Scripting News: Thursday, May 2, 2024

Thursday, May 2, 2024

I asked ChatGPT and Meta.ai to draw a typical residential street in north Queens.#

First browser-based blogging tool#

In February 1999, playing with blog writing in the browser. This was a new idea at that point. Full-size screen shot. #

Screen shot of browser-based blogging tool, c 1999.#

Two podcast episodes#

If you want a new perspective on the election, two recommendations.#

Greg Sargent interviewed political consultant Joe Trippi, who explains why third parties could make all the difference in the election. #
Chris Lydon interviewed Richard Slotkin about the four major stories of American politics. #

Both very illuminating and immediately influenced my thinking.#

What became of 1999.io#

TL;DR: It's gone -- you can't get there. Because it uses Twitter for identity. It and bingeworthy.io are the two apps I miss the most. #

1999 was a rewrite of blogging software from the point of view of both 1999 and 2016. Both timeframes. I had learned a lot inbetween, and the art of online interaction had moved forward a lot. I had become a user of Facebook, and was impressed with how their software worked. I was imploring them to turn it into a blogging system, it was achingly close. When I realized they weren't going to do it, I set out to do it myself, how I imagined Facebook would do a blogging system. Of course I didn't have their source code, so I built it from scratch. #

Because 1999 used Twitter for identity, I couldn't use it. I also couldn't use Radio, because it ran on Windows and a now-obsolete version of the Mac OS. It's made me think that maybe in a few years or even months you might not be able to use FeedLand or Drummer. Then I thought about how I can better future-safe them for users. And that led me to adding a simple feature to FeedLand that will help if a FeedLand server you depend on should go off the air. See the next post, below.#

Protecting your FeedLand subscription lists#

First and foremost, you should keep a current backup copy of your subscription list. It's very easy to do. #

In FeedLand, choose My feed list in the first menu.#
Click on the white-on-orange XML icon, in the upper right corner of the page.#
That will open a standard OPML version of your subscription list. This is the format that all feed reading software understands. #
In your browser, choose the Save Page As command in the File menu (or something like that, there are lots of browsers) and save it along with your other backups.#
You can also automate it if you can run a script that gets stuff over the internet. Once a night would be fine, not a huge burden on the server. #

I added another way to preserve your feed list, using localStorage.#

Every time you sign in FeedLand now saves a copy of your subscription list in localStorage. #
And if the FeedLand server you're using should happen to disappear, if you have not taken a backup in a while, if you have a tab open, you'll at least have a copy in localStorage. #
If you want to see it -- visit feedland.org or feedland.com, wherever you have an account, and do a hard reload. Then open the JavaScript console, and enter this line:#
console.log (localStorage.savedUserSubs)#
If you have questions, here's a thread.#

If not now, when?#

It's time to do whatever you were sent here to do.#

Linkblog items for the day.

Twitter is changing how the block button works. engadget.com

Was There A Trojan Horse Hidden In Section 230 All Along That Could Enable Adversarial Interoperability? techdirt.com

New York Knicks tickets at StubHub. There a lot fewer tickets available and they're much more expensive. stubhub.com

76ers owners buy Game 6 tickets to block Knicks fans. espn.com

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