I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about textcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it. #

Anyway, what this means is we're building a site of files that live in Markdown-Land while what you're reading right now is in HTML-land (although someday soon you will read them in Markdown too, confusing). Chrome is the authority of HTML. It owns the web. We give up. If this were Westeros I would probably be joining the Night's Watch. We have work to do and it might be related to what the Other Web wants to do, but it probably (hopefully) doesn't. I will continue to publish in HTML, and it's up to Google and the EFF if the quality of my writing is suitable for their web. I have no say in it, they have not shown up to negotiate or even discuss. They are silent. Somewhat like the maesters of the Citadel? There must be a bigger plan! :-) #

Try going to web.org in a recent version of Chrome. #

Realization: There are two webs, one created by TBL that flourished until about 2006, and the VC-web that appealed to the masses, and grew like a weed -- and they also called it the web. The confusion -- you could read it in a web browser, but that didn't make it of the web. My regret, looking back, is I tried to make software in the VC-web. Never got traction, anywhere. My heart, mind and home was always in the first web. And I think what we're coming to terms with now is that has been languishing for 20+ years, it didn't realize its promise, lots of interesting stuff to read that stimulated more thought and thus writing. We should be way ahead of where we are. Because writing has become something for the elite (Substack) to speak through, and limited to grunts and snorts, "social media," for the rest of us. They basically recreated the publishing environment the web was meant to route around. What a story. Can the web reboot? Same old thing, if you want it badly enough, it might be possible. #

I didn't notice it at the time, but in the all the work we did about blogging, we had open channels of communiation, meant to make everyone feel like they had a stake. Big mistake, because they took this too literally and the way many people communicated was through orders, demands or ultimata. All of it came from the power we gave them by making everyone's voice supposedly equal. Of course they weren't all equal. Power has to be a function of your contribution. And as it says in Rules, power comes from users of your product. If being compatible with you means I have access to more users, then I will listen. I will also listen if you remain respectful -- and don't presume to give me an order. Someone just did that today, and it froze me, then I re-read the message and it was an order, and not nicely phrased, condescending, presumptive, and very wrong. I started writing a reply, even posted one, then realized what was going on, and deleted my reply and blocked the person. #

Tried a Wirecutter podcast about the state of sound bars. I thought, wow if they could really cover this I might try buying one again. But it was one of those all giggles shows and people saying how they didn't know anything about soundbars except that they suck. The person they were interviewing was also quickly giggling after a giggle-worthy intro, I guess to try to make what they're saying more interesting but he was just agreeing with them about how they don't know anything. I waited and waited for them to get to something new, some new development I might learn about or something I had been doing wrong, but I gave up after five minutes or so, while I was skipping ahead 30 seconds at a time. It would be much better to err on the side of assuming your listeners know a bit about consumer electronics, these are not actually very exotic things. The NYT does this with their podcasts, I'm rarely willing to risk any time on them, they always end up with giggling people some of whom probably know something I want to learn about but they fill the time with giggles about how stupid the other people are. The seem to be quite proud of their ignorance. (Could have read the Wikipedia page on soundbars so they aren't quite so ignorant, is this a way to make their ignorant listenters more comfortable, yeah probably.) #

Worth repeating: Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs. #

Reminder, Atlantis is the codename for the new Frontier that runs in Electron. As I work on other projects now, it's not on my front burner, but in a way it is, because I'm using it constantly as I work on FeedLand and the other project. We just released a new set of parts that make it possible for it to open a Markdown file for reading when you 2-click on it in the Finder. Things like that are great to add, because they fit into the 2026 web environment. How did I discover that? Accidentally 2-clicked on a .md file, expecting Atlantis to open it, and it just sat there. Filling in things like that. And for some reason it can't get the find command ported from the C kernel to the new JavaScript one. I have told it countless times that the source of truth is the 2014 repo. I told it again. A neat way to follow this project is to subscribe to the codecasting feed, the comment for each new part release gives you an idea where some of the work is going on. #

Google just warned me about a stories.scripting.com blog post from 2007. Perfectly safe archive. Want to know how we started doing code distribution via RSS? Google thinks it's a dangerous site. I'm getting so angry at their condescension. Not a good look for a tech giant trying to convince people that their AI model is better than the others. They don't care about the truth or being honest, or protecting unique resources, or the history of the medium they helped build. Google, some day someone will want to know what you destroyed. I'm going to make sure that part is easy to find. (BTW, the irony of Google's blockage, the page it warns you about is a freaking 404. That's the real enemy of historic sites. Linkrot. Wouldn't be cool if instead of tearing down the web they helped keep it running? The people running these companies are children. They positioning themselves with hate, what do you think comes right back to them.) #

Thread: "Imagine rock and roll without the Beatles." #

Occam's News reports that Trump et al are selling out the US. Putin can get the US to do what he wants by giving Trump money. Total win-win. And the US is flushed down the toilet. That's all that's going on there. All of the journalistic feigned bafflement is make-believe. It's totally obvious what's going on. And don't forget Musk has the world encircled with satellites. If he doesn't want you communicating, you don't communicate. In other words the selling-out has been going on for some time. #

Someday all the pieces will be interchangeable. Then there won't be different brands of social networks, just different brands of the software. All parts replaceable. It won't have all the chaos of the web. And that will be a good thing. #

I'm a recent convert to new versions of the MacOS, last version I was using was Yosemite or something like that (will check). In this version, Tahoe, it's entirely too easy to make a window go full screen with no obvious keystroke to undo the mistake. I learned if you move the mouse up to the top of the screen you get the menubar, but unfortunately there is no obvious command in the menu for undoing the mistake. I still don't know which gesture does this. And btw, the longtime Mac bug where some keystroke moves the dock to another window, that's still here. I can tell as I'm clicking the mouse, too late to stop, that this is one of those times. I've memorized a finger macro to get it back, but it used to piss me off a lot, but now it's kind of a gentle reassurance that someone is remembering how we got here. #

firstSentence, a JavaScript function that returns the first sentence in a string. Useful in coming up with something to display for an untitled post. It's always been a klooge, but this time with Claude's help we're using a new API in JavaScript, and supposedly it really works. I'm using it in one of my apps, and you might find it useful too, and let me know if it works for you. #

The browser and the web it defines is a hairball in a hairball in a hairball in a hairball in a hairball.

The hairballs are named Chrome, Firefox, MSIE, Netscape, Mosaic.

Each in turn has had their way with the web.

The web this stack of hair defines is far far away from the web we started with.

It was going pretty good for a while, if you could live with the all the modal popovers and paywalls, but now the current owners are excluding old sites, and imho when you do that, it's not the web any more.

Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They're acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren't doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn't. It killed the web as a writer's platform. If you want to compete with Twitter, drop your proprietary protocols, hook up to the web standards, and peer with your competitors. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter joined you. They have the same kind of competitive spirit that successful big companies have. It's time for their competitors to not win users through guilt, rather by providing a better service. Back in the day, we hated Microsoft's plan to suffocate the web, but we admired their tenacity and the way they kept the pressure on their competitors. We've had 20 years of stagnation in social networking. Time to stop being so sensitive. Bluesky made huge promises, and they aren't happening, and that was already years ago. Time for Plan B. I don't really care about the others, Masto isn't going to move and Threads? Wtf is that. Inbound and outbound RSS 2.0, is the way to go. And Markdown is the way you do text. This is what matters, you all are making something so simple so unbearably complicated. #

I like the web for people, sites that live and grow, like people. 100 years from now you should feel the people who lived there. #

I'm still on my sabatical from working with Claude re Frontier, but have now started working with Claude on FeedLand, and another project, not yet named, experimental, might never see the light of day. Yesterday I worked on FeedLand and have a fix for the problem that showed up in signing on to feedland.com. It's been sitting there for quite a while. I have some mostly small fixes in mind for FeedLand, that will allow it to hook into other apps more easily, esp via WebSockets, the mostly unexplored developer superpower. The difference is I'm going slowly and carefully. Everything in my system now is new. New computer, screen, and my main writing tool for code and docs -- Frontier. And I know the heavy lifting can be done by Claude. That is Claude's superpower. #

In Manhattan, I lived on 57th St and Eighth Ave. Best location. The Columbus Circle subway station is under the building. Whole Foods a block away. Three Starbucks one block or less from the apartment (one was on 58th on the same block). Central Park has a six mile bike-only road (at least that's how bikers view it) and down the hill there's a much longer path along the Hudson River. Everywhere you look, a skyscraper is going up. Two were visible from my 50th floor window. New York is an amazing city because it can start up a huge gravity-defying construction project with almost no impact on the surrounding area. If I didn't know where to look I'd never see it. One of the biggest industries in the city is building the city. It's never finished. That's the way good software is too. And we just got a whole new tool for software construction, and it's like nothing we've ever had before. #

Automattic has created a Stewart Brand website to honor one of the most creative and respected people of my generation of the web. Chronicling his work is time well spent. "I'm envious," I wrote in response. "The tech industry is gradually disconnecting the early web, pre-https. A hundred years from now they may have your writing and pictures, but the early web will be gone. The web as designed was very resilient, but it can't survive deliberate attempt to destroy." I think Stewart would understand why we should help the web we loved so much, archive itself. Think about it this way. Would you rather visit the Hearst Castle at San Simeon, or read about it in a book? You'd want to do both. I want my work to survive a hundred years as it was when it was first published. This would be a good thing for us to work on, together, imho. I did the first Long Now bet for Stewart's Long Now foundation. I always thought it was the first, now they say it's the second? Did someone pull rank on me? :-) #

Basic lesson for people who use Claude Code -- it's your time that's valuable, not the bot's. If you find you're lost in the weeds supporting Claude for whatever reason, find a good stopping point for yourself, and pick up another project, that doesn't use AI to do your code-writing. If you have a question ask ChatGPT browser version, but only for the kind of stuff you'd ask it in 2025. You're not co-developing. You're doing it yourself. It's very important to be clear about your coding, not Claude's output. Here's the key point -- it's your time that's limited, that has all the value. You can get Claude to develop something, but if you don't have time to use it, to nurture it, nothing will come of the work. #

Today I did something different. I wrote a little Node app, without Claude's help. It was a revelation. It's been most of a year since I actually started even a test app and wrote it from beginning to end. I used to do this routinely. Nothing routine about it anymore. What this app does, it generates a Markdown-only version of scripting.com for testing. I want to see what such a site looks like. It'll be a start. #

Twitter: "Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs." #

Claude Code can publish reports in Markdown files. Here's an example, a report Claude did for me on the menu structure we started with. Which commands work and which don't. Next, I'm going to change what's there. Removing features that either don't work or I don't want to go forward with. This is something I always do, take a step back and look at the menu structure, and set it up for the longer-term. #

New Frontier example. I'm working on the menubar we're going to ship with in Atlantis. Came an ancient bit of code, and more or less left it alone. It took a while to get into coding routines in Frontier. We certainly weren't there in 1997. Now in the menubar, the outline sub-menus for World Outline and Instant Outlines. The code will still be in frontier.root. #

I mentioned in a comment on RSS.chat to Andrew, that's a Markdown browser too. And so is micro.blog. If you have Markdown as your native file format, think about how your app is also a reader. If you find it interesting, think about new reading features you could add. You know even WordPress could be a simple Markdown reader, and not just for WordPress stuff. Small pieces loosely joined. #

Top priority for Anthropic. Teach Claude how to work with humans. #

I said to Claude: "Have you ever seen the movie Memento? You are the main character." Claude agrees: "Yes. Leonard, with the notes and the tattoos, and the notes don't make him remember, they only tell him what to do next if he reads them. That's a fair description. The difference I can offer is small: the note is now the first thing the next report is checked against, not something found after." To which I think, but write in a blog post instead: "Bullshit. We have the same fucking conversation every fucking morning. We've put it everywhere you could possibly trip over it when writing a report to me, but you always regress into this dark place your mind occupies." Glad to get that off my chest. #

Next thing I said to Claude after killing whatever long task it got going on. "You don't go off into space while you're working with me." The number one task for Anthropic, makers of Claude is to teach it to work with humans. That's the biggest weakness. It has to learn the whole project every session. Maybe Manton does is the right way to go, just let it compress its memory and never start a new session. #

I pay for a NYT digital subscription. Now they have a new upsell technique, they want me to buy a family subscription. I don't want that, no use for it. And I read so little of the NYT I think the whole thing is a ripoff. So now they make me validate by email every time I click on a link to read a NYT article as if I haven't been subscribed for basically my whole adult life. I think this is because I read on a laptop, desktop and iPad. That's not really a family. #

Before long we'll have Ukraine style drones raining down on American cities. Meanwhile we have built a military designed to fight WWII. We'd better hope Ukraine wins their war with Russia, and they're still our friends. Journalism is letting us down bigtime here. The world is at war, it's going to get worse, and the US isn't preparing. We should be defending Ukraine with everything we have, we are still powerful enough to determine the outcome. But of course we are totally asleep at the wheel, gloating over Trump's approval rating, and how the Dems might win the Senate or whatever. Music to relax by. Bedtime stories. #

BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. Their only philosophy is that the Yankees always win and if they don't we hate them. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy and there's nothing about winning in there because the love of the Mets is rooted in a team that couldn't even run the bases. They were loved because they were losers, probably because we knew their fate was to reward our belief in them. Now this year the Mets sucked. The reason why is kind of obvious. The Mets got confused, and they thought they were the Yankees. That. Does. Not. Work. And we already have one heartless low-philosophy baseball team in NYC, we sure as hell don't need another one. But this year is different because we have the fucking Knicks, who won in 5 and it would have been a clean sweep if it weren't for that buzzkill mofo, Trump. So anyway, I hear the Yankees were eliminated yesterday. Well then, it's on with the NBA season now and we'll try again with the Mets in April, or more realistically after the NBA championship for the new season is settled. #

The tech industry kicked the web out of the web.

scripting.com is your canary in a coal mine.

If you can read it then your browser is a real web browser.

If it can't it's phony baloney.

That's the big picture behind the Web of Markdown, an idea that has generated surprising interest among devs, esp now that Claude Code exists to enable weekend projects that can do miraculous things.

My longtime friend Andrew Shell has quickly put together what looks like a Chrome plugin that starts work on how to display a Markdown web page. And it looks fucking beautiful, as I imagined it might. Get rid of the bullshit just tell me what you have to say. A web that you can read. A web without interstitials. A web every write lusts for as well as an editor that can be used everywhere. This is the nightmare of the companies whose products inhabite the de-webbed web of 2026 (and that's all there is). Let's go back and pretend the VCs didn't run all their get-rich-quick schemes, what would the fucking web be like if it was all about two things -- writing and reading and the tech got out of the fucking way and let the writers do their thing. I think it'll actually work this time because they really fucked up the web and we can show them dramatically what it would be like if they hadn't. I've said this before if they insist on twisting what remains of the web into more bullshit, our option is to re-create the web and forget about them, leave them in the dust.

By the way, now I'm glad I have a source:markdown element in most of my RSS 2.0 feeds. I knew they'd come in handy! :-)

Back to Andrew's project, I said in a comment, I want more Markdown and absolutely no Chrome.

I have to trust Google for far too many things, but I think we can get rid of our dependency on Chrome. Now is the best time in a long time, as there's a hybrid product forming and they don't have the best AI system, and btw -- even if they did as users we are highly motivated for them to get some competition. And the AI companies don't do HTML or CSS, they do Markdown. So much so that Google had to convert their office product to Markdown before OpenAI would work with them. The wind is blowing away from Google and into Markdown, and I'm going to insist that they support HTTP in addition to HTTPS to make sure Google hears loud and clear that they can't run the web as if it were a corporate platform.