http://scripting.com/
Scripting News, the weblog started in 1994 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution. 🚀
Updated at: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 13:30:51 GMT
I got an email in the middle of the night asking if I had seen an announcement from Berkman Center at Harvard that they will stop hosting blogs.harvard.edu. It's not clear what will happen to the archives. Let's have a discussion about this. That was the first academic blog hosting system anywhere. It was where we planned and reported on our Berkman Thursday meetups, and BloggerCon. It's where the first podcasts were hosted. When we tried to figure out what makes a weblog a weblog, that's where the result was posted. There's a lot of history there. I can understand turning off the creation of new posts, making the old blogs read-only, but as a university it seems to me that Harvard should have a strong interest in maintaining the archive, in case anyone in the future wants to study the role we played in starting up these (as it turns out) important human activities.
Also, thankfully it's not where the RSS 2.0 spec is stored, but it was originally posted on one of the Berkman blogs.
In a tweet: "Throwing out this archive is like throwing out an academic journal. Why would a university do that? One of the reasons we did this work at a university was the hope/expectation it would survive over time. Only 15 years later, they want to throw it away?"
John Palfrey, former executive director of Berkman wrote the project info page for blogs.harvard.edu in 2011.
I just looked for some of the old 2003-2004 sites, and they're already gone. Earlier this year we lost the handle on Radio UserLand weblogs because the new owner of weblogs.com was unwilling to maintain a DNS entry pointing to them. That and Google's marking HTTP sites as not secure have been huge blows to the web as an archival medium. It's a good time to pause and reflect on the question of what was the value of all the work, and why bother continuing if the people who should care, a major university, a large research company and one of the largest tech companies, don't care about maintaining the web. What hope is there for it being maintained in the future?
I posted a note on the Berkman-Thursday mail list which, amazingly, is still operating. Sarcastically, I don't see Yahoo saying they're getting ready to take it offline. 💥
When I left Berkman I archived my test site from the Harvard server, and it's still here on scripting.com, and I'll do my best to keep it around. I used it to post pictures and ask stupid questions, and try out new features in the software. There are pictures of people I've known for a long time and haven't seen in ages but still love. ❤️
We had a thunderstorm in Manhattan last night. It woke me up and I was in a foul mood, as I sometimes am when I wake up in the middle of the night. The lightning and thunder scared me. First time that ever happened. My mind started playing games. I imagined the flash of lightning was a nuclear weapon detonating, and the thunder was the wave of destruction. It's a good approximation of the time it would take between the flash and death. Great move, I said to my mind. Now I'm even more scared and sad. Eventually I fell back asleep, but it wasn't a good sleep.
Journalists think Twitter stands out as a bad tech company, I think the opposite. Their unwillingness to follow the herd is a sign of hope that we may continue to use the net to speak freely, even if the majority wants us silenced. And what does it say about journalism that there are few if any dissenters? You see this regularly, they’re too scared for some reason to present all sides of a discussion. It’s amazing at times, the way they form herds.
Winston Churchill: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
Writing in the age of silos. After their August 1 change, I can't cross-post to Facebook. So if I want to speak to people I know on Facebook, I have to write on Facebook. Today if I want to even post a link, I have to do it by hand. And Twitter, new forms of writing have developed there to work around the 280-char limit. Again, if I want to write for people I know there, I have to write it there. This is what always happens with corporate platforms, they become silos. Maybe they start with good intentions, on FB, the open graph, with Twitter their API, but over time, they evolve to become their own completely self-contained very unweblike worlds. You can see that evolution in action today, at a super-high pace. For me this is the Nth time around this loop, so I have an idea what to expect next.
Poll: Chrome users, do you see not secure on scripting.com?
Three ideas for making the open web, and blogging, more valuable and interesting, by building a search engine for the next decade, not for two decades ago. Sorry Google, your search engine is showing serious signs of age and boredom. We can do so much better. Here are the ideas.
BTW, Google knows I'm the "owner" of this blog, they threaten me as such. 💥
xkcd's story for today is right on. I’m a software developer and I concur. We throw out our base technology every few years and start over, leaving the stuff that’s already deployed hard to evolve or fix, and the latest stuff full of bugs, and long before it’s mature and reliable we do it all over again.
I commented in a thread on Twitter on the controversy re the recent hire by the NYT editorial board and sweeping comments she made previously about white men. I am responding to a piece by Ezra Klein in Vox. I waited a few days for the furor to die down, and to try to say thoughtfuly and carefully how I as a man feel about such statements. Klein had said, for the first time I can recall for a reporter, how he feels about these things. I'll let the comments speak for themselves now.
How can so many elections come down to a fraction of a percent of the vote? Doesn't probability say that this outcome is extremely unlikely? Why does it happen so often?
The other day I spilled a bottle of water on my keyboard, and have been limping along waiting for a new keyboard to arrive. I am now using it. This time I decided not to opt for the expensive Apple keyboard, instead I got a Macally keyboard which cost a fraction of what the Apple one did. So far it seems quite nice. My fingers need to set up in a different place, and the keyboard doesn't have lifters at the top to put it at an angle, but I'm already getting used to it. Unfortunately the modifier keys control panel isn't working, not sure why. Might have to reboot the system? I usually don't like doing that. And then as if by magic it started working! I like to map Control to Command and vice versa. My brain was trained by many years of using Windows, a long time ago.
Making good progress testing the new version of Little Outliner.
This idea needs to get to the right people. Don't just like it, RT it. We can win this thing but we have to be smarter.
Unforeseen consequences. It's not at all surprising that when a tech company hijacks an incomprehensibly huge, world wide platform that's been growing uncontrollably for 25 years, they might overlook some huge applications thereof, and in plotting a transition break the installed base. It's completely foreseeable. Which is why we don't let private companies hijack public resources if we have our heads screwed on straight, which we clearly do not. 💥
This is a picture of my dear departed Uncle Vava taken in my parents' house in Flushing, in the early 70s probably. He's the only person in my family who would have posed for a picture that way.
I ❤️ Silent Movie GIFs.
I fixed a serious startup bug in the new version of LO2. Thanks to Steve Hooker for finding and reporting it. Now would be a great time for people to try the new version. I'd like to put it to bed and move on to other projects next week. Thanks! 🚀
Here's the outliner howto doc that explains what an outliner is and how to use the core outliner in LO2.
Poll: Suppose all the social media sites ban a commentator whose ideas you detest. He no longer can communicate with most of the people who want to hear what he says.
dave.blog now redirects to scripting.com. I was never going to start a new blog there. I don't know what I was thinking. One person, one blog seems to be the default.
If you fight for free speech only for people who agree with you then you are not for free speech.
I've written here many times about the distinction between the terms blogger and journalist. In a Twitter thread, Lora Kolodny makes a distinction between journalist and reporter. I hadn't realized there might be a difference. Here's what she says.
My own two cents. I'd love to reserve the term blogger for people who write about their own experiences, not for pay, the "unedited voice of a person." I think of bloggers as sources in the journalism world.
Spoilers ahead, you have been warned! 💥
I had been hearing good things about the HBO series Succession so I chose it for my next binge. I made it all the way to the next to last episode about an hour before the finale aired last night, but waited till the morning to watch it. I wasn't prepared for how disturbing it would be. I wasn't expecting it to be so.
I think perhaps it was so disturbing because the Roy family reminds me of my own family. All the disconnects, vanity, foolish sense of self-importance. And the prohibition on every talking about it realistically. These were all big features of my upbringing.
They really play with you. At times it's so funny, it seems like a comedy, but then, in the next episode, it knocks you down. That's what the finale was like. Complete knock down, with the tour de force in the very last scene.
The best line delivered by the patriarch's latest wife to one of the adult children: "He built you a playground and you think it's the world."
There's a lot of self-awareness in the last episode, but mostly they avoid living their own lives, all of them, including the all-powerful father.
On reflection, the Roy family is not like my family, where the women fought, and the men, while they often roared, were mostly sidelined, not the main act. I guess when you participate in something so intensely for so many hours your subconscious starts accepting it as real.
I have a hard time recommending Succession. It's very well done. But hard to watch at times, it's so awkward and the people are such fools. And it's very disturbing, that gives it value, at least for me. As art, it's outstanding.
An interesting thread with Amy Bellinger on Twitter. People think somehow hate of whites on the net is innocuous, I don't believe it is.
I can't believe people, esp journalists with lots of followers, still RT the troll, by pasting images, so even people who have the troll blocked are forced to see it. I unfollow them. Cut off the air supply of trolls. Do your part to save our democracy.
I belong to the Big Tent Party.
We stand for the American political system, universal suffrage, respect for the world, ourselves and the environment.
From there we can argue about everything, inside the tent.
I rarely ask for a RT, but this tweet needs more circulation. Thanks! 🚀
BingeWorthy had the Twitter login problem, it's fixed.
I think it's time to start teaching regular people to do journalism. A civic thing, like jury duty. Every college grad should take a semester of journalism. It's a very important skill to at least appreciate, if not practice.
I definitely don't want to be part of the debate about whether racism can apply to white people. The dictionary definition seems to imply it can. Sexism, on the other hand gives preference to women, but doesn't disallow sexism with men as the target. There's a lot of ridiculous gymnastics used to justify some pretty awful things said that should simply be retracted and apologized for. One thing is very clear, it's possible to be abusive without being either sexist or racist. And a lot of what passes for satire is imho abuse. We need a broad, simple, respectful, adult and professional code of conduct on Twitter, and we should have an amnesty for all past sins, and then set about solving problems working together, instead of having these ridiculous fights over who has the right to say what.
Tribalism is good for sports not thought or policy.
The Trump things aren't rallies, they're concerts. Once you understand that, he's easy to beat.
It would be interesting, as an experiment, to see a Democrat run for governor or senator and directly ask for Republican votes. "We're really all conservatives now, in that we'd like to turn the clock back to when the US was a world leader and respected itself."
A quick demo of SAVED/NOT SAVED in LO2.
This is a test to see if <marquee> still works in this browser.
Poll: How did you learn Facebook is down?
Good morning. The new version of LO2 is ready for testing.
I've completed most of the features planned for this release, so it's a good time for people who'd like to help to start using the new version. I've made a backup of all the outlines, in case there are any data-losing bugs in the software. I don't think there are, because I've used it myself fairly thoroughly, and there aren't many changes to the core outliner in this release.
If you encounter any problems or have questions, please post an item in this thread on the Scripting News repo.
Here's a quick list of the new stuff.
Known problems
My friend Stan Krute on Facebook wrote how astonished he is about conspiracy theories that real people believe in. I wrote a series of three comments, which I've included here, lightly edited.
Jim Carrey's latest.
feedBase was having the Twitter logon problem, fixed. The problem: callbackfromtwitter != callbackFromTwitter. Also I have to swing back around to feedBase, definitely some unfinished business there.
I use Twitter as the identity system for my browser-based apps. To see how it works, log onto Radio3, MyWord, feedBase, LO2 or Little Card Editor.
I like it, it works well, and takes a difficult problem off my plate. It takes a complicated problem and makes it relatively simple for me, as a developer.
Here's how it works, at a very high level. I send you over there to log in, and in return I get your unique screenname and a bit of info about you (the stuff you put into your profile). And a few other bits, like when you created your Twitter account.
An example of the data that Twitter gives an app about a user (me).
I also get the ability to post in your name, but my software never uses that ability unless you specifically ask it to. For example, there's a tweet icon in LO2 that lets you send the text of the cursor headline to Twitter as a tweet. Nice functionality to have, but hardly mission-critical.
I'm concerned that at some point Twitter may decide not to allow this use. I would prefer if they tightened the restrictions on posting, maybe eliminate it, that would be okay. But I would have a problem if they canceled the service.
Pretty sure nothing this simple exists in the open source world. I could be wrong. Either way this is something we should have, and it should be good. debugged, well burned-in. It would be nice if a public foundation ran the service, the way Twitter does. I know, keep dreaming. 💥
I really dislike complaining about free services. If you hate a service, my philosophy goes, just opt out. I've been on the other side of this, struggling to provide a free service to users who acted like they were paying huge money, long before there was any monetization of free services. I never want to be one of those people.
But sometimes a service is very hard to opt out of, and they take advantage of that, by changing the service from tolerable to obscene. Disqus is now doing that, and it will be hard and/or painful, maybe impossible, for me to opt out.
Here's an example of one of the pages. And a screen shot.
I've used Disqus for comments for many years, probably a decade, maybe more. I included their code in my pages, so users could comment on posts. I've even built support for products on Disqus. Some pages have a lot of comments with valuable information. Just turning off Disqus, a brute force way of opting out, would also remove those comments. And turning off Disqus is hard to do because I don't control the HTTP servers that host most of my content, and changing the HTML pages themselves is a sizeable task (understatement).
How we got here. The old Disqus was fairly innocuous. Of course they spied on the users, and then a few years ago they started including ads, but they were small and out of the way. Now the ads are huge, and getting bigger. They're more prominent than the comments. It's as if I were running ads on my sites, and the comments were clickbait to get you to look at the ads, like so many sites these days. Their ads make me look bad.
Of course I don't run ads on my pages. It's never been worth it to me. Those are their ads, paying them money, on my pages. They're changing the deal on pages that were published a long time ago, and are there just to maintain a record.
I could probably turn off the display for most of them without modifying any content, using CSS. I now wish I had a central set of styles every page included, but I wasn't so wise as to foresee the need. I have a conundrum. Every time I look at one of the pages with those huge ads on them, I think what a problem, I need to fix this, now.
And then I remember how impossible it is.
First step in fixing it, I guess, is documenting the problem. Done.
Video: A demo of how the new version of LO2 is coming along.
You can see in this image when Facebook turned off the cross-posting API. It's a screen shot of Radio3 -- the tool I use for linkblogging. It's amazing this has gotten almost no coverage in the press. It's like a tunnel under the Hudson was terminated, where FB is New Jersey and everything else is Manhattan (or vice versa, it doesn't matter). Only this TechCrunch story. Update: And a story on ProgrammableWeb.
