff makes a product more expensive to make, not necessarily more expensive to buy. A manufacturer who was already making a large per-unit profit might choose to accept less instead of losing market share.
Only if a vendor feels safe in their share of market will they automatically raise prices for their customers.
Sometimes companies even sell products at a loss if they want to make it diseconomic for smaller competitors with less ability to lose money.

2024-11-15 14:53:44 GMT

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The idea behind WordLandI imagined the kind of text editor I’d want in Twitter, Masto, Bluesky, Threads, etc — rather than the [tiny little text boxes](http://scripting.com/2024/01/14/031201.html ) they provide.
What features would I want, and how would it work. That’s what [WordLand](https://this.how/wordland/ ) is.
If you look at the [textcasting](https://textcasting.org/ ) doc, that’s the basic feature set. But as you can see, the editor is still quite simple, and easy to write in.
There are also features that make it easy to manage a library of documents, so you don’t lose track of the things you’ve written. That’s one of the problems of social web apps. You can’t find anything you’ve written, in case you want to make a change. And we also assume you can edit the things you’ve written, because that’s what writers do.

2024-11-13 23:04:28 GMT

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This is a test of imagesI seem to have uploading of images working. And even better I can paste them into my blog posts here. I am a happy camper. Only took three days. Hopefully I never have to do this again.

2024-11-08 08:44:22 GMT

Prediction: owning a twitterlike system will be like owning a big sports franchise or congressperson, or if you got in early, a president. A more functional trophy than a super yacht for the up and coming billionaire.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/11/08/401/

2024-11-05 18:52:55 GMT

The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn’t share. I certainly understand that.
Then I realized, as often is the case, that I could do myself what I had been asking others to do. And in fact I already was sharing my OPML subscription lists, but people who didn’t use [FeedLand](https://feedland.org/ ) wouldn’t know [how to find](https://imgs.scripting.com/2024/11/04/whereTheOpmlLinkIsInFeedland.png ) them. So I decided to make it easier.
On [lists.opml.org](https://lists.opml.org/ ) I’ve got a link to the [lists of podcasts](http://scripting.com/publicfolder/feedland/subscriptionLists/podcasts.opml ) I’m subscribed to. That list should update every hour for any additions or removals from this list. I don’t update the list very often, fwiw.
I make no warranties about the quality of the podcasts, or when the feeds in the list update. And maybe this will give other people an idea that they might want to do this as well. Let me know if you do, I’d love to see what you do.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/11/05/sharing-my-list-of-podcasts/

2024-11-02 22:06:54 GMT

Programming language design should follow the half of [Postel’s Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle#%3a~%3atext=It%20is%20often%20reworded%20as,an%20early%20specification%20of%20TCP. ) that says be “conservative in what you send.” There should be one way to do anything, not many. That way I can include your code in mine and vice versa. I can understand what you’re doing. Tools can be developed that make it even easier to do things the only way they work. New programming languages if they really are necessary should strive to simplify the programming model, there should be less things for the developer to worry about, the more easily new ideas can be developed, the less attention you have to pay to how you’ll do something over what it does. I actually don’t support the other half of Postel, in everything but user interface where I do support it. I don’t think in general software interfaces should be liberal with what they understand because that defeats the first half. They sort of zero each other out.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/11/02/postel-and-programming-languages/

2024-10-31 15:21:00 GMT

I did the first demo of my new editor to a couple of developers I’m working with on our ActivityPub project, something I’m ever-more-excited about. Happy to say the demo was a success. They appeared to love the product, and for the right reasons.
It makes WordPress into a fantastic writer’s platform. This is what I love to do more than anything. People think I’m most interested in protocols and formats, but that’s just part of it, and not the main part. I love making writing tools. I got interested in that in the late 70s working on editors for programming languages, then ran a company that made the same kind of editor, outliners, for writers, and then with Frontier went back to programmers.
Now I’m trying something new. I want to create a whole category of editors. Editors where none existed before but should be there. The web. Instead what we have in 2024 is a lot of “tiny little text boxes” that hoard your writing making it pointless for developers to compete for writing tools that writers love. So writing on the web remains something that’s not for writers. That’s freaking stupid!
Anyway right in the middle of all this is the perfect product, really a platform — WordPress. It needs 100 great editors. I’m going to provide the first, and the toolkit to create more. Then Murphy-willing I’m going to create another editor, to show that it can be done. Then I’m going to kick back and smell the roses, a lifetime’s work done, so now I can play.
It’s looking like the plan might just work.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/31/382/

2024-10-24 09:42:31 GMT

What a sad situation. What started with the open web in the 90s is now owned by user-hating billionaires, who, looking for new worlds to conquer have adopted a fascist buffoon as their frontman. It was never supposed to be owned by anyone.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/24/it-wasnt-supposed-to-be-owned-by-anyone/

2024-10-12 13:18:27 GMT

I remember when I first arrived in Silicon Valley with a couple of products and after meeting Steve Jobs at Apple, and signing with the company that bought Visicalc, I felt like I had arrived, and quickly found my tribe. These people understand what I do, after trying to get folks at my university, in Madison, to understand. It was great.
But I didn’t understand how thin the competence was. That didn’t come until I had lunch with one of two leading analysts who were the influencers of the day, the ones who acted as gatekeepers for the venture capitalists. This was a couple of years later, I was on my own after the Visicalc company decided my outliner was too weird to stake their rep on.
So I was going to explain to this reputed visionary how my outliner worked and why it was so different from the writing tools other people were marketing. Very quickly I understood that this person had no more understanding of software than my roommates in Madison did. They were smart and educated, but they were English majors or studied agriculture or business. They didn’t understand the first thing about computers, and neither did this gatekeeper. I can’t tell you how disheartening this was. This was a famous person who I’m not going to name.
Later I learned that when Symantec, the company that bought my startup, was thinking about making a product, they’d invite this person to hear the pitch and if they didn’t like or understand it, they wouldn’t make it.
I later learned that the execs at most of the tech companies were similarly clueless on what made software possible, and basic stuff like trading off time for space and vice versa. Yet these people were deciding what software got made.
And then years later when the PC industry was slowing down, and the cursor had moved into the newly invented world wide web, when we were booting up blogging and I was writing for Wired, again — almost no one knew how these things worked and thus had no idea what was possible. It was so weird, I could figure things out, because I had a degree in computer science, and had written at least prototypes of most of the different kinds of software, that were incomprehensible to anyone else I met in the industry. I was always looking for something new these machines could do, but if I wanted to actually make the products, I’d be on my own.
But what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.
PS: This is my second day of kitchen-table blogging using wordLand, WordPress and Mastodon, and I like it even more today than I did yesterday. I have a lot of ideas how to make this work better and even how to build a business on this product. It feels right, and that’s always a good sign.
PPS: Here’s a [link](https://mastodon.social/@npub1v7f…4pgk/113294648507571898) to a location on Mastodon where you can read this piece. That is still evolving, and it will look better soon. And you can of course follow me there, so we don’t have to rely on other social media sites for you to find my latest writing.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/the-web-i-want-vs-the-one-we-have/

2024-10-11 23:17:24 GMT

Summarizing the last 18 years on the web.
Between Twitter and Google Reader, the web was cut into two, and they didn’t get along.
We may now be on the cusp of fixing that.
Why? Because WordPress and Mastodon work with each other in unforeseen ways.
We got lucky, because I don’t think this was done consciously by the developers of either product.
[More here](http://scripting.com/2024/10/11/132736.html?title=theWebLives).
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/the-web-lives-in-wordpress-and-mastodon/

2024-10-11 12:38:40 GMT

I got a lot of shit when FeedLand first came out because it used Twitter for identity. I had been doing that for about eight years, because it was convenient. Almost everyone had a Twitter account, and their developer support was really good, it was easy to create a new app, they didn’t care what you did with it, and their API was er.fine.
But then Elon Musk bought it and people were angry with me — ***me*** — because I used Twitter this way. So I had to do a very quick corner-turn, even so it took a few months, and during that time I was the victim of a lot of hate mail (ask Leo Laporte why he hates me, for example). I worked as fast as I could. The Twitter identity stuff was deeply integrated, and it wasn’t a matter if just swapping out one set of functions and replacing it with another.
So I switched to WordPress for identity, because I was working with Automattic on a project, and I felt even stronger that it was a safe choice, the company had been around for 20 years and as far as I knew had never been controversial. And it worked for a while. Except now they are controversial. Oh my god. Geez Louise. I am not a lawyer. My mother loves me. Etc.
I also added email identity to FeedLand at the time, as a backup, so I wouldn’t have to deal with this again. But I realllllly hope WordPress quiets down and resumes its quiet profile, so it’s safe to build on their systems, which remain strong, liberal, with good performance and reliability.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/i-have-bad-luck-hooking-up-to-platforms/

2024-10-11 12:31:35 GMT

I’m going to start using this wordpress/mastodon site to write some blog posts. Why not?
Here’s an idea. Let’s re-assemble the 1990s blogosphere here in the Mastoverse?
Just occurred to me when one of my old blogger friends from the 90s followed me on Threads. Why do we need Facebook to get us together, and will we ever be satisfied with how they manage our new world? Come on. We know better than that.
Also, we need a shorter way of saying wordpress/mastodon — nothing really jumps out at me. But this really has potential imho.
Love, Dave
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/a-place-for-a-90s-blogospheric-reboot/

2024-10-08 17:25:34 GMT

WordLand is where writers write for WordPress and the open web.
A better way to write. A new future where web writing is easy and fluid, and publishes through the most powerful and widely deployed web CMS.,Flow comes naturally. Every post is automatically added to an easily edited outline of all your posts, which you can organize as you *like. *Easy to write and publish from a phone or *tablet*. Wizzy editing or edit the HTML code. Designed for writers.
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/08/writers-come-first-in-wordland/

2024-10-07 16:48:14 GMT

For the next sixty seconds I will post to the fediverse from my wordpress blog, which is located (on the www) here:
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/
You can follow me in the fediverse at this address.
[email protected]
At this stage it’s not clear to me if I can include HTML, but I couldn’t avoid using HTML when I entered the URL.
WordPress added it on its own.
Now I’m going to take a screen shot and see what I can do with that! WordPress did what I expected when I pasted the image into the post. It’ll be interesting to see if that gets transferred across the ActivityPub bridge. 🙂
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/2024/10/07/my-first-fediversed-post/
https://daveverse.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image.png?w=1024