Scripting News: Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Podcast: I was able to write a post that appeared on Mastodon using ActivityPub. Via the WordPress API. Congrats to the ActivtyPub community, Automattic and Mastodon. "It just worked." #
Okay this is blowing my mind. My friends at Automattic showed me how to turn on ActivityPub on a WordPress site. I wrote a test post in my simple WordPress editor, forgetting that it would be cross-posted to Mastodon. When I just checked in on Masto, there was the freaking post. After I recovered from passing out, I wondered what happens if I update the post in my editor, and save it to the WordPress site that's hooked up to Masto via ActivityPub. So I made a change and saved it. I waited and waited, nothing happened. I got ready to add a comment saying ahh I guess it doesn't update, when -- it updated. Oh geez look at that. Folks, I did nothing here but write an app that can be used to edit WordPress posts. And I got in return an app that is part of the freaking Fediverse. And I never had to write a line of ActivityPub code. Think about that. I don't know if Automattic understands what they have, honestly. #BTW, it also supports HTML pretty well, but the title does not appear on the Mastodon version. That's going to be a problem. Actually the title is visible at the bottom. Let's call that an anachronism. Of course the title should/must be at the top.#
Om Malik, a long-time friend, NBB and supporter: "The best version of Dave is the Hopeful Dave." I agree. That's certainly when I'm happiest. Because it means someone is working with someone else. Imho, that's the only source of hope in our world. #
I'm really proud of what John Gruber said about me as a blogger in his Daring Fireball yesterday: "Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what's kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News's 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that's because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant." #I've mentioned the wpIdentity package a few times recently, and thought I should explain its purpose and history. #
Guy Kawasaki and I have been going back and forth privately about what we want from our personal ChatGPT. Here's one thing for the list. When I go to Google and search for NBB, it should take me to this page on my blog. It shouldn't even require me to click on Feelin Lucky. Google has had 26 years to get to know me, and it still thinks I might mean National Bank of Blacksburg. Folks, this is my blog, read it and use it as context when I ask a question. And they don't have to even read my blog, NBB is defined in my glossary, which I make public and is used in rendering all my pages. #A few years back, Google, when I searched for my mother, using her correctly-spelled last name, which happened to also be my last name, showed me results for Eve Wilmer.#
Back to Guy. I asked if he's written about what an evangelist is. To me, he is the prototypical evangelist. He's #1 and there isn't a #2 or #3. He has written about it, in the Harvard Business Review in 2015. But his story is, excuse me, bullshit. I should record a podcast about what an evangelist is, as I was very well-schooled in this by Guy. Let me try here. #
The evangelist for a product or organization is the person who deliberately tilts the playing field in favor of developer products that absolutely must get out there for the organization to achieve its mission. How is the tilt determined? Intuitively. If some random schmuck approaches him out of the blue at a developer conference, and explains their problem, where most BigCo people ignore them, the evangelist listens carefully. Helps without a second thought. And his door is open, if the developer wants to follow up. He helps route his needs through the organization. No developer is on their own if Guy is there. #
And when the killer product comes along, the one that will give Mac users something to get charged up over in 1986 when the hardware problems were being solved (they were!) and the software flow had dried up, Guy gets the developer the $400K they need to keep the doors open to ship the freaking product. The level playing field approach, which most tech companies follow, results in dead developers and platforms whose capabilities go unexplored. Users get bored, and move on to where the excitement is. #
I've seen products and companies fail to look around them to see what's possible. They only look inward at their own organizations who fail year after year to create products that users love. There's a reason for this, but you don't need to know it -- you just need to keep looking at every possible victory and when one comes along, do anything it takes to get it out to users.#
I've applied Guy's teaching in every project I've done since I got to know him in 1983 and when we, together, rode the wave of success in the Mac in 1986. He was like a member of our team inside the Mac Division at Apple. And we did have the hit product that year. And Guy pulled every string to make sure the world knew. #
This is how I applied the lesson. When I saw the potential in another developer and a way for their project to help me achieve my goal, I go for it. I know those things are very rare, and not to worry if it doesn't arrive in exactly the way I expected it to. #
Linkblog items for the day.
The Apprentice: the film Trump doesn't want you to see. axios.com
wpIdentity simplifies the WordPress REST API, making it easier to incorporate into JavaScript apps running in the browser. github.com
It's so funny how respectable Flushing has become. My hometown. Always found the name kind of embarrassing. 😳 wikipedia.org
A test of writing in WordPress, published to Mastodon. This WordPress post is part of the Fediverse. Click on the link to see the same story on mastodon.social. A new kind of interop. wordpress.com
Kamala Harris: The 60 Minutes Interview. youtube.com
I was able to write a post that appeared on Mastodon using ActivityPub. All via the WordPress API. Congrats to the ActivtyPub community, Automattic and Mastodon. "It just worked." 9 minute podcast. scripting.com
It appears the first Grateful Dead song in the RSS podcasting experiment in 2001 was (of course) Dark Star. Someone asked, so I looked it up. scripting.com
Daring Fireball: 30 Years of Dave Winer's Seminal Blog, Scripting News. daringfireball.net
It's not anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth. scripting.com
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