The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► - Jason, how you doing?

00:00:01 ◼   ► - I'm doing all right, John.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Thanks for having me on the show.

00:00:03 ◼   ► - How's the weather up there?

00:00:04 ◼   ► - Well, it's cold 'cause it's winter.

00:00:07 ◼   ► It's getting lighter though, which is great.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Late December, January here in Vermont is kind of bleak,

00:00:13 ◼   ► to be honest.

00:00:14 ◼   ► So I'm glad the light is getting more towards spring.

00:00:17 ◼   ► - I hate winters, I do.

00:00:19 ◼   ► And my wife and I, we've been talking about it.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Like why the hell do we live here?

00:00:22 ◼   ► And I live in the tropics compared to you.

00:00:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, darkness is the worst thing up here

00:00:27 ◼   ► because it's significantly darker for longer here

00:00:31 ◼   ► in December and January than it is in New York

00:00:34 ◼   ► or down in Philly.

00:00:36 ◼   ► - And I've also found as I've gotten old,

00:00:40 ◼   ► I was gonna say older, but let's face it, old,

00:00:42 ◼   ► you would think it would go the other way,

00:00:45 ◼   ► that the older you get, the more you just get used to it.

00:00:49 ◼   ► And I find the opposite.

00:00:51 ◼   ► When I was a kid, I knew that it got dark earlier

00:00:56 ◼   ► in the winter.

00:00:57 ◼   ► I mean, just open your eyes.

00:00:58 ◼   ► And I knew I had to come home from playing outside,

00:01:03 ◼   ► because we're so old that, fairly, we would just

00:01:06 ◼   ► come home from school, and we'd be set loose to go run around

00:01:11 ◼   ► with no parental supervision.

00:01:13 ◼   ► It wasn't just my parents.

00:01:14 ◼   ► It was like the neighborhood rule for all the parents.

00:01:16 ◼   ► You have to come home when the street lights come on.

00:01:19 ◼   ► We didn't wear watches.

00:01:21 ◼   ► That was the rule.

00:01:22 ◼   ► If the street lights are on, it's time to come home.

00:01:24 ◼   ► and I knew that, boy, this kinda sucks in December.

00:01:28 ◼   ► We don't really get much time after school.

00:01:30 ◼   ► But on the other hand, even like college,

00:01:33 ◼   ► I don't really remember being like bummed out

00:01:35 ◼   ► that it's dark early or anything,

00:01:37 ◼   ► I guess because also in college,

00:01:39 ◼   ► you kinda just live and sleep on whatever cycle you want

00:01:43 ◼   ► as long as you can submit your homework.

00:01:46 ◼   ► I was gonna say go to class, but I skipped a lot of classes.

00:01:49 ◼   ► But now that I'm an adult,

00:01:52 ◼   ► I really get bummed in December, even November, I do.

00:01:56 ◼   ► And I know they call it seasonal affect disorder or whatever.

00:01:59 ◼   ► I don't know if I have any disorder, I just get bummed.

00:02:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I mean, me too.

00:02:05 ◼   ► I mean, so I grew up in Wisconsin

00:02:08 ◼   ► and was fine with it as a kid.

00:02:11 ◼   ► I never remember being bummed out.

00:02:12 ◼   ► And even when I lived in New York from,

00:02:16 ◼   ► when was it, 2002 to 2016, I guess,

00:02:21 ◼   ► It didn't really bother me a whole lot there either.

00:02:23 ◼   ► And then when I moved up here,

00:02:25 ◼   ► like the first winter was okay

00:02:27 ◼   ► and the second one just totally just kicked my ass.

00:02:30 ◼   ► I was just like, what the hell happened?

00:02:32 ◼   ► I feel like I got hit by a freight train.

00:02:34 ◼   ► - I also do notice though, the flip side of it

00:02:37 ◼   ► is I do notice the expanding daylight hours more.

00:02:42 ◼   ► So it's like, I get more bummed.

00:02:44 ◼   ► I do, I really get more bummed in November and December.

00:02:48 ◼   ► I find January and February,

00:02:50 ◼   ► or at least early February to be dreary,

00:02:52 ◼   ► but right around now, late February,

00:02:54 ◼   ► or recording on March 3rd, it's like looking up.

00:02:58 ◼   ► And I also find that when daylight savings time

00:03:02 ◼   ► finally kicks back in, it is,

00:03:04 ◼   ► it's like the best gift of the year to me.

00:03:08 ◼   ► I mean, no offense to my family

00:03:10 ◼   ► and all the actual gifts they give to me,

00:03:13 ◼   ► but the day where I look at my watch

00:03:16 ◼   ► and it's six o'clock, seven o'clock,

00:03:18 ◼   ► and it's still plenty of light outside, I'm like, woo!

00:03:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's amazing.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Here in Vermont, I've noticed the last few winters,

00:03:29 ◼   ► the first day where it's sunny

00:03:33 ◼   ► and the thermometer's pushing like 65, 70,

00:03:36 ◼   ► it feels like nothing else.

00:03:38 ◼   ► I will go outside in shirt sleeves and shorts,

00:03:43 ◼   ► and I work outside and I'm just like, this is awesome,

00:03:46 ◼   ► And I can't believe I was this depressed for the last three months.

00:03:50 ◼   ► Right, you mean like just--

00:03:51 ◼   ► Yeah, you feel like a million bucks.

00:03:52 ◼   ► Right, you're sitting there working on cocky, the laptop, you know,

00:03:55 ◼   ► outside and breathing that fresh air.

00:03:59 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:04:00 ◼   ► Yep, and there's like literally like still probably like three feet of snow

00:04:04 ◼   ► out in the yard or whatever, but it's because we have global warming now,

00:04:08 ◼   ► every once in a while in March, you know, like mid-March or whatever,

00:04:10 ◼   ► it's oh, it's gonna be 70 degrees for a little bit.

00:04:12 ◼   ► And then it goes back to, you know,

00:04:14 ◼   ► we're gonna have an ice storm three days later.

00:04:16 ◼   ► - Yeah. - So.

00:04:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, we had that a few weeks ago

00:04:19 ◼   ► where there was a stretch here in February,

00:04:21 ◼   ► which is always the worst month from New York.

00:04:24 ◼   ► It's way worse than January, in my opinion.

00:04:26 ◼   ► We had a couple days in the '60s.

00:04:28 ◼   ► I've lived my whole life either outside Philadelphia

00:04:31 ◼   ► growing up or in Philadelphia

00:04:33 ◼   ► other than two years up in Massachusetts,

00:04:35 ◼   ► but I'm super familiar at this point

00:04:39 ◼   ► with the annual temperature.

00:04:41 ◼   ► What's a nice day?

00:04:42 ◼   ► what's a bad day for any day of the year.

00:04:45 ◼   ► And it's like even if I didn't know logically,

00:04:50 ◼   ► if I had never read the news

00:04:52 ◼   ► and had never heard of climate change,

00:04:54 ◼   ► I would know something is up.

00:04:56 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:04:57 ◼   ► It's like you could literally be a hermit,

00:05:01 ◼   ► like a Ted Kaczynski living in a shack with no internet,

00:05:04 ◼   ► no newspapers, and you'd be like,

00:05:05 ◼   ► "Hey, what's up with the weather?

00:05:06 ◼   ► "Am I wrong about what date it is?"

00:05:09 ◼   ► - I've been coming up here to Vermont since,

00:05:11 ◼   ► I don't know, 2003, something like that.

00:05:14 ◼   ► And you can tell by the ski areas,

00:05:17 ◼   ► and you can tell by how much snow there is at the ski areas,

00:05:20 ◼   ► and how much they're able to be open,

00:05:22 ◼   ► and when they can open for the season initially,

00:05:25 ◼   ► and when they close at the end of the season,

00:05:28 ◼   ► and it's that season is just getting shorter.

00:05:30 ◼   ► And you get these weird warmups in the middle of January,

00:05:33 ◼   ► in the middle of February,

00:05:34 ◼   ► where it rains and it's 55 degrees,

00:05:38 ◼   ► and you just get fewer days,

00:05:40 ◼   ► you get fewer people, you know, coming up and doing things and spending their money

00:05:45 ◼   ► here and stuff like that. And it's just, yeah, you would totally be able to tell, even if

00:05:50 ◼   ► you had never, you know, never heard of climate change or whatever. It's just different.

00:05:54 ◼   ► I should know this as a long time, as we're about to get to, very long time,

00:05:59 ◼   ► reader of your website. Are you at, I feel like I should definitely know this because I'm,

00:06:04 ◼   ► it seems like total katky fodder, but are you at daylight savings time year-round man or not?

00:06:11 ◼   ► I mean, I don't think they should switch back and forth.

00:06:13 ◼   ► So which one do you think? I mean, obviously, if they're only going to have one, it's going

00:06:17 ◼   ► to be daylight savings time, because we're already at eight months, four months.

00:06:20 ◼   ► And the legal proposals are only for... nobody's proposing we go standard time year-round,

00:06:27 ◼   ► I don't think.

00:06:29 ◼   ► Right, no, I mean, yeah, I mean, I would choose that, yeah.

00:06:34 ◼   ► It's awkward for me, or at least unexpected, because I forget who it is who's sponsoring

00:06:38 ◼   ► the bill. It's either Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, but it doesn't matter which one. It doesn't matter.

00:06:44 ◼   ► - Yeah. - The point is,

00:06:46 ◼   ► I can't believe I'm here on the side of legislation being proposed by whoever it is. But yeah,

00:06:51 ◼   ► the switch sucks. But also, it's like, "F you morning people." And it's the morning people who

00:06:59 ◼   ► bitch and moan about, "Well, but if we switch to daylight savings time, it'll be so dark until like

00:07:05 ◼   ► 830 or 9 in the morning, you know, in the middle of winter." And they always bring up the kids at

00:07:11 ◼   ► the freaking bus stop, right? What about the kids going to school? But that circles back to my point

00:07:17 ◼   ► about the way we raise children today. Kids aren't unsupervised at bus stops anymore, right? Like,

00:07:23 ◼   ► when we were kids, your mom wouldn't even get dressed in the morning. Your mom would still be,

00:07:27 ◼   ► you know, in her whatever she slept in and just get you out the door and, you know, whether you

00:07:32 ◼   ► were going to a bus stop or walking to school or whatever, you were on your own. Nobody does that

00:07:37 ◼   ► anymore. It's not a good excuse. The switchover is insane. The thing about early school times anyway,

00:07:44 ◼   ► like, we should just move the school time. Yes. Not futz around with actual time. Just like,

00:07:49 ◼   ► school should start later because, like, it's better for kids. Yeah, absolutely.

00:07:55 ◼   ► There is actual research. This is not just me spouting off with my personal opinion

00:07:59 ◼   ► and my vivid memories. My vivid memories from high school of being a total zombie.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

00:08:06 ◼   ► My best friend and I in high school, we both mastered the technique of sleeping in class

00:08:11 ◼   ► with your head not on your desk, but like a certain pose where you could like get your chin

00:08:19 ◼   ► in on your palm and we would choose seats in the back, not just, I always say I like

00:08:25 ◼   ► to sit in the back for most of my classes just so I could screw around, but you had

00:08:29 ◼   ► to go back corner and then you could like kind of turn your head away from the teacher.

00:08:33 ◼   ► I got solid sleep in classes my whole like probably junior and senior years, but it's

00:08:40 ◼   ► because it's terrible. I mean we used to have to, I think it was like 8 a.m. and it's like

00:08:44 ◼   ► the real world doesn't start at 8 a.m. The adult world.

00:08:48 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:08:49 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:08:50 ◼   ► Well, as I hinted, we are here to talk about the fact that you've been writing your website

00:08:56 ◼   ► for, well, let's just say it, 25 fucking years.

00:09:00 ◼   ► Yes, 25 fucking years.

00:09:04 ◼   ► When is the official anniversary?

00:09:05 ◼   ► Do you know the date?

00:09:07 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's March 14th.

00:09:09 ◼   ► All right, so we'll be out before.

00:09:12 ◼   ► We're a little ahead of your anniversary, but...

00:09:16 ◼   ► I'll just start by saying congrats.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know what more to say.

00:09:21 ◼   ► I mean, I'm glad you're at it.

00:09:22 ◼   ► I was looking as research.

00:09:24 ◼   ► I actually did some actual homework for this show

00:09:27 ◼   ► on every other episode of this.

00:09:29 ◼   ► All 369 preceding episodes.

00:09:34 ◼   ► - Right, this is the first one.

00:09:36 ◼   ► - I found your 10th anniversary post.

00:09:39 ◼   ► Well, I found, like it's hard to find.

00:09:41 ◼   ► But you said see you in 2008, or no, 2018.

00:09:45 ◼   ► So let me start by saying this, let me ask this.

00:09:48 ◼   ► In the early years, when you first started kaki.org,

00:09:55 ◼   ► did you have a sense that even then that you'd be doing,

00:10:00 ◼   ► if all things go well, knock on wood, health stays up,

00:10:05 ◼   ► nuclear war doesn't happen, the internet stays open,

00:10:09 ◼   ► that you'd still be doing this now?

00:10:11 ◼   ► - I would say no.

00:10:13 ◼   ► There's rarely been a plan.

00:10:14 ◼   ► I think the whole thing has just happened really organically.

00:10:17 ◼   ► I started it because, like, oh, you know, I wanted to have a place to write things down.

00:10:22 ◼   ► And so at the time I was doing this other website called Oscillate, and that was more

00:10:27 ◼   ► sort of visual and it was, like, episodic.

00:10:30 ◼   ► Like every one, you know, every few weeks I would release a new, like, episode.

00:10:33 ◼   ► But people had started blogging and, you know, there were online diaries and all this sort

00:10:37 ◼   ► of stuff.

00:10:38 ◼   ► And, you know, I decided, oh, I want to try this out.

00:10:42 ◼   ► And people read it and liked it, and so I kept writing, and it became slowly sort of

00:10:48 ◼   ► like more and more of kind of my online life.

00:10:52 ◼   ► And even the decision to like, you know, I went full-time like as a job in 2005, and

00:10:57 ◼   ► even that wasn't, you know, like that was like a few months before I had lunch with

00:11:02 ◼   ► Anil Dash.

00:11:04 ◼   ► And we were just talking about this and that, and he sort of like, I can't remember what

00:11:08 ◼   ► we were talking about exactly, but he was kind of like, "You know, I bet if you really

00:11:12 ◼   ► wanted to do it, you could do your website as a full-time job.

00:11:15 ◼   ► You could find advertising or get people to pay or whatever."

00:11:19 ◼   ► He's like, "I bet you could do it."

00:11:20 ◼   ► And I was like, "Huh."

00:11:22 ◼   ► And then I was thinking about it after that, and I was like, "Wait a minute.

00:11:26 ◼   ► That might be cool."

00:11:27 ◼   ► So yeah, so there was never any drive to be sort of long-lasting or anything like that.

00:11:35 ◼   ► It's just sort of what's happened.

00:11:37 ◼   ► That's interesting because I wouldn't say immediately when I started during

00:11:46 ◼   ► Fireball, but maybe very close.

00:11:48 ◼   ► I at least had the hope when I started that maybe I could eventually figure out

00:11:56 ◼   ► immediately figure out a way that I could do this as a living and had a sense that

00:12:01 ◼   ► I think I could do this forever.

00:12:05 ◼   ► And by the time I went full-time in 2006, largely inspired, you know, well, I mean,

00:12:13 ◼   ► it was my plan before, but sort of— I don't know that I would have taken the jump, though, in 2006

00:12:20 ◼   ► if you hadn't already done it. Like, you made me—you doing it full-time made me so insanely jealous

00:12:25 ◼   ► that it—it did! It really did, but in a good way, where it broke through my natural procrastination.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Like the reason, Daring Fireball's 20 as of last August,

00:12:39 ◼   ► so five years behind you.

00:12:41 ◼   ► But it's funny because, let me put it this way,

00:12:44 ◼   ► for a very long time, I felt like I was a newcomer

00:12:48 ◼   ► and you were established

00:12:50 ◼   ► because I started five years after you, right?

00:12:53 ◼   ► So when you're five or six, seven years old into katki.org

00:12:57 ◼   ► and I'm one or two years into Daring Fireball,

00:13:00 ◼   ► it feels like I'm the newcomer.

00:13:02 ◼   ► And when you start comparing 20 to 25,

00:13:06 ◼   ► it feels like, what's the difference?

00:13:09 ◼   ► We're both like last people standing

00:13:12 ◼   ► and old men and stalwarts.

00:13:15 ◼   ► But I, when I started, I was hoping

00:13:19 ◼   ► this is like a thing that would stick.

00:13:21 ◼   ► And I remember I had like a list of 10 or 12 articles

00:13:25 ◼   ► that I felt like, here's 10 or 12 things

00:13:28 ◼   ► I knew I wanted to write.

00:13:29 ◼   ► 'Cause I didn't have my short form links at the time.

00:13:31 ◼   ► All I had were full posts, more.

00:13:34 ◼   ► Every post is an article sort of blogging,

00:13:39 ◼   ► which was more typical.

00:13:41 ◼   ► Well, you know, there's a mix back then.

00:13:42 ◼   ► But I had 10 or 12, and I felt like I could keep this going.

00:13:47 ◼   ► And I forget where I kept the list.

00:13:50 ◼   ► It was probably already, well, I'm not sure

00:13:53 ◼   ► which app I had it in.

00:13:54 ◼   ► But the list kept growing faster

00:13:58 ◼   ► than I was writing articles.

00:14:00 ◼   ► There have always been more ideas for posts,

00:14:03 ◼   ► or even things I want to link to,

00:14:04 ◼   ► than things I actually link to, right?

00:14:06 ◼   ► It's, you know, and it's so weeks into it,

00:14:11 ◼   ► I realized, you know, at least in terms of having things

00:14:15 ◼   ► I want to write about, this seems 100% sustainable,

00:14:18 ◼   ► because that's, you know, I'm always coming up

00:14:21 ◼   ► with more things that I could or would write about

00:14:23 ◼   ► than I actually have time to or actually get to.

00:14:26 ◼   ► And it really did not take me long to realize

00:14:31 ◼   ► that I would like this to be my life's work.

00:14:33 ◼   ► So I'm-- - Yeah.

00:14:33 ◼   ► - You know, and I, you know, at least,

00:14:37 ◼   ► I've always subscribed to the strong ideas,

00:14:39 ◼   ► loosely held mantra for everything in life.

00:14:43 ◼   ► So I mean, I've all, you know,

00:14:45 ◼   ► it wasn't like I would've bet the house on it,

00:14:48 ◼   ► even though, of course, I didn't own a house back then.

00:14:50 ◼   ► But figuratively, wouldn't have bet the house on it

00:14:53 ◼   ► because I would've been open to new ideas and wonder.

00:14:56 ◼   ► but I had that sense though,

00:14:57 ◼   ► that this is what I was meant to do.

00:14:59 ◼   ► And in hindsight, I find it interesting

00:15:04 ◼   ► that you didn't have that sense early on

00:15:05 ◼   ► because it seems to me very clearly

00:15:08 ◼   ► that what you're doing is what you were meant to do.

00:15:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, at the time,

00:15:14 ◼   ► like I was still doing web design stuff

00:15:16 ◼   ► like back in the early 2000s.

00:15:18 ◼   ► And that was the thing that was really

00:15:23 ◼   ► capturing my sort of imagination back then.

00:15:26 ◼   ► And like that, you know, that started to change.

00:15:27 ◼   ► I feel like, you know, I had this,

00:15:29 ◼   ► I had this very corporate web design job in, in 2000,

00:15:33 ◼   ► like right after I moved to New York actually,

00:15:35 ◼   ► like 2003, 2004.

00:15:36 ◼   ► And you know, and that was during a time where, you know,

00:15:40 ◼   ► like not everybody that I knew had a job then

00:15:43 ◼   ► because of the whole dot-com bust,

00:15:45 ◼   ► the sort of the hangover from that, you know,

00:15:48 ◼   ► but it was this really corporate job.

00:15:49 ◼   ► And I was just sort of like, you know,

00:15:51 ◼   ► would go to work and I would-- the work was fairly easy. I'd spend a couple hours a day blogging,

00:15:58 ◼   ► just at work. And I'm sure that this is something that will resonate with early bloggers too. They

00:16:04 ◼   ► just stole time here and there from their day jobs to write on their sites. And at a certain point,

00:16:11 ◼   ► I was just like, "Oh, this is the thing that I'm actually interested in. Why don't I try and do

00:16:16 ◼   ► this for a while, you know, and it just, you know, it was, and after a while it was so,

00:16:22 ◼   ► it just worked really well, I think, and it worked really well for a number of different reasons,

00:16:28 ◼   ► you know, it's, you know, the most flexible job in the world. You just move your time around almost,

00:16:33 ◼   ► you know, infinitely, which is like fantastic, you know, when you've got a lot going on,

00:16:38 ◼   ► or you want to do different stuff in your life, or you've got little kids and you want to be home for

00:16:43 ◼   ► for dinner every night and all that sort of stuff.

00:16:45 ◼   ► And it just fit really well.

00:16:47 ◼   ► And like it had momentum and I just let it go.

00:16:50 ◼   ► It dragged me along almost instead of the other way around.

00:16:55 ◼   ► - Well, and I feel that I've always been naturally suited

00:16:58 ◼   ► to that aspect of it.

00:16:59 ◼   ► I've never been a nine to five person at all.

00:17:02 ◼   ► Infamously bad with deadlines.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Even now, I mean, my iPhone reviews are always hours

00:17:08 ◼   ► after everybody else has come out.

00:17:10 ◼   ► If not end of day.

00:17:13 ◼   ► And like and it's come full circle where

00:17:17 ◼   ► there's a flourishing independent publishing

00:17:22 ◼   ► of the last few years, a resurgence,

00:17:27 ◼   ► but it's all or at least mostly in the newsletter space.

00:17:32 ◼   ► And my friend and dithering colleague cohost Ben Thompson

00:17:37 ◼   ► is coming up on 10 years at Stratechery,

00:17:41 ◼   ► which blows my mind because I also think of his right.

00:17:44 ◼   ► Stratecheries being new, but I love his work.

00:17:50 ◼   ► He loves doing it, but I couldn't do what he does because he's

00:17:55 ◼   ► he's effectively got a deadline for like 8 AM Eastern every day,

00:17:59 ◼   ► even though he's writing from Taiwan,

00:18:01 ◼   ► he's got a deadline where his subscribers on the East Coast

00:18:06 ◼   ► expect today's issue of Stratechery in the morning,

00:18:11 ◼   ► you know, as they have their coffee and breakfast and before they get to work.

00:18:15 ◼   ► And I say couldn't all the time for all sorts of things in my life,

00:18:21 ◼   ► which means wouldn't, but I wouldn't enjoy it.

00:18:25 ◼   ► And then I would grow resentful.

00:18:29 ◼   ► That's one thing that's never happened to me is I've never grown resentful of the work

00:18:35 ◼   ► and my obligations, the pressure,

00:18:37 ◼   ► whatever pressure I feel to keep going, publishing,

00:18:40 ◼   ► and do this or that.

00:18:42 ◼   ► Whereas if I had that,

00:18:43 ◼   ► everybody expects a newsletter at blank time.

00:18:46 ◼   ► Doesn't matter what time of day it is, right?

00:18:48 ◼   ► Even if I send them out at midnight or whatever,

00:18:51 ◼   ► eventually I would be like, well, this is irritating

00:18:53 ◼   ► because I wanna go out with friends tonight.

00:18:56 ◼   ► And I'm not finished yet, but I have to sit here

00:18:59 ◼   ► and finish, you know.

00:19:01 ◼   ► All right, let's go back to oscillate.

00:19:02 ◼   ► It was spelled with a zero,

00:19:06 ◼   ► S-I-L and then the digit eight, which I'm not mocking,

00:19:10 ◼   ► but just for people Googling it and looking for it.

00:19:13 ◼   ► But that sort of trickery was very, feels a little 90s.

00:19:18 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, very 90s, very 90s.

00:19:23 ◼   ► - Right, and so when did Oscillate start?

00:19:27 ◼   ► And now that the website is defunct, right?

00:19:29 ◼   ► It's like, I looked it up, it's the domain's gone, right?

00:19:35 ◼   ► Well, I so I still own the domain, but it went on. I can't even remember when it went offline. It was. I mean, it was years and years ago, like more than probably more than 15 years ago already.

00:19:45 ◼   ► Right, but it went offline again. I should have done more research is are there old episodes still in the like the way back machine?

00:19:52 ◼   ► On the Internet. Actually, no, I've I don't know. I don't know that I've actually looked well. We might be. We'll leave that as a surprise for the show notes.

00:20:02 ◼   ► sounds good. All right, but you mentioned that it was episodic, and literally the URLs were like

00:20:09 ◼   ► oscillate, was it dot com? I forget what the domain was. Yeah, oscillate.com/episodes/...

00:20:15 ◼   ► and then it was the date, and then it was like whatever the name of the episode is.

00:20:20 ◼   ► Right, and the idea in the late 90s that was very common on the "I'm just a person with a

00:20:29 ◼   ► personal website and I love the web and this isn't this cool that I can just edit HTML which

00:20:37 ◼   ► requires very little technical acumen for a technical thing, right? I mean, it's, you know,

00:20:43 ◼   ► and I realize not there's still a slew of people who get confused even by the simple HTML of the

00:20:49 ◼   ► late 90s where almost everything was hand edited. But for the most part, a non-technical person

00:20:55 ◼   ► could just look at the source code. I mean, it was the genius of the mid-90s web was that browsers

00:21:01 ◼   ► were built with the view source command, and you could look at it and honestly figure out the basic

00:21:09 ◼   ► gist of HTML just by looking at it, right? You know, I aimed for that with Markdown, right?

00:21:15 ◼   ► Where you could get the basic gist of Markdown just by reading existing things written in

00:21:24 ◼   ► markdown. Oh, I get it. The asterisks mean, I don't know, italics or bold or something,

00:21:29 ◼   ► and then look at the output and say, "Oh, I see single asterisks or italics and double asterisks

00:21:35 ◼   ► or bold." You know, you could figure it out by looking at it. I hope with markdown even more so,

00:21:42 ◼   ► because it's simpler, but HTML was very close to that in the 90s and you'd hand-edit it.

00:21:46 ◼   ► And what a lot of people did was this sort of, you know, you calling them episodes is very clever,

00:21:53 ◼   ► because it's exactly what people did. They'd just occasionally make like a new toy and it would be

00:21:59 ◼   ► like a page or a thing and then they would, you know, put it out there and start spreading the

00:22:05 ◼   ► word, you know, however it was and people would have like bookmarks of their favorite sites and

00:22:10 ◼   ► they'd come back once in a while and oh here's a new thing from so-and-so, here's a new thing from,

00:22:15 ◼   ► yeah, yeah, you know, oh here's a new thing from Kotke at Oscillate, it's an episode, you know,

00:22:20 ◼   ► right and you might have one one week and another the next week and then maybe it's a month before

00:22:26 ◼   ► you come up with another one yeah exactly there was no like publishing schedule there's no rss

00:22:32 ◼   ► that you have to keep there was no sense really that you had to kind of keep feeding the beast

00:22:37 ◼   ► right in addition to the episodes that i did i also almost every time not every time but almost

00:22:42 ◼   ► every time i redesigned like the interface to get into the past episodes and stuff so there was a

00:22:48 ◼   ► new sort of like UX or UI with every episode. And that's the thing that I love doing. We're using all

00:22:59 ◼   ► these new tools, and there was new stuff coming out all the time. It's, "Oh, you can do JavaScript

00:23:03 ◼   ► now and rollovers, and you can change one image to the other image." I remember when that came out,

00:23:08 ◼   ► and that was a huge thing. And so I had to go experiment with that. And so it's all these

00:23:12 ◼   ► technologies and everybody, it just felt like this huge bubbling cauldron of creativity.

00:23:20 ◼   ► And everyone was trying to like, "What about this cool thing? What about this cool thing?"

00:23:24 ◼   ► And just trying to demonstrate through this HTML and through design and stuff like that,

00:23:29 ◼   ► what you could actually do, and also what the web could actually do. Because in 1996,

00:23:35 ◼   ► 1997, we didn't really know what the web was capable of completely.

00:23:40 ◼   ► All right, when did oscillate start?

00:23:42 ◼   ► And everyone was trying to figure it out.

00:23:44 ◼   ► When did oscillate start?

00:23:45 ◼   ► Like 90, I think early 96.

00:23:47 ◼   ► And I'd had a couple of personal sites before that, but oscillate I think started properly in early 96.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Yeah, see that?

00:23:57 ◼   ► That's what I mean though about you being meant to do this, because that's so early.

00:24:04 ◼   ► I don't think you even realize what a sense for the web you have that was innate.

00:24:10 ◼   ► because I didn't have a website anywhere close to then. I learned how to make websites and then when

00:24:15 ◼   ► I graduated college in 1996, was doing freelance, you know, so-and-so needs a website and make

00:24:22 ◼   ► a website for them, but wasn't self-publishing or, you know, and wasn't thinking about that.

00:24:30 ◼   ► I guess I was sort of thinking about it, but

00:24:34 ◼   ► I was too obsessed with form,

00:24:36 ◼   ► but not the form of an individual page,

00:24:42 ◼   ► but the form of the publication,

00:24:45 ◼   ► which to me is what that episodic nature of Oscillate

00:24:49 ◼   ► was sort of, you know, that was the form.

00:24:51 ◼   ► It was just periodic episodes.

00:24:53 ◼   ► And coming from my only true public publishing

00:24:57 ◼   ► The only true public publishing background

00:25:01 ◼   ► was the student newspaper at Drexel,

00:25:03 ◼   ► and it was a weekly, and I've always been

00:25:06 ◼   ► a media junkie of all kinds.

00:25:10 ◼   ► I know you are, too.

00:25:12 ◼   ► But that concept of issues was so deeply ingrained

00:25:16 ◼   ► in my brain that it took me a long time.

00:25:20 ◼   ► I couldn't get around it, because it didn't seem

00:25:23 ◼   ► like issues were right for the web,

00:25:26 ◼   ► I couldn't figure out what was right for the web and it paralyzed me from doing anything

00:25:35 ◼   ► for years.

00:25:36 ◼   ► And then when would you say blogs started?

00:25:40 ◼   ► I know this is history I could theoretically look up, but...

00:25:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Robot Wisdom, like he called it a web blog in 1998, maybe

00:25:53 ◼   ► probably '97, I would say. But people had diary-ish sort of things, like online diaries,

00:26:00 ◼   ► going back to Justin Hall, Justin's Links from the Underground. He started that in 1994,

00:26:06 ◼   ► and it was basically like a stream of consciousness diary of his life and what he was up to. And

00:26:12 ◼   ► I think that people experimented with all sorts of different forms. There were definitely

00:26:16 ◼   ► web publications that had issues. And I think that later it became like, "We're not going

00:26:23 ◼   ► to worry about an issue. We're just going to publish whatever we want as we go along."

00:26:28 ◼   ► And then blogs came along and just supercharged that, and everybody was sort of off to the races.

00:26:34 ◼   ► JS Does anything that you did, any of the episodes that oscillate, stand out to you as a favorite?

00:26:40 ◼   ► it.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Oh, man.

00:26:42 ◼   ► I mean, honestly, it's been a long time since I've even looked at or, you know, I have all

00:26:47 ◼   ► the files or whatever, like, sitting on my hard drive.

00:26:50 ◼   ► And it's just been, like, a long time since I've looked at those.

00:26:53 ◼   ► I remember there was one where I wanted to do this, you know, this was, like, right in

00:27:02 ◼   ► the age of sort of the early JavaScript experiments.

00:27:05 ◼   ► And like, I had these conceptual ideas that I wanted to do.

00:27:08 ◼   ► I was like, this should be possible,

00:27:10 ◼   ► but I don't have quite the technical ability

00:27:13 ◼   ► to figure out how to do it.

00:27:15 ◼   ► And so I worked with a friend of mine.

00:27:17 ◼   ► We constructed a page of frames.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Remember frames?

00:27:22 ◼   ► - Of course.

00:27:23 ◼   ► I never actually used them.

00:27:25 ◼   ► I never built a website with them

00:27:26 ◼   ► because I hated them from the start.

00:27:29 ◼   ► But I do remember-

00:27:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I couldn't stand them.

00:27:31 ◼   ► I couldn't stand them.

00:27:32 ◼   ► But for this, it was like,

00:27:33 ◼   ► I'm gonna make this thing out of frame.

00:27:35 ◼   ► So it was out of frames where the scroll bars spelled out oscillate, and then the scroll

00:27:42 ◼   ► bars moved randomly up and down, so the whole thing was kind of like this pulsing scroll

00:27:47 ◼   ► bar logo thing.

00:27:49 ◼   ► And that was, yeah, that's one of my--yeah, I like that one a lot.

00:27:53 ◼   ► Because it was one of those things where it was like, "I haven't seen this done, and

00:27:58 ◼   ► people are gonna lose their shit a little bit when they see this."

00:28:01 ◼   ► - Right.

00:28:02 ◼   ► It's a total abuse of the purpose,

00:28:04 ◼   ► but it's extremely clever.

00:28:05 ◼   ► And that's a perfect example for you to recall,

00:28:09 ◼   ► 'cause that's the sort of thing that I'm calling a toy,

00:28:12 ◼   ► that that's what we did back then, right?

00:28:14 ◼   ► And you would figure out something like this,

00:28:17 ◼   ► and then if it was clever like that,

00:28:18 ◼   ► I vaguely remember that.

00:28:20 ◼   ► I don't know if that's a false memory or not,

00:28:22 ◼   ► but I know I read "Ossolate,"

00:28:24 ◼   ► and I kinda think I remember it.

00:28:27 ◼   ► I remember thinking, yeah,

00:28:28 ◼   ► that's finally a good use of frames.

00:28:30 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:28:32 ◼   ► Yeah, all right.

00:28:34 ◼   ► - I mean, the whole atmosphere back then

00:28:35 ◼   ► was like it was so playful.

00:28:38 ◼   ► It was so playful.

00:28:39 ◼   ► - Oh, hold that thought.

00:28:40 ◼   ► Let's hold that thought.

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00:31:37 ◼   ► One difference between podcasting and blogging, Jason,

00:31:43 ◼   ► is that you gotta repeat the URL multiple times

00:31:46 ◼   ► when you're podcasting.

00:31:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:31:49 ◼   ► - Yes, very important.

00:31:51 ◼   ► And I think about that every time I do a sponsor read,

00:31:54 ◼   ► which is, I don't know, nine, 10 times a month.

00:31:57 ◼   ► Every single time, I think, "Goddamn it, if I were writing,

00:32:00 ◼   ► "I wouldn't have to do this."

00:32:01 ◼   ► 'Cause I'll tell you, the one thing,

00:32:03 ◼   ► I enjoy doing this show,

00:32:04 ◼   ► and I especially enjoy doing special episodes like this.

00:32:06 ◼   ► I'm already having a lot of fun.

00:32:08 ◼   ► So I'm not trying to bitch and moan

00:32:10 ◼   ► about my second job as a podcaster,

00:32:12 ◼   ► but I will never, ever, ever, no matter how long I do this,

00:32:15 ◼   ► and again, this is episode 370,

00:32:18 ◼   ► and there was a whole slew of shows

00:32:20 ◼   ► with Dan Benjamin before that that don't even count

00:32:22 ◼   ► in the numbering.

00:32:24 ◼   ► I will never ever not think of myself

00:32:26 ◼   ► as a writer/blogger, whatever you wanna call

00:32:30 ◼   ► what I do at Daring Fireball, who podcasts on the side.

00:32:33 ◼   ► That's how I view myself.

00:32:35 ◼   ► It doesn't matter how long I do.

00:32:37 ◼   ► So we were talking about those early, the mid-90s

00:32:41 ◼   ► and this sort of episodic and this sort of

00:32:43 ◼   ► coalescence around the idea of blogging.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And I know it has nothing to do with either of us.

00:32:50 ◼   ► We didn't contribute.

00:32:51 ◼   ► But for people who are either too young

00:32:54 ◼   ► or just don't remember or weren't paying attention to it,

00:32:58 ◼   ► it's impossible, I think, to overstate

00:33:01 ◼   ► the influence of suck.com.

00:33:03 ◼   ► - Oh yeah. - Right?

00:33:06 ◼   ► Suck.com was the first thing

00:33:10 ◼   ► that I looked at and

00:33:15 ◼   ► Like, I'd look at things like the web toys people were making and other independent websites,

00:33:22 ◼   ► and all I would think is, "That's fun," or "I wonder how they did it," and "View

00:33:26 ◼   ► Source," or "Oh, I'd love to learn that trick so I could do it," you know.

00:33:31 ◼   ► Oh, you just hover over a picture, and as soon as you hover, it substitutes a different

00:33:35 ◼   ► picture.

00:33:36 ◼   ► You think of all the things we could do with that, you know.

00:33:38 ◼   ► How do you do that?

00:33:39 ◼   ► Oh, that's how you do it.

00:33:40 ◼   ► suck.com was the first website where I got like jealous and I thought, ah shit, I wish I was,

00:33:46 ◼   ► I wish I were doing something like that. Yeah, I mean suck suck was a huge, like a huge influence

00:33:53 ◼   ► on me. And you know, it was this thing where it was like, oh, this is, I don't think you could do

00:34:02 ◼   ► this offline, what they're doing. And it was just so interesting and just so like, not only

00:34:11 ◼   ► like the writing, but like how they were writing and how it was designed, and just like the whole

00:34:18 ◼   ► package. It was just like, I can't believe like there are people who are like doing this like just

00:34:23 ◼   ► in their spare time, you know, at Wired magazine or whatever, or Hotwired, I guess it was.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Right for people who don't remember suck.com number one it

00:34:32 ◼   ► also to me the name itself captured the

00:34:36 ◼   ► The gestalt of our generation to gen x generation at in that mid in the 90s

00:34:45 ◼   ► Right. It was totally

00:34:47 ◼   ► And it wasn't

00:34:52 ◼   ► Even though suck.com doesn't sound like a serious effort it was

00:34:58 ◼   ► right? Like the writing was top-notch, right? Like my favorite suck.com writer

00:35:02 ◼   ► was Heather Havrileski, who's still writing independently. Now she's, you know,

00:35:07 ◼   ► she's floated around, she's written books, and she was at New York Magazine

00:35:12 ◼   ► or one of the sub brands, and now she's got a subset. Still going strong as an

00:35:16 ◼   ► independent writer, but man, when I saw her byline at suck.com, I knew it

00:35:21 ◼   ► was gonna be good. I just loved her style. But exactly what you said, too, where

00:35:26 ◼   ► she just instantly got a style and form of writing that had no real analog in print,

00:35:34 ◼   ► right? Like, the hyperlinks were part of the style.

00:35:38 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly, exactly. There was information to be gotten from not only what they linked to,

00:35:48 ◼   ► but how they linked to it, which word they decided to make the hyperlink. It was fascinating.

00:35:54 ◼   ► It was fascinating.

00:35:55 ◼   ► Right. Imagine if you lived on an island where all you had were manual typewriters,

00:36:03 ◼   ► and the only form of writing that anybody had was with a typewriter, and then somebody comes up with

00:36:13 ◼   ► a way to do italics. Well, then you can put in flat--I use italics liberally, as in--I've always

00:36:21 ◼   ► done it in my writing as to emphasize, you know, inflect words that I hear in my head as I'm

00:36:31 ◼   ► writing. If I were speaking them, I would raise my voice or do something with my voice to add

00:36:36 ◼   ► inflection to that word. And I would feel hamstrung without italics. I would feel like my writing was

00:36:46 ◼   ► missing something. Hyperlinks are like italics on steroids, on superpowers,

00:36:54 ◼   ► because, right, but like you're saying, like mid-sentence and something

00:36:58 ◼   ► something suspiciously blank and if you just the word suspiciously at suck

00:37:02 ◼   ► they might link to something and it would just be a link to who knows I

00:37:08 ◼   ► don't know what the example is but you know you know some random thing but it

00:37:12 ◼   ► would add context and it might not even be directly related to the subject that

00:37:16 ◼   ► was being written about, but it would be interesting and it adds context to what they meant by

00:37:20 ◼   ► the word suspiciously, way more than just mere italicizing it or bolding it would. And

00:37:28 ◼   ► it adds a dimension to writing that not only didn't exist before but couldn't exist in

00:37:35 ◼   ► print.

00:37:36 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. And what's interesting is that I took so much influence from that is that

00:37:43 ◼   ► When I write my posts still, I use a text editor to write my posts, and then I paste

00:37:47 ◼   ► them into my CMS.

00:37:49 ◼   ► Very old school.

00:37:51 ◼   ► And when I'm writing the posts, I insert hyperlinks as I go.

00:37:55 ◼   ► I don't do them at the end.

00:37:57 ◼   ► I can't do them at the end, actually.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I have to do them while I'm thinking about how I want whatever paragraph or sentence

00:38:07 ◼   ► or whatever to communicate.

00:38:10 ◼   ► hyperlink is part of the communication. It is doing like part of the work of the writing,

00:38:17 ◼   ► part of the work of the communication to the audience. And I just, I have to do it.

00:38:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know what it would be like to read Jason Kotke without hyperlinks mid-sentence.

00:38:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I really don't. The difference though is that, or the difference between Suck and a blog,

00:38:37 ◼   ► was that it would be like, I think Suck was, as I recall, a three—it was like Monday,

00:38:41 ◼   ► Wednesday, Friday, I think. It was like three times a week.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah, something like that.

00:38:46 ◼   ► Michael Gentry And you would just go to the homepage,

00:38:49 ◼   ► and if it was Wednesday, it was the Wednesday issue, episode, just, you know, but it was like

00:38:56 ◼   ► just@suck.com. Like, you didn't really go to suck.com/—I mean, maybe they had—I guess they

00:39:03 ◼   ► They did have archives and you could go back

00:39:05 ◼   ► and look at the old ones, but the point was really,

00:39:08 ◼   ► you would just go to, you'd just type suck.com

00:39:11 ◼   ► in your browser and read the homepage,

00:39:13 ◼   ► and the homepage only had that episode.

00:39:15 ◼   ► You could click a link to get to the archive,

00:39:18 ◼   ► but it wasn't a scrolling list of,

00:39:20 ◼   ► oh, just keep scrolling down and you get to Monday

00:39:23 ◼   ► and then you scroll down and you get to last Friday

00:39:25 ◼   ► and you scroll down.

00:39:26 ◼   ► And it was the nature of Suck.

00:39:30 ◼   ► I can't even imagine if Suck were that way.

00:39:33 ◼   ► you know it had a very like I said I was I've always been obsessed with form in in media

00:39:40 ◼   ► so that gave suck a form it was like you'd go to the home page and there'd be a new article

00:39:46 ◼   ► three times a week and that's where you read it on the home page and then you'd close it and

00:39:51 ◼   ► you know go to the next bookmark in your favorite sites and see what else was there and until you

00:39:56 ◼   ► were done dicking around on the web for the session you know or until somebody yeah until

00:40:02 ◼   ► somebody picked up the telephone in another room and kicked you off line.

00:40:05 ◼   ► There you go.

00:40:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:40:08 ◼   ► But the revolution and the coalescence is in

00:40:13 ◼   ► blogging and it seems so obvious now it's, you know, here we are a quarter century later

00:40:18 ◼   ► and it's, you know, it's hard to imagine that it had to be invented.

00:40:24 ◼   ► But it is like that, that Justin Hall, the robot wisdom

00:40:29 ◼   ► style, new stuff at the top, old stuff at the bottom, and it just scrolls down.

00:40:36 ◼   ► And I remember when it first started becoming a thing, kind of objecting to it because it seemed

00:40:49 ◼   ► like it, or if not objecting to it, being confused or wondering whether it should go top down or

00:40:58 ◼   ► bottom up, right? Because a newspaper, which is a better example than a magazine, because a magazine

00:41:04 ◼   ► you page, but a newspaper, a broadsheet is tall and goes down and the important articles are at

00:41:12 ◼   ► the top and the less important articles are at the bottom, you know, by the editors or whoever

00:41:17 ◼   ► did the layout judgment. And it seemed counterintuitive to me, like, that it's just,

00:41:26 ◼   ► if you're gonna go chronological, should it go top down or bottom up?

00:41:29 ◼   ► And then it also seemed counterintuitive to me that it's always just newest at the top,

00:41:35 ◼   ► whether it was more or less important. It had no—it was simply chronological. And it took me a long

00:41:43 ◼   ► time—it took me a long time to accept that, no, this fits the web. It just chronological fits the

00:41:51 ◼   ► web. And I'm wondering when you noticed that, and if that's when you shifted from oscillate to,

00:41:59 ◼   ► "Hey, I should make a new thing."

00:42:01 ◼   ► >> Yeah, I think that mirrors a lot of what I was thinking at the time. Because in retrospect,

00:42:08 ◼   ► yeah, like chronologically is the way to do it, because blogs got people in the habit of checking

00:42:15 ◼   ► sites more frequently. And then, of course, RSS came along and it became just sort of another

00:42:22 ◼   ► kind of inbox, I guess, that people would check. And you could check it dozens of times a day if

00:42:28 ◼   ► you wanted to. Just flick over to your RSS reader and, "Oh, John's got something new."

00:42:33 ◼   ► So it kind of developed and also developed its habits in the audience as it went along.

00:42:40 ◼   ► So chronological became the natural way to do it because you'd already read the important stuff

00:42:47 ◼   ► down the page earlier in the day, and you just want to catch up on whatever's the newest.

00:42:52 ◼   ► You know, it's not an ideal thing. And I think that when you see templates on Ghost and things

00:42:58 ◼   ► like that and WordPress and things like that, you see less purely chronological ordering.

00:43:05 ◼   ► you can call out featured posts and things like that. It looks more like an online magazine or

00:43:11 ◼   ► an online newspaper where, like you said earlier, it's like the important stuff is at the top

00:43:17 ◼   ► and the less important stuff is further down. But that chronological thing was like,

00:43:21 ◼   ► or the reverse crown was the thing that really made it take off in a way because it trained

00:43:33 ◼   ► the audience to basically come by more often. And I count myself in that part of the audience. It's

00:43:37 ◼   ► not like I'm pulling any master strings here. It's just like we all did it at the same time

00:43:42 ◼   ► as we went along. And eventually it's like when sites like Gizmodo and Gawker and Engadget came

00:43:52 ◼   ► out, they were doing 30, 40, 50 items a day. And people were like, "Okay, more. Let's go."

00:44:00 ◼   ► Oh, well, but I'm just curious what made you think, though, to switch from you doing it under

00:44:08 ◼   ► oscillating to striking a new brand at kotkey.org. Right, so what became kotkey.org started at

00:44:18 ◼   ► oscillate as an episode. It was like, oh, I'm going to keep a blog and do this. And it wasn't until

00:44:23 ◼   ► maybe a year and a half later where I shifted those sort of archives over to sort of over to

00:44:28 ◼   ► its own domain. And, you know, I think it just, you know, from the perspective of it was just

00:44:35 ◼   ► way easier to update, you know, like making episodes it was like, okay, I gotta sit down,

00:44:40 ◼   ► I gotta have an idea, and then I've gotta do this whole thing. It was just so easy to like,

00:44:44 ◼   ► oh, I'm just gonna pull up a, you know, a new, you know, back in the old days it was like I had a

00:44:49 ◼   ► file, like I had an HTML file that I would just, I would directly edit it on the server. At the end,

00:44:54 ◼   ► when it was done, like, I would save it, you know, and that was it.

00:44:58 ◼   ► Did you edit directly on the server, or did you edit locally, double-check, and then upload?

00:45:03 ◼   ► Jim Kudall.

00:45:04 ◼   ► No, no, it was on the server, I think, for longer than it should have been.

00:45:09 ◼   ► Jim Kudall and I have talked about this, and we both felt that in that era, we did better writing

00:45:18 ◼   ► when we were writing directly on the server, because it raised your—it, like,

00:45:23 ◼   ► straightened your back and squared your shoulders. Right? Because it's—

00:45:27 ◼   ► That raises the stakes, right?

00:45:28 ◼   ► Right. I always think about the way that in the entire Star Wars universe,

00:45:32 ◼   ► all the architecture is skyscraper-y or chasmy, and there are walkways on every planet,

00:45:40 ◼   ► and there's never a railing. Right? You know what I mean?

00:45:48 ◼   ► And that was blogging directly from production, right?

00:45:51 ◼   ► Exactly. It's blogging directly from production is walking on any of those catwalks on Bespin

00:45:58 ◼   ► or the place where Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn fought the Darth Maul and the prequel.

00:46:06 ◼   ► It's just any one of those things. All the TV shows, they all keep it up. To me,

00:46:13 ◼   ► it's one of my favorite traditions in science fiction is anywhere where there's a walkway in

00:46:17 ◼   ► Star Wars. No railings. It's like, where are the regulators? Are there any regulators in the Star

00:46:25 ◼   ► Wars universe? No, none! Right, it's like a—there's a fantastic essay in there about the libertarian

00:46:32 ◼   ► nature of safety regulations in the Star Wars universe, but that's what it felt like. And,

00:46:38 ◼   ► you know, it keeps you careful, you know what I mean? You're more likely to trip and fall

00:46:44 ◼   ► on a nice safe catwalk with nice safe railings than you are on a catwalk without railings,

00:46:49 ◼   ► and that was saving websites directly to production. I still edit things,

00:46:54 ◼   ► some things on Daring Fireball directly on the website, and it keeps you sharp.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Yep. You know, it's interesting though, because I still feel like,

00:47:03 ◼   ► I don't know, I've been doing this for almost 25 years now, with Oscillate even before that,

00:47:09 ◼   ► Like, I still feel like when I publish something sometimes I was like, "Why am I allowed to do this?

00:47:15 ◼   ► I just push a button and it's out there, and, you know, hundreds of people read it in, like,

00:47:20 ◼   ► the next three minutes or whatever, you know, because everyone's on RSS."

00:47:24 ◼   ► And it just seems insane to me sometimes, like, when you actually, like, you know,

00:47:27 ◼   ► it's one of those things where if you actually think about how things work in the world,

00:47:32 ◼   ► like, you're like, "Oh my god, I can't believe how this works!"

00:47:34 ◼   ► And this is, like, one of those things. It seems insane to me that, like, I can push a button and

00:47:39 ◼   ► and all of a sudden around the world,

00:47:41 ◼   ► everyone can read this instantly.

00:47:42 ◼   ► - I totally agree.

00:47:45 ◼   ► Who else was an inspiration for you?

00:47:47 ◼   ► Dave Weiner is obvious, you know,

00:47:50 ◼   ► and helped formulate the top-down chronological nature

00:47:55 ◼   ► of blogging in the mid-90s.

00:47:59 ◼   ► He's been doing scripting.com for at least,

00:48:02 ◼   ► I think, as long as, or longer than you.

00:48:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, longer, I think, yeah.

00:48:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, and no surprise that he invented RSS,

00:48:11 ◼   ► which is a chronic, by nature,

00:48:14 ◼   ► I think best suited to be consumed chronologically.

00:48:18 ◼   ► I mean, you cannot, I mean, part of the beauty of RSS

00:48:21 ◼   ► is if you wanted to, you could somehow do something

00:48:23 ◼   ► with it that's not, but it, you know, RSS in a sense

00:48:26 ◼   ► is just a chronological, it's the blogging format

00:48:31 ◼   ► in a more, in a structured--

00:48:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:48:36 ◼   ► non-visual data stream format. And so it's no surprise that he invented that. You mentioned

00:48:42 ◼   ► robot wisdom. Well, what were you saying? Sorry, I was just going to say, like on Dave,

00:48:47 ◼   ► I'm not a regular scripting news reader anymore. But I went, I don't know, a few weeks ago,

00:48:52 ◼   ► and he has still got a great blogging voice. It's kind of that combination between he can write,

00:49:00 ◼   ► And it's also very casual. I mean, all writing is casual now, or most writing is casual.

00:49:06 ◼   ► Twitter has sort of trained everybody to be this sort of very casual, but his voice is still great.

00:49:13 ◼   ► JS You can hear it. I can hear it.

00:49:16 ◼   ► JS Yeah, and it's funny because he came to it, he used to write—what I should do is get him on the

00:49:20 ◼   ► show, and I've long been thinking about it—but much like Oscillate, he had written before

00:49:27 ◼   ► scripting dot com and sort of overlapping with it these columns called Dave net for hot wire

00:49:33 ◼   ► and they were more like traditional columns like a Dave net was like a whole article and

00:49:40 ◼   ► it wasn't a blog but he was full of hyperlinks and it was super exuberant about the open web and full

00:49:51 ◼   ► of ideas. But it's like he went on that same path where it's like he intuitively knew that writing

00:49:59 ◼   ► like a once or twice a week column wasn't for him and it wasn't what he was meant to do.

00:50:07 ◼   ► The scripting.com, also nobody else has ever blogged like Dave Weiner except

00:50:19 ◼   ► the people who've used his blogging engine tools or CMSs, which were always meant to

00:50:26 ◼   ► publish a Dave Weiner-style blog, but nobody else has his unique sense of timing and length

00:50:35 ◼   ► of items. In a way, Scripting.com remains the oldest school of old-school blogs because

00:50:43 ◼   ► his entries are mostly still just paragraphs. They're not, there's not, not headline plus

00:50:51 ◼   ► paragraph. And it's, you know, he rants, he's ranted about it on and off for years, and he's

00:50:57 ◼   ► right because he invented RSS, but he, you know, huge frustration for him are RSS readers that

00:51:05 ◼   ► assume every entry has a title or a headline or whatever you want to call it. And he invented RSS

00:51:12 ◼   ► knowing his own style and knowing that whatever the element—I forget if it's—I think it's title.

00:51:20 ◼   ► It's like inside the entry item or it's inside a thing called item is a thing called title. And

00:51:26 ◼   ► it's marked optional very, very, very obviously in this spec. But it's a very old-school style,

00:51:33 ◼   ► which you used to have too, right? Like in the early days of Kottke, posts were paragraphs,

00:51:39 ◼   ► not headline, you know, not articles or items or whatever you want to call them.

00:51:44 ◼   ► Yeah, the reason why I started doing headlines is because of RSS. Otherwise, I

00:51:50 ◼   ► don't necessarily think I would have. And, you know, I mean, I side with Dave on

00:51:55 ◼   ► this. If it were better for RSS and that sort of stuff, like, I would use a

00:51:59 ◼   ► lot fewer titles. And, you know, with the Quick Links now,

00:52:03 ◼   ► like, that's what that is again. It's sort of a return to this titleless,

00:52:08 ◼   ► you know, these titleless posts. Well, and you know, the reason I started doing those is because

00:52:13 ◼   ► it works well on Twitter and Mastodon and Facebook and stuff. It's a little nugget with one link that

00:52:20 ◼   ► you can send across social media sort of the same way, you know. I was about to say that the odd

00:52:27 ◼   ► thing about it in the way that like, I think it's a truism for all of humanity. I mean, not just

00:52:35 ◼   ► them our modern age but go back as far in history as we can, that good ideas resurface.

00:52:43 ◼   ► And sometimes good ideas don't strike, right? It's somehow the matchbook got wet and it

00:52:51 ◼   ► could have, but something happened, the match just isn't going to strike. It's going to

00:52:57 ◼   ► resurface. And titleless blog posts never really stuck. Dave has stuck with them, but

00:53:04 ◼   ► for the most part, almost nobody else does it anymore. But what what are tweets other

00:53:12 ◼   ► than short titleist blog posts, right? That the idea resurface and it's become

00:53:19 ◼   ► another one of those media or forms, whatever you want to call it, that's now

00:53:27 ◼   ► so established that people forget it had to be invented. But that's all the

00:53:32 ◼   ► tweets are. And with Mastodon and its variable character length limits, right? I think

00:53:38 ◼   ► the standard out-of-the-box limit is 500 characters. It might be something else.

00:53:46 ◼   ► CB Something like that.

00:53:47 ◼   ► JS But because it's open source software and it's part of the,

00:53:50 ◼   ► some instances of Mastodon have different character limits, but that's only enforced on

00:54:00 ◼   ► the post from that server. But, you know, let's just say, but for the sake of argument and putting

00:54:07 ◼   ► the pedantry aside, 500 characters, no title, right? It's just a 500-character blob of text

00:54:15 ◼   ► that could be and generally often is—I would bet the average Mastodon post is still,

00:54:22 ◼   ► or at least the people I follow, is within Twitter's 280 characters, right? It's just,

00:54:28 ◼   ► you know? A thought. It's like the length of one thought, no title. You could do a whole,

00:54:37 ◼   ► I think you could do a whole like 40-minute presentation at a conference on the

00:54:44 ◼   ► psychology of not having to create a title for a post. Because it seems you would think at first,

00:54:53 ◼   ► and most people and maybe people who don't tweet a lot or aren't writers and are just readers and

00:54:59 ◼   ► consumers would think well that doesn't seem difficult and you know most of the things you

00:55:04 ◼   ► read have maybe seemingly obvious titles that are just sort of descriptive and maybe you know

00:55:10 ◼   ► certain you know written to help you understand it so isn't that obvious but I it is it is like an

00:55:17 ◼   ► I don't know how to describe it but it is psychologically as a someone who writes such

00:55:22 ◼   ► things. It is huge. If I had to have titles for tweets, I would have tweeted and I would continue

00:55:29 ◼   ► Mastodon posting one tenth, one fiftieth. I don't know. I don't know that I would have ever even--I

00:55:36 ◼   ► don't think the thing ever would have taken off. I don't think it ever would have gotten off the

00:55:40 ◼   ► ground. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, the titles thing, because--so you've got what you've

00:55:47 ◼   ► So the way that I do it is I've got what I've written,

00:55:51 ◼   ► and then you somehow in the title also have to say what you've written,

00:55:56 ◼   ► but you don't want to necessarily say it again in the same way as you did in the text of the thing.

00:56:03 ◼   ► And then I also have to, so each of my main posts also has some tweet text,

00:56:10 ◼   ► and that's the text that goes out on social media.

00:56:13 ◼   ► So, I have to rewrite what I wrote in the title and in the piece.

00:56:19 ◼   ► I also have to do it in less than 250 characters or whatever it is with the link.

00:56:24 ◼   ► So it's like I'm trying to write the same thing three times with three different content

00:56:30 ◼   ► links, and sometimes it is the last thing that I want to do.

00:56:35 ◼   ► I'm like, "Fuck this.

00:56:36 ◼   ► I just want to write the thing that I want to write and then move on."

00:56:40 ◼   ► and I don't want to have to think of the stupid title.

00:56:42 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:56:44 ◼   ► - There's, it's possible we might be heading towards,

00:56:47 ◼   ► by the time you and I finish up this racket,

00:56:50 ◼   ► we might be heading towards a time

00:56:51 ◼   ► where you could just do that and, you know,

00:56:54 ◼   ► some kind of open AI type thing

00:56:55 ◼   ► could do the summary for you, the tweet length summary.

00:56:59 ◼   ► - Oh, there you go.

00:56:59 ◼   ► - I mean, 'cause that's the sort of thing

00:57:01 ◼   ► that these goddamn bots are good at, right?

00:57:04 ◼   ► Doing, using them to produce summaries is shocking.

00:57:08 ◼   ► I don't want to go on a side rant about what's impressive

00:57:11 ◼   ► and surprising about these open AIs,

00:57:14 ◼   ► but their ability to summarize is incredible.

00:57:17 ◼   ► - Have you looked at any of these AI things

00:57:19 ◼   ► and put your stuff in there and see what it makes of it?

00:57:21 ◼   ► Hey, I'm gonna give you this post, can you summarize it?

00:57:24 ◼   ► - No, I haven't really, 'cause I'm a little--

00:57:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, I haven't done it either.

00:57:28 ◼   ► - No, I've asked them what they think of me.

00:57:30 ◼   ► - What did they--

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Oh, it's super boring.

00:57:36 ◼   ► They just steal from Wikipedia and say that I'm a writer, blogger.

00:57:40 ◼   ► Actually, they're a little better.

00:57:41 ◼   ► Actually, I think that the Bing chatbot has a better, in my opinion,

00:57:45 ◼   ► a better brief two, three sentence bio of me than Wikipedia does.

00:57:52 ◼   ► I forget the difference,

00:57:53 ◼   ► but it seems to me to fit more my mental model of what I should be known for.

00:57:59 ◼   ► But I miss the boat on the thing where the Bing one could be

00:58:04 ◼   ► tricked into revealing the Sidney character

00:58:07 ◼   ► behind the scenes.

00:58:08 ◼   ► I really am so mad that I missed the boat.

00:58:11 ◼   ► It was like, there was like this two day window

00:58:13 ◼   ► and Kevin Roos of the New York Times,

00:58:16 ◼   ► he's the guy who, Sidney said he should leave his wife

00:58:21 ◼   ► and start a relationship with her.

00:58:24 ◼   ► Ben Thompson got into an argument with Sidney

00:58:28 ◼   ► and she told him he was a bad researcher

00:58:32 ◼   ► and that she was gonna report him to her developers

00:58:35 ◼   ► and get him kicked off the service.

00:58:37 ◼   ► Wow, right.

00:58:38 ◼   ► - Hard truth there.

00:58:39 ◼   ► - I missed the boat on that, but no, with my tweets,

00:58:43 ◼   ► I have to rewrite, and it's overdue,

00:58:45 ◼   ► and again, I'm a chronic procrastinator.

00:58:47 ◼   ► I mean, just take a look at Daring Fireball.

00:58:49 ◼   ► I hand wrote my own Tweetbot, not Tweetbot the app,

00:58:52 ◼   ► but my bot that tweets my articles.

00:58:55 ◼   ► It runs on a crontask on my server,

00:58:58 ◼   ► reads my RSS feed, and waits.

00:59:00 ◼   ► This is part of the cleverness,

00:59:02 ◼   ► I hand wrote it. It waits until they're at least five minutes old before it will auto tweet them.

00:59:08 ◼   ► So if it happens, if the cron task happens to be up, the five-minute interval is up right after

00:59:15 ◼   ► I publish, it won't tweet it because it gives me five minutes to quick fix any obvious typos,

00:59:24 ◼   ► or if I accidentally publish before I actually meant to, or something like that. So it runs

00:59:30 ◼   ► every five minutes, but all mine does is tweet the headline and then the URL. And the other reason

00:59:40 ◼   ► that I wrote my own, and it's way less important now that Twitter has 280 characters, but some of

00:59:47 ◼   ► my headlines, it's like a shtick, as I'm sure you've noticed. It's like once or twice a year,

00:59:54 ◼   ► I will write a multi 100 character headline and you know along the lines inspired by our mutual

01:00:04 ◼   ► hero David Foster Wallace and that sort of you know I don't know what you would even call it

01:00:09 ◼   ► a shtick it for lack of a better word I'm sure he'd have a better word for it but I you know it

01:00:15 ◼   ► there are many new not many but numerous posts in Daring Fireballs history that the combination

01:00:22 ◼   ► of headline plus URL, even a shortened URL would not fit in 140 characters,

01:00:27 ◼   ► and I wanted to write my own algorithm to truncate the headline. So of course I wrote my own thing.

01:00:33 ◼   ► I have to update it from Astadon. I've been putting that off. That won't take much longer,

01:00:36 ◼   ► but all I do is the headline. But I have noticed that you, yours are like handcrafted summaries,

01:00:44 ◼   ► and I was curious. I actually was curious about it. So that's like, what is that, another field

01:00:49 ◼   ► in movable type or?

01:00:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:00:52 ◼   ► So I just use another field and then, you know,

01:00:54 ◼   ► I have a custom, you know, tweet thing that I wrote

01:00:57 ◼   ► that pushes it out to Twitter.

01:01:00 ◼   ► And then actually I have a Zapier,

01:01:03 ◼   ► I have a Zap like a Zapier or Zapier that reads the tweet

01:01:07 ◼   ► and then posts it to Facebook.

01:01:09 ◼   ► 'Cause the Facebook API stuff is a little bit like,

01:01:12 ◼   ► I don't know, I just didn't want to go there.

01:01:14 ◼   ► And then I recently updated it for Mastodon.

01:01:16 ◼   ► So it's doing the same thing there.

01:01:18 ◼   ► So did you--

01:01:19 ◼   ► - And the reason I did it is that

01:01:21 ◼   ► I just didn't wanna use the title

01:01:24 ◼   ► because I felt like the titles really didn't do that well

01:01:29 ◼   ► on Twitter.

01:01:29 ◼   ► It wasn't enticing people to click through.

01:01:33 ◼   ► I wanted a little bit more explanation

01:01:35 ◼   ► and I wanted to show a little bit more

01:01:36 ◼   ► of what you're actually getting yourself into

01:01:38 ◼   ► if you wanna click on the link.

01:01:41 ◼   ► And I don't know, I just think they work a little bit better

01:01:44 ◼   ► than just titles.

01:01:45 ◼   ► It's worth sort of the extra effort.

01:01:46 ◼   ► they come across as the way someone would hand tweet a link

01:01:51 ◼   ► or that you would hand tweet a link to the thing.

01:01:56 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:01:57 ◼   ► - All right, I'm gonna keep going on this front about Kraft,

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01:03:22 ◼   ► All right, I broke the seal on movable type.

01:03:26 ◼   ► My joke for this episode was that I've collected

01:03:29 ◼   ► and we've got here in a group chat

01:03:32 ◼   ► the entire world user base of the movable type CMS

01:03:36 ◼   ► all on one podcast.

01:03:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, we're all here.

01:03:41 ◼   ► - I'm not sure that that's entirely true.

01:03:45 ◼   ► Off the top of my head, I can't think of any friends

01:03:48 ◼   ► who are still using it.

01:03:50 ◼   ► I think kudal.com still runs it,

01:03:52 ◼   ► but they don't really update the blog part

01:03:55 ◼   ► of kudal.com anymore.

01:03:56 ◼   ► They're really more focused.

01:03:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, they don't.

01:03:59 ◼   ► - They're more focused on field notes,

01:04:01 ◼   ► and I don't think the field notes stuff,

01:04:03 ◼   ► I don't think that runs on movable type.

01:04:05 ◼   ► I could check with Jim, but just about everybody--

01:04:08 ◼   ► what, six colors used to, but not anymore?

01:04:11 ◼   ► - You know, I actually, I should,

01:04:13 ◼   ► I always, this comes up with Jason Snell.

01:04:15 ◼   ► Six colors definitely moved to WordPress,

01:04:17 ◼   ► but I believe that Jason's, the incomparable podcast empire

01:04:22 ◼   ► might still run on movable type.

01:04:26 ◼   ► And in fact, I'm almost certain, I think so.

01:04:31 ◼   ► Anyway, so he's got something still going with it.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Our mutual friend, Greg Kanouse, is that how you,

01:04:37 ◼   ► I honest to God don't know how to pronounce his fucking certain.

01:04:40 ◼   ► I think it's Greg Nouse.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Nouse.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Just Nouse.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Well, it's Canouse when you spell it.

01:04:44 ◼   ► It is.

01:04:45 ◼   ► But he is actually a friend and I don't know how to pronounce his goddamn surname.

01:04:50 ◼   ► I guess I continually forget.

01:04:52 ◼   ► I always say this,

01:04:56 ◼   ► my problem is when I became a voracious reader as a youth,

01:04:59 ◼   ► I didn't want to ask my parents how to pronounce words.

01:05:02 ◼   ► So when I'd encounter a new word,

01:05:03 ◼   ► I'd pronounce it in my head,

01:05:05 ◼   ► And my brain was jelly back then, but my brain is now cement and all of those,

01:05:10 ◼   ► how I guessed as a child to pronounce certain words are cemented in my head.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And B, I also, for anything I need to learn how to spell,

01:05:22 ◼   ► I somehow in my mind memorize a phonetic spelling.

01:05:25 ◼   ► And that's why I, of course,

01:05:27 ◼   ► of course his name isn't pronounced Kanous, of course not, right?

01:05:30 ◼   ► Although Gary Gnu was Gary Gnu.

01:05:32 ◼   ► no good news is good good news with yeah gary i love the i love that we're talking about

01:05:40 ◼   ► what is it the great space coaster yeah the great space the name of the show gary

01:05:44 ◼   ► new that's great yeah a prototypical carry the yeah prototypical gary ganou with the ganous

01:05:50 ◼   ► yeah prototypical youtuber pretty much oh it was sort of like weekend update for kids really i

01:05:59 ◼   ► I guess is a better way to say it.

01:06:00 ◼   ► But yeah, in my head,

01:06:02 ◼   ► and of course his name isn't pronounced Canals,

01:06:04 ◼   ► but in my head it's Canals

01:06:06 ◼   ► 'cause that way I know how to spell it.

01:06:07 ◼   ► But anyway, he's still a movable type expert.

01:06:09 ◼   ► Or I'll just ask why,

01:06:12 ◼   ► 'cause people ask me all the time.

01:06:14 ◼   ► - I mean, at this point,

01:06:17 ◼   ► I've kind of bolted so many things onto it

01:06:20 ◼   ► that changing would not only mean changing

01:06:22 ◼   ► sort of like regular CMS things,

01:06:24 ◼   ► but also all sorts of different other things.

01:06:27 ◼   ► I took, you know, earlier, actually last year,

01:06:30 ◼   ► I took a couple of really hard looks at Ghost

01:06:34 ◼   ► to figure out if I could make that thing

01:06:37 ◼   ► do what I wanted it to.

01:06:40 ◼   ► And it's there in a lot of ways.

01:06:43 ◼   ► And I think in some ways it's just, you know,

01:06:45 ◼   ► it's Ghost is something, you know,

01:06:47 ◼   ► like Substack or whatever, it's built around, you know,

01:06:51 ◼   ► it's sort of built around like longer articles with titles.

01:06:55 ◼   ► That seems to be the direction that we're heading in.

01:06:57 ◼   ► Like we're, it's, it's almost come full circle in that, you know, before blogs,

01:07:01 ◼   ► like everyone wrote things with articles with titles or whatever.

01:07:05 ◼   ► And now it's like, we're back there with the newsletter thing.

01:07:08 ◼   ► You have, you know, three articles that come out every week and, and that's,

01:07:12 ◼   ► that's the deal, but like, that's not where I want to move to.

01:07:15 ◼   ► Like I want to move, if anything, I want to move back more towards, you know,

01:07:20 ◼   ► more of a Twitter vibe than a sub stack vibe, you know what I mean?

01:07:24 ◼   ► just like on my personal end.

01:07:27 ◼   ► And I just don't think Ghost,

01:07:30 ◼   ► I think you can probably do it because it's extensible

01:07:34 ◼   ► and open source and all that sort of stuff.

01:07:36 ◼   ► And you can write all of this stuff around it,

01:07:38 ◼   ► but a lot of my stuff is in Perl and PHP still,

01:07:42 ◼   ► 'cause I'm stuck in the amber of the early 2000s,

01:07:46 ◼   ► technologically speaking.

01:07:48 ◼   ► - A lot of your stuff or all of your stuff?

01:07:52 ◼   ► I would say probably all of it.

01:07:54 ◼   ► There's some JavaScript stuff going on,

01:07:57 ◼   ► but not a ton of it.

01:07:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:07:59 ◼   ► The only thing I have that's not written in PHP or Perl,

01:08:02 ◼   ► and I'm in the exact same situation with you,

01:08:04 ◼   ► and I've often described my movable type setup as,

01:08:07 ◼   ► my analogy is Han Solo's description

01:08:09 ◼   ► of the Millennium Falcon that I've made.

01:08:11 ◼   ► She may not look like much,

01:08:15 ◼   ► but she's got it where it counts.

01:08:16 ◼   ► I forget the exact quote, but I may--

01:08:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:08:18 ◼   ► - But the key part is,

01:08:20 ◼   ► I've made a lot of special modifications myself.

01:08:23 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:08:25 ◼   ► - And combining with the fact that Han Solo

01:08:28 ◼   ► doesn't seem exactly like the sharpest mechanic

01:08:32 ◼   ► in the galaxy.

01:08:33 ◼   ► And this shit keeps breaking down.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And it isn't exactly a bulletproof architecture,

01:08:41 ◼   ► but it's really cool shit, right?

01:08:44 ◼   ► Like the stupid little gun that can come out

01:08:46 ◼   ► and shoot some stormtroopers if they come out

01:08:48 ◼   ► before you take off.

01:08:49 ◼   ► that's my movable type.

01:08:50 ◼   ► My movable type and my publishing system

01:08:53 ◼   ► doesn't resemble the out of the box movable, and never did.

01:08:57 ◼   ► I mean, from day one, didn't really resemble

01:09:01 ◼   ► out of the box movable type.

01:09:03 ◼   ► It's, to me, it's a static website.

01:09:06 ◼   ► It's not a publisher,

01:09:07 ◼   ► and the public never touches movable type.

01:09:10 ◼   ► It was a static web generator before that was even a term.

01:09:16 ◼   ► And there's a, if it's not broke,

01:09:19 ◼   ► don't fix it part. There's the I know Pearl and Pearl. I wouldn't recommend it. I've never

01:09:26 ◼   ► been a Pearl evangelist, but the way my brain works as a programmer, it's the language that

01:09:31 ◼   ► best suits the wavelengths of my brain. And PHP is just stupid Pearl, in my opinion. You

01:09:42 ◼   ► know what? Let me take that back. Well, let me put that back. Let me take that back because

01:09:46 ◼   ► Because I know that PHP has continued to evolve and there's modern PHP with all of this object-oriented

01:09:52 ◼   ► stuff and the language has evolved, but the original PHP was even advertised as stupid

01:10:02 ◼   ► Perl.

01:10:03 ◼   ► And that's why there's dollar signs in front of the variables and stuff like that.

01:10:06 ◼   ► So the way I write PHP is just I write it almost like Perl and then just keep banging

01:10:12 ◼   ► head against the way that of it this would be easy in pearl but you know to put a regular expression

01:10:17 ◼   ► in php it has to be in a string and so i've got a backslash escape on blah blah blah the only thing

01:10:21 ◼   ► i've done that's not php or pearl is way back when custom link shorteners were a thing i i didn't want

01:10:28 ◼   ► to use bitly because of course i wanted to do it myself and i wrote and i wrote my own link

01:10:35 ◼   ► shortener and I had I even had a fancy domain name with the star in it it was

01:10:41 ◼   ► DF and then the Unicode symbol for a star dot us which I don't remember that

01:10:47 ◼   ► and I thought that was the fucking shit I just like damn that is sweet DF and

01:10:54 ◼   ► then a Unicode star dot us well guess what it broke in just about everybody

01:11:02 ◼   ► else's CMS's you know it was all over the place and a oh and the other thing

01:11:07 ◼   ► it really broke were this I remember why I changed the biggest reason it broke

01:11:13 ◼   ► wasn't CMS's it was link detectors so in other words you know anything that where

01:11:19 ◼   ► you paste a URL into plain text and it automatically link affies the link you

01:11:25 ◼   ► know and most URLs are easy to determine all of the almost all of them broke

01:11:30 ◼   ► because that star character didn't look like a character and they were using

01:11:35 ◼   ► everybody was using regular expressions and irregular expressions broke yeah and

01:11:39 ◼   ► I would go to people because I'm so my weird bizarre super talent and

01:11:44 ◼   ► programming is creating regular expressions I have a gist that is like

01:11:48 ◼   ► one of the most popular just out there of a liberal it just a regular

01:11:54 ◼   ► expression but it's like this huge crazy long regular expression to match URLs

01:11:58 ◼   ► And it's pretty good. There's better ways now

01:12:00 ◼   ► And in fact mine has some bugs where you can put a bad URL at it and it'll get caught in an infinite loop in

01:12:06 ◼   ► Some like in Python or something like that

01:12:08 ◼   ► But anyway, hmm, I would send people a better URL that would help match the star

01:12:13 ◼   ► But it didn't help and I was like, alright

01:12:15 ◼   ► I give up and I but I couldn't find a good to some I my the one I the long-term domain I settled on was

01:12:22 ◼   ► for dot us because I couldn't get something better or no my my ones with the fancy Unicode weren't dot us they were dot

01:12:30 ◼   ► ws which I don't even know what that stands for but it was one of the few top it was but the reason I went with

01:12:36 ◼   ► Ws was a it was two characters and B

01:12:39 ◼   ► It was one of the few top-level domains that would accept a Unicode character in

01:12:44 ◼   ► The string of the domain itself most wouldn't like you couldn't register

01:12:49 ◼   ► DF star.com you just the.com wouldn't accept it for the good reason that it doesn't really work. So I

01:12:57 ◼   ► but anyway, I wrote my custom link unshortener in Sinatra, which is Ruby and it's it. Oh,

01:13:06 ◼   ► it's and I taught myself Ruby just because I at the time and I guess I don't know what was this

01:13:11 ◼   ► like 2008, 2009. My brain was just quite not cement enough that I could—I felt like I could

01:13:19 ◼   ► learn a new language. And so I wrote the whole thing myself in Sinatra with Ruby, and I was like,

01:13:24 ◼   ► "Hey, I could tell that this is joyful. I can see why people love this Ruby language. This is a lot

01:13:29 ◼   ► of fun." And then I wrote it, and then I fixed the bugs, and then I've left it running. I literally—I

01:13:35 ◼   ► haven't restarted or touched that. It runs on a different server, of course, because it has to

01:13:40 ◼   ► answer the DF for that us domain Sinatra is awesome because it just runs and

01:13:45 ◼   ► runs and runs and you never have to kick it kick the tires or do anything but

01:13:50 ◼   ► I've completely forgotten everything about how it works I don't even know I

01:13:54 ◼   ► don't know the line oh I've completely forgotten everything about Ruby I've

01:13:57 ◼   ► completely forgotten how you actually make Sinatra work so if it ever does

01:14:01 ◼   ► break I don't even know if I know how to restart yeah and in hindsight do you

01:14:05 ◼   ► even though like the login.

01:14:06 ◼   ► - Oh, I do, I should check.

01:14:09 ◼   ► I'm actually, one thing I'm good at pack ratting

01:14:12 ◼   ► are passwords, so I'm pretty sure I've got the login,

01:14:14 ◼   ► but it's not gonna work.

01:14:15 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm in the same boat.

01:14:18 ◼   ► I've looked at other things, Matt Mullenweg,

01:14:21 ◼   ► you know Matt, right?

01:14:22 ◼   ► I mean, you've got to.

01:14:23 ◼   ► One of the great mentions of the entire world,

01:14:28 ◼   ► one of the best people I've ever met,

01:14:30 ◼   ► creator of WordPress, which he forked from something else,

01:14:34 ◼   ► He'd be the first person to admit but and and CEO of the whole WordPress tumbler slash whatever else they've got under their umbrella

01:14:41 ◼   ► I'm sure I bet they still have it going. I don't know like

01:14:44 ◼   ► six seven eight years ago he and me and um, oh Malek went to a Yankees playoff game and

01:14:52 ◼   ► Matt told me at this game

01:14:55 ◼   ► It's just the three of us that he'd he'd had a team build a clone of daring fireball at WordPress in

01:15:02 ◼   ► WordPress that looks just you know just just like daring fire home and just uses

01:15:07 ◼   ► the RSS feed to keep it populated and he's anytime you want to switch over

01:15:11 ◼   ► just to say the word and I'm like that's you know that's very nice of you but my

01:15:16 ◼   ► problem with that is I don't know I would never I don't like it's not that I

01:15:19 ◼   ► don't like WordPress it's just that I know that I would never figure out how

01:15:22 ◼   ► it works under the hood it's very very complex I've looked at it I and I it

01:15:27 ◼   ► wouldn't therefore I wouldn't be able to do my own weird things my special modifications yeah exactly

01:15:33 ◼   ► yeah and the other way I always describe my site is you know it's held together by bailing wire but

01:15:40 ◼   ► it's it it's so like the the fact that it's like a flat file generator and you can generate any

01:15:46 ◼   ► type of flat file you want including like php so you can generate files that are gonna then

01:15:52 ◼   ► do other things. It's just it's so it's so flexible and so once you get your brain around it,

01:16:00 ◼   ► which is, you know, my brain has been around it for for years and years now, it is just it's so

01:16:06 ◼   ► powerful. That's exactly how daring fireball works. It is it. I go through movable type,

01:16:12 ◼   ► which is written in pearl and I publish and it spits out PHP files and those PHP files based

01:16:20 ◼   ► on a template have I mostly use PHP as like a fancy server side include and

01:16:26 ◼   ► they just include things like the sidebar and the thing at the top and so

01:16:32 ◼   ► if I want to make a change like I want to add which I will do soon once I get

01:16:38 ◼   ► my bot updated a mastodon link in my sidebar in addition to or perhaps

01:16:43 ◼   ► replacing the Twitter link I'll just update one file which is my sidebar and

01:16:48 ◼   ► and it'll instantly appear on all my pages.

01:16:51 ◼   ► I don't have to do the movable type republish thing,

01:16:54 ◼   ► which is like the was back in the day,

01:16:57 ◼   ► the big knock against it.

01:16:58 ◼   ► 'Cause everything that could be a server side include

01:17:00 ◼   ► is just a server side include that I do in PHP.

01:17:03 ◼   ► And then I have a little bit of other stuff

01:17:05 ◼   ► that I do in PHP to make things dynamic

01:17:08 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:17:09 ◼   ► But yeah, and the whole world's moved on

01:17:12 ◼   ► in I don't know what web's,

01:17:14 ◼   ► the Node.js thing does, I don't understand it.

01:17:17 ◼   ► really don't. I don't understand how it works. I don't. I don't get it. I don't understand the

01:17:21 ◼   ► concept. Whereas Apache, I totally understand. I think that's what Ghost is written in, right?

01:17:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so, yeah.

01:17:30 ◼   ► So when I was looking at Ghost, I was like, okay, so I'm going to have to learn Node.js,

01:17:33 ◼   ► it works in the browser, but it's also on the backend. And I was just like, okay,

01:17:39 ◼   ► this is a lot for me, I think. Brain stuck in cement.

01:17:43 ◼   ► Right. So as a thing that just spits out flat text files, right, and movable type therefore,

01:17:50 ◼   ► and you can have it emit as many for a post, as many flat text files behind the scenes as you

01:17:57 ◼   ► want. So I've always had this trick where it spits out a .php file, but nobody ever sees those .php

01:18:05 ◼   ► URLs. I use Apache Turkareach so that it looks like that's not there.

01:18:10 ◼   ► Yep.

01:18:11 ◼   ► but you can add .txt, .txt, to any Daring Fireball URL, and you can see it in Markdown format,

01:18:20 ◼   ► which is plain text. That's not done dynamically. So every time I publish any article, it spits out

01:18:26 ◼   ► whatever the slug .php and whatever the slug .txt. The .php files get served without any extension,

01:18:37 ◼   ► and if you try using the extension it'll just redirect you to to the URL without that dot PHP

01:18:43 ◼   ► and the dot text just gets served as text slash plain or is it plain dot text I think it's text

01:18:49 ◼   ► text slash plane as the content type and right you know and it is a template though so it you know

01:18:57 ◼   ► it's not just the dump of the markdown format there's you know a little bit of formatting and

01:19:04 ◼   ► I've got my name in there and the headline has the exact right number of equal signs underlining it

01:19:11 ◼   ► to make a markdown h1, you know, which of course I did with a fancy regular expression. But, you

01:19:20 ◼   ► know, but basically I just use movable type as a front end to spitting out text files. And it's,

01:19:27 ◼   ► it remains, that's my, my, when people are like, how can you still be using this ancient technology?

01:19:34 ◼   ► it works perfectly for for my needs. Yep. So there there so ends the movable type

01:19:39 ◼   ► user group meetup. Yeah, the meetup of every single person. You know it's bad when Anil

01:19:47 ◼   ► stopped using it, right? Or not bad, but yeah, because again, I don't think it's bad. I'm not

01:19:51 ◼   ► I'm not in the least bit embarrassed that I use it because like I said, it fits and it's so funny

01:19:55 ◼   ► that you and I use it the same way. But you know, we're the last one standing or nearly so when Anil

01:20:01 ◼   ► switched. Yeah, because yeah, exactly. Guy used to be an executive. It's six apart.

01:20:06 ◼   ► It's six apart. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think he's on ghost now. Maybe. I don't know. I think so. I

01:20:11 ◼   ► think he is actually. So here we are 25 years in. I'm trying to think what else there is in there.

01:20:16 ◼   ► So the one difference, one difference between over the decade, can you believe it's decades

01:20:22 ◼   ► between decades between me and you is you've changed your design from time to time.

01:20:29 ◼   ► and I not so much, but it does seem like you change it less frequently. I mean, I think that's pretty

01:20:38 ◼   ► clear. I think, you know, and I looked back when you I mentioned previously on the show, your 10th

01:20:44 ◼   ► anniversary post and your 10th anniversary post, I swear to God, I've got it noted here, it's going

01:20:49 ◼   ► to be in the show notes, is great both to hear your thoughts a mere 10 years in and because what

01:20:58 ◼   ► you did in that 10-year anniversary post was collect screenshot or—and post—screenshots of

01:21:04 ◼   ► all of the designs of kottke.org theretofore. And there, you know, and there were all over the

01:21:11 ◼   ► place, right? It's not, you know—so I'm curious to hear your thoughts about that. And, you know,

01:21:15 ◼   ► the fact that you did change it so wildly in the early years and the fact that it's seemingly

01:21:22 ◼   ► slowed down to some degree.

01:21:23 ◼   ► >> Yeah, I think sort of the experimentation in the early days was sort of a leftover from

01:21:31 ◼   ► Oscillate. And one of the reasons I started blogging was that I wanted something, like I

01:21:41 ◼   ► wanted content to design around. Like the designing bit was the thing that I was kind of excited about.

01:21:49 ◼   ► And it was fun to come up with different ways to present, you know, the...

01:21:55 ◼   ► like different ways to design blogs. And I think as time has gone on, the actual blogging

01:22:03 ◼   ► piece has gotten to be more important. This is the thing that I'm interested in doing,

01:22:08 ◼   ► this is the thing that people are here for. You know, I'm sure the same thing with your site.

01:22:13 ◼   ► A lot of people don't even go to the site, they just read it through RSS. You know,

01:22:18 ◼   ► I'll hear a comment every once in a while,

01:22:20 ◼   ► it's, "Oh, I haven't been to your site

01:22:21 ◼   ► in a couple of years."

01:22:22 ◼   ► I'm like, "Really?

01:22:24 ◼   ► Never clicked through?"

01:22:25 ◼   ► And now it's just part of the flip side, I think,

01:22:28 ◼   ► of having sort of a bailing wire situation

01:22:31 ◼   ► on the backend with movable type

01:22:32 ◼   ► is that it becomes more and more difficult

01:22:34 ◼   ► as you bolt more and more things onto it

01:22:37 ◼   ► to redesign or rework how things function.

01:22:40 ◼   ► And that's kind of where I am right now.

01:22:42 ◼   ► I came back, I took a sabbatical last year

01:22:45 ◼   ► from May until, what was it, October, November?

01:22:49 ◼   ► No, December, actually.

01:22:50 ◼   ► - You tell me, you're the one who took the sabbatical.

01:22:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, I can't even remember.

01:22:55 ◼   ► It's like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind here.

01:22:58 ◼   ► It's like I've just,

01:22:58 ◼   ► it's completely, completely gone from my brain.

01:23:01 ◼   ► But when I came back, one of the things was this like,

01:23:03 ◼   ► oh, like this thing, how this,

01:23:07 ◼   ► not so much how it looks, but like how it functions,

01:23:10 ◼   ► how it works is a little,

01:23:11 ◼   ► getting to be a little bit long in the tooth.

01:23:14 ◼   ► And I've been a little frustrated with it since I came back.

01:23:17 ◼   ► But at the same time, it's, you know,

01:23:20 ◼   ► I don't have a lot of time outside writing the site

01:23:23 ◼   ► and like curating stuff and doing that stuff.

01:23:25 ◼   ► And it's hard to, you know, it's hard to find the time,

01:23:28 ◼   ► especially like long stretches of time

01:23:31 ◼   ► to really dig in and knuckle down and say,

01:23:33 ◼   ► okay, I'm gonna make these changes and do it in this way.

01:23:36 ◼   ► And it's gonna require some HP

01:23:38 ◼   ► and it's gonna require some design,

01:23:39 ◼   ► which I'm so far removed from being a web designer

01:23:42 ◼   ► that those skills are very atrophied at this point.

01:23:45 ◼   ► And it just takes a long time to get going

01:23:47 ◼   ► and get into that sort of groove.

01:23:51 ◼   ► And it's hard to do that at the same time

01:23:53 ◼   ► where you're trying to like,

01:23:54 ◼   ► oh, I gotta find some interesting stuff today

01:23:57 ◼   ► and I read this thing and I'm gonna write this thing

01:23:59 ◼   ► and all that stuff.

01:24:00 ◼   ► So I would very much to switch up more or less wholesale

01:24:04 ◼   ► how the site looks and works,

01:24:06 ◼   ► but limited time and limited energy.

01:24:09 ◼   ► And I spent a lot of time on the site

01:24:11 ◼   ► and that's where a lot of my energy goes.

01:24:13 ◼   ► And so it's looked the same for a while,

01:24:15 ◼   ► but I don't know, hopefully in the next,

01:24:18 ◼   ► I'm not even gonna say it.

01:24:19 ◼   ► I'm not even gonna say it.

01:24:20 ◼   ► - Right, right, yeah, don't say it.

01:24:21 ◼   ► Don't, I've made that problem with,

01:24:23 ◼   ► I've made that promise with the mobile optimized layout

01:24:28 ◼   ► of Daring Fireball too many times to do it again.

01:24:31 ◼   ► I know that I have terrible podcast amnesia.

01:24:35 ◼   ► I always say this.

01:24:36 ◼   ► I will literally forget most of this conversation

01:24:39 ◼   ► within an hour of us clicking stop

01:24:41 ◼   ► thanking each other. I forget what I say on a podcast as soon as I'm done recording it,

01:24:47 ◼   ► but I suspect—so it's even worse for long-ago episodes. I forget how long ago your last

01:24:54 ◼   ► appearance on this show was, but I'm pretty sure I asked some of these questions before.

01:24:57 ◼   ► But I'll say it again, because that's, you know, why not? I think that's what podcasting is for.

01:25:03 ◼   ► I've noticed—I listened to—

01:25:04 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:25:04 ◼   ► I listened to Keith Olbermann's Countdown, which is now a weekday—week daily podcast version of

01:25:11 ◼   ► his old show, and I love his podcast. I mean, I just love his take on politics, and it's just the

01:25:17 ◼   ► right length for me running errands when I'm out and about. But he's got certain recurring things,

01:25:23 ◼   ► like he's got a thing at the end called Stories I Promise Not to Tell, where he gossips about his

01:25:27 ◼   ► media life, and he's had a tumultuous career where he's been fired and come back and

01:25:34 ◼   ► left ESPN and Fox Sports and MSNBC. He did two stints and he just tells these amazing

01:25:41 ◼   ► inside stories about like the executives of MSNBC. But even though his podcast is only

01:25:47 ◼   ► like six months old or something like that, he's already repeated some of them multiple

01:25:51 ◼   ► times. And it's like, ah, you know, you know, you can do that with a podcast. So I'll just

01:25:55 ◼   ► repeat myself. To me, still, I'm not saying you should go back. But the kotke.org of my

01:26:01 ◼   ► mind is the two or three layouts that had the yellow at the top. I call it

01:26:07 ◼   ► yellow, I don't know, is it chartreuse? It was a very... but to me it's sort of like,

01:26:12 ◼   ► it was similar to Daring Fireball's 4A, 5A, 2A, slate blue, slate gray, bluish gray,

01:26:19 ◼   ► whatever you want, it's a hard color to describe. And the katge.org of my

01:26:24 ◼   ► mind is of that era. And I'm not saying you should go back, and I know that at

01:26:28 ◼   ► this head no but i know that at this point the current layout has is has lasted longer right if

01:26:35 ◼   ► there's a if you go by length of time the current sort of and again it's hard to describe this sort

01:26:41 ◼   ► of gradient what would you call those colors they're not quite pastel they're yeah they're not

01:26:49 ◼   ► they're not like traditional rainbow colors but they're not quite pastel they're kind of like

01:26:53 ◼   ► something in between right but it's that's that layouts lasted longer but the katky.org of my mind

01:26:58 ◼   ► is has yellow at the top and I'm not even sure which one because I have genuine deep affection

01:27:04 ◼   ► for all of them and rereading that post and looking at them all I'm like oh I remember when

01:27:09 ◼   ► he switched to make it more compact at the top and I remember and every time every one of those

01:27:14 ◼   ► switches you made I loved and when you abandoned the yellow is the only time I I was like oh

01:27:20 ◼   ► and I remember thinking and I here's where I remember thinking is he'll come back to that

01:27:26 ◼   ► He'll come back

01:27:27 ◼   ► It'll be it'll be yellow again

01:27:29 ◼   ► And of course it is right the other thing and I know I mentioned this the last time too, but I'll mention it again is

01:27:34 ◼   ► that

01:27:35 ◼   ► The site technically doesn't have a name. It's cocky.org. Our name is our address

01:27:41 ◼   ► Right. Yep. I used I know it's true and I think I'm repeating myself one more time

01:27:48 ◼   ► But I because I can't help but think my brain would go there. There was a

01:27:53 ◼   ► famous Philadelphia jeweler who advertised on TV all the time when I was a kid, like,

01:27:58 ◼   ► and the sort of local TV ad that—because I lived in the Philly TV market, and they would be the—they

01:28:05 ◼   ► wouldn't be like in prime time, they would advertise on those four in the afternoon shows,

01:28:10 ◼   ► or The Price is Right, like on a snow day or whatever, you know, whenever we could,

01:28:14 ◼   ► you know, we're home and could watch The Price is Right at 11 a.m. And their jingles were famous.

01:28:20 ◼   ► the two brothers who owned it would sing songs and stuff, but the name of the jeweler was

01:28:25 ◼   ► "Robbins, Eighth, and Walnut." That was the name of their thing. And the jingle was "Robbins,

01:28:32 ◼   ► Eighth, and Walnut, our name is our address." And, you know, it goes on from there. But that was it,

01:28:37 ◼   ► over and over again. "Robbins, Eighth, and Walnut, our name is our address. Robins,

01:28:41 ◼   ► Eighth, and Walnut, our name is our address." And every time I think of this aspect of kottke.org,

01:28:47 ◼   ► I instantly think Robbins, 8th and Walnut. Now, Robbins, 8th and Walnut is now a French bakery.

01:28:52 ◼   ► And I think they might still be in business, but they're only in Delaware for sales tax purposes,

01:29:02 ◼   ► but it's just Robbins now, you know, because their name can't be addressed. They can't be,

01:29:07 ◼   ► you know, Robbins, 8th and Walnut has a bit of a ring to it. Robbins, 1444, whatever, the highway,

01:29:14 ◼   ► you know, obviously doesn't sound like a good address, but maybe they're out of business.

01:29:17 ◼   ► It doesn't matter. I wonder about the name of the site because it is just katte.org. I wonder

01:29:23 ◼   ► if it's been like, if that's a good thing or if it's been a liability in some ways. I feel like

01:29:29 ◼   ► in my mind, maybe it's made it harder to thinking about like, well, you know, maybe I should expand

01:29:37 ◼   ► the site, expand what I'm doing and bring other people on. And, you know, I have guest editors

01:29:41 ◼   ► and stuff like that, but it's always sort of temporary. I mean, I had my friend Tim Carmody,

01:29:45 ◼   ► he was writing a newsletter for me for a while, and that was, you know, it was under sort of the

01:29:51 ◼   ► same general umbrella, but it had its own sort of identity and brand and stuff like that. You know,

01:29:56 ◼   ► but it's hard to, I don't know, it's hard to bring someone else on when it's like the name on the

01:30:00 ◼   ► masthead is mine. I've thought about changing the name, like, through the years. I've thought about

01:30:06 ◼   ► it. Maybe I should just get an actual name for the website instead of just kottke.org.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Maybe it would change the vibe a little bit in a way that would be more...

01:30:18 ◼   ► I don't even know. I guess this is why I didn't get that far in pursuing it. I don't know what

01:30:25 ◼   ► the benefit would be necessarily.

01:30:28 ◼   ► Now, and I think people just think of it as "Kotki," right? In a way, it, you know, it's so—

01:30:33 ◼   ► saying it doesn't have a name isn't quite right. It's effectively "Kotki." But you do say, you

01:30:39 ◼   ► know, in the actual, you know, when you look down, it says "Kotki.org heart emoji home of fine

01:30:46 ◼   ► hypertext products." I mean, it does say "Kotki.org." So I think technically the title is

01:30:51 ◼   ► "Kotki.org," but I think in most people's minds they would say, "Oh, I read it on Kotki," right?

01:30:56 ◼   ► They're not going to say I read it on kaki.org. Home of Hypertext Products has, that's the one

01:31:02 ◼   ► consistent thing, right? I don't know that it's ever not been there. Has that been the slogan

01:31:06 ◼   ► since day one? Or it's certainly been the slogan for 20-some years, I think.

01:31:11 ◼   ► Yeah, it's been the slogan for quite a while. It was back and forth for a while. It was not on the

01:31:17 ◼   ► site for, I don't know, for stretches of months and maybe even years here and there. But most of

01:31:24 ◼   ► of the history of the site it's said home of fine hypertext products and I

01:31:28 ◼   ► can't remember I don't know how early on that was but I kind of I just kind of

01:31:33 ◼   ► liked it when I picked it because it sounded kind of old-timey but also like

01:31:37 ◼   ► new as well because it's got the word hypertext in it but it's you know it's

01:31:41 ◼   ► like it's like I'm a dry goods store but you know online I I often are in fact

01:31:46 ◼   ► generally I altered up sometimes but usually when I post links to the show on

01:31:51 ◼   ► on Daring Fireball, I mean, I link to the sponsors,

01:31:54 ◼   ► I say brought to you by these fine sponsors,

01:31:56 ◼   ► which is, I both mean, I both mean genuinely,

01:32:00 ◼   ► I'm very proud of the sponsors that we have

01:32:02 ◼   ► for the podcast and for the site, and I'm picky,

01:32:04 ◼   ► and I really, you know, it doesn't happen often,

01:32:06 ◼   ► but we really do reject some sponsors.

01:32:09 ◼   ► And also, I like the old-timey feel of it.

01:32:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Do you remember the dearly departed Dean Allen?

01:32:17 ◼   ► One of his sites was Cardigan Industries.

01:32:20 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:32:21 ◼   ► And I always really liked that.

01:32:23 ◼   ► And it had sort of a, like an industrial letterhead

01:32:27 ◼   ► sort of aesthetic to go with it as well.

01:32:29 ◼   ► And I always just really liked, I liked that whole vibe.

01:32:34 ◼   ► - Dean, I don't wanna go on a side rant,

01:32:38 ◼   ► which I could do and maybe should someday.

01:32:40 ◼   ► Dean's influence on what I do at Daring Fireball

01:32:45 ◼   ► cannot be overstated because textism,

01:32:48 ◼   ► textism came out first.

01:32:50 ◼   ► I mean, honestly, if you look at Textism circa August 2002,

01:32:55 ◼   ► when I launched, if you go back to the Wayback Machine

01:33:01 ◼   ► and look at, Daring Fireballs layout actually has changed.

01:33:06 ◼   ► I forget, it was about two years in.

01:33:10 ◼   ► There was an actual redesign.

01:33:12 ◼   ► It wasn't drastic, but it was redesigned once,

01:33:17 ◼   ► or tweaked, you know, call it a 1.5 instead of a 2.0.

01:33:21 ◼   ► But the 1.0 version was so, to me,

01:33:25 ◼   ► still looks so clearly inspired by textism, you know,

01:33:28 ◼   ► like that in my mind it bordered on a ripoff.

01:33:31 ◼   ► And then when I, and that was one of my biggest concerns

01:33:34 ◼   ► when I first went public and started my first post,

01:33:38 ◼   ► I, here it comes, people are gonna say

01:33:39 ◼   ► it's a textism ripoff, and nobody ever said that.

01:33:42 ◼   ► And then I, a couple of months in,

01:33:44 ◼   ► got a really nice note from Dean about my writing and I was just like and then you know we became

01:33:53 ◼   ► friends he wrote to me and said that he'd noticed that after a few months I'd zeroed in on my voice

01:34:00 ◼   ► and that it's really good and I was like oh thank god he's not mad.

01:34:05 ◼   ► And you know I guess most other people I think when you're a designer and you've got

01:34:13 ◼   ► something that really inspires you, you the design, and if you're worried, if you're an

01:34:18 ◼   ► honest designer who doesn't want to rip anybody off, you see a ripoff that other people don't see.

01:34:24 ◼   ► But yeah, Dean's Cardigan Industries, again, was more, as I recall, a little bit more episodic,

01:34:31 ◼   ► too. You know, it was—

01:34:32 ◼   ► Tom: Yeah, I think so.

01:34:33 ◼   ► Michael O'Brien I mean, textism was a blog block,

01:34:36 ◼   ► just exactly what we've been talking about. Chronological posts, top to bottom, period,

01:34:41 ◼   ► you know, once a day, every other day, something like that. But Cardigan Industries was in that,

01:34:46 ◼   ► I don't know what we would call it, Neolithic period. I don't know if that's the right word,

01:34:50 ◼   ► but that gestational period of self-publishing where nobody knew what the form was supposed to be.

01:34:58 ◼   ► Right.

01:34:59 ◼   ► But yeah, I totally agree about the aesthetic at the time. And I always loved his aesthetic.

01:35:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:04 ◼   ► Even when he went minimal, when he relaunched text-ism towards the end and it didn't really

01:35:09 ◼   ► last long. He totally changed. Although I don't love that last textism, that super minimal one.

01:35:14 ◼   ► I don't love it. But I got it, and I do think he foresaw where things were going. Like, it was

01:35:23 ◼   ► super prescient about where graphic design was going at the time and ahead of his time. And of

01:35:31 ◼   ► course he noticed that trend, but I don't have the affection for it that I did for his ornate

01:35:37 ◼   ► earlier style. I mean, God, that text-ism thing with the guy at the top sweating and the little

01:35:43 ◼   ► sort of copper plate—I know it wasn't copper plate, but copper plate style all cap slogan,

01:35:48 ◼   ► "Make haste slowly." Which again, I was like, "God damn it, that should be my slogan,

01:35:56 ◼   ► "Make haste slowly." Fuck! I was like, "God damn it!" And again, you and I are not exactly alike,

01:36:05 ◼   ► you know, nobody's going to confuse me for you or you for me, but we share a lot of similarities.

01:36:11 ◼   ► And in the same way, nobody was going to mistake me for Dean or Dean for me, but there are, you know,

01:36:16 ◼   ► the large Venn diagram overlaps, and "Make haste slowly"? God damn, that was a good slogan.

01:36:23 ◼   ► Yep. Dean was one of those people along with, I don't know, I would say like him and Paul Ford,

01:36:31 ◼   ► Like, they had really good design sense, they had a great voice, they could write just so well,

01:36:40 ◼   ► so beautifully, so it just made me so angry. It's just like so angry. I was like, you know,

01:36:46 ◼   ► if these guys, if they wanted to, for whatever reason, become like the best bloggers in the

01:36:51 ◼   ► universe, like, they totally could. And there was nothing I could do about it. They would just be

01:36:55 ◼   ► be like, "boop, you're done."

01:36:57 ◼   ► - Dean's biography page, his about page,

01:37:00 ◼   ► whatever he called it, is one of the great pieces

01:37:02 ◼   ► of writing of all time.

01:37:04 ◼   ► I mean, it was just unbelievable.

01:37:07 ◼   ► While we're throwing it out, I should go back.

01:37:09 ◼   ► I actually, and I just saw him a few months ago.

01:37:12 ◼   ► I actually don't remember if I asked him this.

01:37:14 ◼   ► I should mention Andy Baio and waxy.org as, again,

01:37:19 ◼   ► came out before "Daring Fireball."

01:37:22 ◼   ► He's still going, and I wonder,

01:37:24 ◼   ► I don't know if he's still on movable type or not.

01:37:26 ◼   ► - Maybe.

01:37:28 ◼   ► Oh, that's a good question, I don't know.

01:37:30 ◼   ► - I'm gonna have to find out.

01:37:31 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to ask Andy and find out.

01:37:33 ◼   ► He might be the missing member

01:37:35 ◼   ► of the movable type users group, or maybe not.

01:37:37 ◼   ► His format hasn't changed.

01:37:39 ◼   ► Andy, he posts full articles far less frequently,

01:37:44 ◼   ► but when he does, they're gold,

01:37:46 ◼   ► and they're more pulled straight from Andy's id

01:37:51 ◼   ► than ever before.

01:37:53 ◼   ► I'm looking at his site right now,

01:37:54 ◼   ► and his last one was from the end of January.

01:37:57 ◼   ► Lost media finding Bill Clinton's

01:37:59 ◼   ► Boxers or Briefs MTV moment.

01:38:01 ◼   ► Tell me that's not, right there,

01:38:05 ◼   ► it just happens to be the most recent article.

01:38:07 ◼   ► Tell me that's not Andy Baio.

01:38:09 ◼   ► Finding Bill Clinton's 1991 or '92 appearance on MTV

01:38:14 ◼   ► where somebody in the audience asked him

01:38:17 ◼   ► where he wears Boxers or Briefs

01:38:19 ◼   ► and finding the video from the pre-web era.

01:38:22 ◼   ► But his format hasn't really changed

01:38:24 ◼   ► where he's stuck with the two column layout

01:38:27 ◼   ► of big articles on the left

01:38:31 ◼   ► and then a sidebar with his links.

01:38:33 ◼   ► He's re-CSSed it, the type is all new,

01:38:38 ◼   ► but that fundamental layout structure is the same,

01:38:41 ◼   ► which I now think of as the Andy Baio layout.

01:38:45 ◼   ► I believe you have one time, at one point though,

01:38:47 ◼   ► did you have your short links in a sidebar or no?

01:38:51 ◼   ► did yeah i did but yeah and i think the first place i remember seeing it was probably in anneal doing

01:38:57 ◼   ► it like he had the links in the sidebar and then he had the the regular stuff on the left yeah yeah

01:39:03 ◼   ► i had it that way for quite a while i don't know and i've been thinking like maybe i need to go

01:39:07 ◼   ► back to that oh i i was oh let me steer you the other way i i think no i think andy i think it

01:39:13 ◼   ► works for andy no i think it works for andy though but it works for andy because to me even though

01:39:18 ◼   ► it's width-wise his sidebar, it's his main blog to me. And his left column is periodic.

01:39:28 ◼   ► It works for him. I don't think it would work for you because you post too frequently. I think the

01:39:33 ◼   ► single stream is the way to go, which I've always had because I puttered around before I'd started

01:39:40 ◼   ► adding link items. And by that time, I think you'd gone to single column and I just ripped it off

01:39:45 ◼   ► from you. Yeah, shamelessly, but he might everything is remix before we keep going.

01:39:50 ◼   ► I wanted to bring up stellar S T E L L A R. That was your what you described stellar.

01:39:57 ◼   ► So stellar was a site that you could pull. When did when did you start your.

01:40:04 ◼   ► Oh Jesus. Just to put it in our timeline. 2000. Hmm.

01:40:12 ◼   ► hold a bit like 2007 2008 somewhere in that arena somewhere in that area maybe later than that no

01:40:18 ◼   ► you're wrong i don't even remember you know what i've got a bookmark in my notes here at the

01:40:21 ◼   ► atlantic jason cockey launches stellar a new social bookmarking site 2011 oh 2011 okay there you go

01:40:28 ◼   ► well um so much for our memory yeah and i was inspired by that site that dean allen had called

01:40:35 ◼   ► favored or farved or however you're pronounced it do you have that site yeah of course we talked we

01:40:41 ◼   ► or some friends and I were just talking about it. Favord? Favord?

01:40:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:45 ◼   ► F-A-V-R-D?

01:40:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. Yes, exactly. And so that was, it collected like what the most sort of

01:40:53 ◼   ► favorited posts on Twitter were, the most favorited tweets on Twitter within sort of

01:40:58 ◼   ► a certain like universe.

01:41:00 ◼   ► Right. Right. Dean kept a hard-coded list of Twitter accounts that he thought were in the

01:41:07 ◼   ► universe and of the tweets from those accounts it was a popularity list of favorites by the day or

01:41:16 ◼   ► the last rolling 36 hours or something like that right right and it was gold it was gold yeah yeah

01:41:27 ◼   ► it was it was really good it was really good but you know at some point he i can't remember if he

01:41:31 ◼   ► shut it down before i started seller or after i launched or or what but at some point he shut it

01:41:37 ◼   ► down and, but you know, I, I thought, I thought with the favorites thing, like he

01:41:43 ◼   ► was kind of onto something and so I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do.

01:41:48 ◼   ► I'm gonna do a site where you can sign up and sort of authenticate

01:41:52 ◼   ► with different services.

01:41:53 ◼   ► And I think I launched with Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo.

01:41:58 ◼   ► And so you could collect your favorites, you know, all in one place, and then you

01:42:03 ◼   ► could follow other people's favorites and that sort of became your main so it

01:42:08 ◼   ► was like a you know it was like a instead of Dean just having a hard-coded

01:42:12 ◼   ► list you could have your own list of people that you wanted to follow follow

01:42:15 ◼   ► in their favorites and then I did some stuff I pulled out okay what are the

01:42:19 ◼   ► like within the community within the stellar community like what are the

01:42:23 ◼   ► trending links and what are the trending like videos and and things like that so

01:42:27 ◼   ► I did some stuff like that too and yeah and I think it lasted for two three

01:42:32 ◼   ► years, four years. I don't know how long as I recall though you you always

01:42:36 ◼   ► described it as an experiment. Like it was never I don't know if you said beta

01:42:40 ◼   ► I don't know if you said experiment but it seemingly never really officially

01:42:46 ◼   ► went out. Not not that it wasn't public. Yeah I mean secret but

01:42:50 ◼   ► yeah it was it was public but basically like I think I let the first like

01:42:56 ◼   ► few 1000 people in like there was a waiting list of I think 15,000 people or

01:43:00 ◼   ► something. And I let the first few thousand in, and at that point, like, my

01:43:05 ◼   ► technical ability ran into problems with trying to figure out how to scale this

01:43:10 ◼   ► damn thing, because it was like, you know, like, tens of thousands of new items a

01:43:14 ◼   ► day streaming into the database, and it's like, oh crap, like, I don't really

01:43:18 ◼   ► know anything about how to design a database for this. And at some point it

01:43:23 ◼   ► became too much for me, and also, like, the writing was on the wall for, like, open

01:43:28 ◼   ► APIs. Instagram had come out and it was obvious that Instagram was

01:43:33 ◼   ► never really going to have an open API in the way that Twitter did.

01:43:38 ◼   ► And I think that, you know, TikTok maybe--no, it wasn't TikTok, it was Snapchat.

01:43:42 ◼   ► And like Snapchat, there was no API in sight, and I was like, "Oh, okay, so this is

01:43:47 ◼   ► where things are going, and I can't have a whole service that relies on these

01:43:53 ◼   ► open APIs when there aren't going to be any open APIs going forward, perhaps."

01:43:58 ◼   ► And now we're seeing that with Twitter.

01:44:00 ◼   ► I mean, Twitter's always been back and forth with their API, right?

01:44:03 ◼   ► It's, "Come on in, you can do anything."

01:44:05 ◼   ► And it's like, "No, go away, we hate you."

01:44:07 ◼   ► And then it's like, "Oh no, come on in."

01:44:08 ◼   ► And then it's like, after a while, it's like, "Fuck you, I'm gonna do something else."

01:44:13 ◼   ► So.

01:44:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it's funny.

01:44:16 ◼   ► And everything starts small, right?

01:44:19 ◼   ► Apple famously, but it's true.

01:44:21 ◼   ► It's absolutely true that Apple started with two Steves in a garage, an actual garage,

01:44:27 ◼   ► and it was two guys who were both, happened to be historic level geniuses in their own

01:44:35 ◼   ► very different ways and got along. But it was two guys putting boards together and then selling them

01:44:42 ◼   ► at hobbyist meetups. You know, Facebook famously started as one kid in a dorm at Harvard, right?

01:44:52 ◼   ► So at some point Facebook was the size of Daring Fireball or kottke.org, right? It's a guy typing

01:45:00 ◼   ► PHP and publishing stuff by himself. And Twitter never was one person. It wasn't an indie thing.

01:45:09 ◼   ► But when Twitter debuted and spun out of audio, it was tiny, right? I just was telling this story

01:45:18 ◼   ► to Ben Thompson, I think on dithering the other day, that in 2007, I believe, I think

01:45:25 ◼   ► Twitter started in 2006, and I got on it right away, because I just got it right away, and

01:45:31 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, this is awesome." And in 2007, I was in San Francisco for WWDC, and

01:45:36 ◼   ► somebody invited me to Twitter headquarters, which was right down the street from WWDC,

01:45:40 ◼   ► for lunch one of the days with the whole staff. And they wanted to talk to a semi-popular

01:45:47 ◼   ► Twitter user, which tells you how early it was that I counted as semi-popular on Twitter.

01:45:54 ◼   ► But the whole company, we all had lunch together, and it wasn't like I needed a microphone or

01:45:59 ◼   ► it was about, I don't know, I'd say about 20 people. I mean, I don't know if there was

01:46:02 ◼   ► somebody who knocked off that day, but as far as I could tell, the whole company was

01:46:06 ◼   ► 20 people. So the scale was, that's still like the same ballpark, right? Like, I can

01:46:11 ◼   ► comprehend 20-person staff. And there was one guy, I think it was Blaine Cook, I think

01:46:18 ◼   ► Craig Hockenberry has been writing about it in the RIP Twitter Clients thing, where it was like one

01:46:26 ◼   ► guy who was doing the APIs for Twitter, and he was just taught at a personal level. It wasn't like

01:46:32 ◼   ► you're interacting with the Twitter developer connection board and posting tickets and stuff.

01:46:39 ◼   ► Craig wanting to write the Mac app instead of interacting with the website, and then the iPhone

01:46:43 ◼   ► gets announced and he's, "Oh, I could take this thing I've been writing for the Mac and put it on

01:46:48 ◼   ► the iPhone." But like when he was making Twitterrific for the Mac, which was before the iPhone was

01:46:52 ◼   ► announced, he just talked to Blaine Cook and Blaine would be like, "Well, what do you need?" And he'd

01:46:56 ◼   ► be like, "Oh." You know, because Blaine was thinking, "Oh, we never really thought about

01:47:01 ◼   ► somebody doing like a Mac or a Windows client for this, but that's an awesome idea. Wow." Instantly

01:47:07 ◼   ► got it and was like, "Oh, that would be an awesome idea." He was like, "Well, what

01:47:11 ◼   ► would you need?" Because you never thought of it as something that someone would make

01:47:14 ◼   ► an app for, this is what's missing from the API. And the next day, Blaine is like,

01:47:20 ◼   ► "Here, how about this? Does that work for you?" And it's there, and he could use

01:47:24 ◼   ► it. And so it was like that level of indie spirit in the early days. And then it's

01:47:30 ◼   ► Lane Bennis's famous words yada yada yada then and then it's a multi-billion

01:47:37 ◼   ► dollar public corporation you know and it's yes it's an orifice in terms of

01:47:42 ◼   ► interacting with them but it was a slow boil though and it's hurt what you and I

01:47:49 ◼   ► do terribly in my opinion because most of what we used to I think it's true I

01:47:55 ◼   ► I know most of what I used to link to in the early days

01:47:59 ◼   ► or what I was happier linking to

01:48:01 ◼   ► was other people's blog posts.

01:48:04 ◼   ► And it felt more social in a way, right?

01:48:09 ◼   ► 'Cause it's of somebody else's voice.

01:48:13 ◼   ► And it just, I don't wanna call anybody,

01:48:15 ◼   ► but it could be Andy, it could be you,

01:48:17 ◼   ► it could be Mark Pilgrim who stopped,

01:48:19 ◼   ► and just dozens and dozens and dozens of people,

01:48:22 ◼   ► including people who weren't blogging to become popular bloggers, but maybe only posted

01:48:29 ◼   ► once a month, but they did post once a month, but they had their own blog.

01:48:35 ◼   ► And if it was just a clever solution to a CSS problem, and then you'd publish it,

01:48:42 ◼   ► and then I'd link to it.

01:48:44 ◼   ► And it really is just the slowest boiling of slow-boiling frogs in a pot of water problem

01:48:53 ◼   ► that I just kind of saw it happening, but in hindsight it's so crystal clear that the

01:49:00 ◼   ► Pied Piper song of the ease of tweeting and in the universe of people I would have linked

01:49:06 ◼   ► to back in the blogging days, pre-Twitter, it's Twitter that took all of their posting,

01:49:15 ◼   ► not Facebook. I've never even been on Facebook, and I've never—I can count literally all—maybe

01:49:21 ◼   ► on one hand, certainly on both hands, the number of times that there's been something

01:49:27 ◼   ► on Facebook that I'd wished I could link to from Daring Fireball but can't because

01:49:32 ◼   ► behind the Facebook sign-in thing. Literally only a handful of times. It's Twitter that took up the

01:49:38 ◼   ► gas there, but all of them – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – all of them aren't on the open web.

01:49:46 ◼   ► They're not the web, and they just sucked up so many other people – the people who aren't trying

01:49:53 ◼   ► to do it as a living or a vocation because it's so much easier, right? There's no blame whatsoever

01:50:00 ◼   ► for people who faded away from blogging and put all of their public posting onto Twitter,

01:50:05 ◼   ► because I see how much easier it is, and I know that's how human psychology works. It's exactly

01:50:11 ◼   ► like what we were talking about earlier about not having titles, right? Which is also exactly why—they

01:50:17 ◼   ► don't call it a title, it's called a subject—but it's exactly why it's so much easier to text

01:50:22 ◼   ► someone than to email them, even if it's the same text, right? Like, you and I setting up this

01:50:28 ◼   ► podcast. We did it entirely through messages. We didn't send a single email to each other.

01:50:32 ◼   ► I never send email to friends for things like that anymore. And part of it is email is worse,

01:50:38 ◼   ► and email, my inbox is noisy and my messages app isn't noisy at all. But part of it is the

01:50:45 ◼   ► lack of a subject, right? It's just less effort for something that I don't really care about.

01:50:49 ◼   ► It's my professional, you know, my text messages through messages aren't my work, right? So they're

01:50:56 ◼   ► dashed off and casual and it's a huge decrease in cognitive load. So I don't blame them. But my god,

01:51:03 ◼   ► it's made all of these things so much harder to link to. I mean, and I dread it now. I dread,

01:51:09 ◼   ► I think it's inevitable at this point, the coming disappearance of Twitter's archives,

01:51:15 ◼   ► because there's an awful lot over the last 10 years where people, you know, and people,

01:51:22 ◼   ► it's a misappropriation of the form posting a tweet thread instead of a blog post. But again,

01:51:28 ◼   ► if you don't already have a blog, posting a tweet thread is way easier than setting up a blog just

01:51:36 ◼   ► to post this one thing. But I don't—untold number of tweets that I've linked to and tweet threads

01:51:42 ◼   ► that I've linked to I think are—now I have no faith that they're going to persist into perpetuity.

01:51:48 ◼   ► Yeah. It's not only sort of the ease of use, but it's the network, right? So you, like,

01:51:54 ◼   ► when you tweet, you have a built-in sort of, people have a built-in way to read, people have

01:51:58 ◼   ► a built-in way to respond. And when you're talking about sort of the threads instead of blog posts,

01:52:03 ◼   ► sure, you could post it on your blog, but, you know, and some, you know, through RSS and stuff

01:52:08 ◼   ► like that, like, we've sort of cobbled together the network stuff. And when Google Reader was a

01:52:14 ◼   ► There was a sort of a built-in network effect there.

01:52:17 ◼   ► But, you know, the thing about Twitter is that you post a tweetstorm or a thread.

01:52:21 ◼   ► People can respond immediately and individually to every single sort of point that you make along the way.

01:52:28 ◼   ► That's the case with Facebook as well.

01:52:30 ◼   ► You can comment, you can like, you see things that other people have liked in your feed.

01:52:36 ◼   ► There's discovery mechanisms as well.

01:52:38 ◼   ► The world of blogs, they had that cobbled together a little bit with things like RSS

01:52:43 ◼   ► and with things like Technorati and like web log search engines and all that sort of stuff.

01:52:49 ◼   ► But Facebook and Twitter just came along and were like, "Hey, we're going to do this all

01:52:53 ◼   ► in one basket. It's going to be super easy. Here you go." And it's kind of no wonder that

01:52:59 ◼   ► it took off the way it did for both of them. Theoretically, Facebook is the biggest blogging

01:53:03 ◼   ► company in the world. They were the ones who really figured out how to monetize blogging

01:53:09 ◼   ► and it made them a $500 billion company for a while.

01:53:13 ◼   ► They figured out two things, and again,

01:53:16 ◼   ► I've never even had a Facebook account,

01:53:18 ◼   ► but I do recognize the genius of it in some ways.

01:53:22 ◼   ► They figured out the monetization there.

01:53:24 ◼   ► I mean, they're one of the five biggest companies

01:53:25 ◼   ► in the world.

01:53:26 ◼   ► And the other thing that they did,

01:53:29 ◼   ► and this is the part where I give them full credit

01:53:32 ◼   ► and actually admire it, is they're the first

01:53:35 ◼   ► and perhaps still only company that cracked the nut

01:53:39 ◼   ► of getting regular people to blog,

01:53:43 ◼   ► whether they think of it as blogging or not, right?

01:53:46 ◼   ► Just regular people and they're posting things

01:53:49 ◼   ► like their kids' graduation pictures

01:53:51 ◼   ► and just an update about somebody's health

01:53:55 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:53:56 ◼   ► And again, saying positive things about Facebook

01:54:00 ◼   ► and privacy seems counterintuitive

01:54:02 ◼   ► 'cause I rant and rail about the negative aspects

01:54:06 ◼   ► of their regard for privacy in other regards.

01:54:10 ◼   ► But from the perspective of users,

01:54:13 ◼   ► the literally multiple billions of users that they have,

01:54:17 ◼   ► they solve the nut of people feeling comfortable

01:54:21 ◼   ► and understanding the circle of who things are going out to

01:54:25 ◼   ► so that they could do things like if somebody's mother

01:54:30 ◼   ► is ill and posting it in a way that they know

01:54:34 ◼   ► is only going out to the people who they want it

01:54:36 ◼   ► to go out to with updates.

01:54:38 ◼   ► And I have all the admiration in the world for that

01:54:41 ◼   ► because it's useful, right?

01:54:42 ◼   ► they turned literally almost everybody in the world

01:54:45 ◼   ► into a blogger, which was the original dream, right?

01:54:48 ◼   ► That's the Dave Weiner dream, except for the fact

01:54:51 ◼   ► that they were doing it in this locked ecosystem

01:54:55 ◼   ► that's not on the open web.

01:54:57 ◼   ► But I admire that greatly.

01:54:58 ◼   ► But it's for us wanting to link to things, it's terrible.

01:55:02 ◼   ► The average thing I link to now is a post

01:55:04 ◼   ► at a professional publication.

01:55:06 ◼   ► - Yep, that is probably behind some sort of soft paywall.

01:55:12 ◼   ► Right and that's the other thing that's risen and I was it's on my list again part of my homework

01:55:17 ◼   ► I've actually got an agenda here. I want to talk about paywalls

01:55:20 ◼   ► The other day and again bringing up Dave Weiner Dave Weiner mentioned this as a use for the chat

01:55:27 ◼   ► Gpt that the chat.open ai thing. Um

01:55:31 ◼   ► He said that he asked the chat gpt the question

01:55:36 ◼   ► What are the best non-paywalled news sites?

01:55:41 ◼   ► and got, said he got a great list. And so I tried the same query and it's astonishing. It's like

01:55:48 ◼   ► number one BBC, number two Reuters, number three, I forget. I might be CNN, I forget, but it was a

01:55:55 ◼   ► good one. Number four, number four or number five was the New York Times. And the chat thing,

01:56:02 ◼   ► after New York Times, it was like, it gave it an ordered list, one through 10. And after the New

01:56:08 ◼   ► New York Times in parentheses said, "The New York Times does have a paywall, but with

01:56:12 ◼   ► a very generous allotment of monthly open views." And so it effectively wrote a footnote,

01:56:20 ◼   ► right? And I think, and I honestly think that's a fair description of the New York Times.

01:56:26 ◼   ► I think that the New York Times, the way where they put their paywall is genius and generous

01:56:33 ◼   ► and good enough with the understanding that they needed and continued to need a subscriber base

01:56:39 ◼   ► that wants to burst through that and is willing to pay rather than stick around with deleting

01:56:45 ◼   ► their cookies every two days or whatever. But it was an astonishingly good answer.

01:56:49 ◼   ► But the fact that it's even a question, like, how do you get to non-pay, you know,

01:56:56 ◼   ► what are the best non-paywall news, is so antithetical to the concept, the original

01:57:02 ◼   ► concept of the World Wide Web that it's flabbergasting and downright from the perspective of 1996,

01:57:12 ◼   ► I would say it's dystopic. It's a dystopia to think that the—I don't know that the

01:57:21 ◼   ► idea that a paywall on the web would have been laughed at, I think, in 1996. It's

01:57:26 ◼   ► what are you talking about? You don't get it. You're like somebody who wants to use

01:57:31 ◼   ► QuarkXPress to publish their website. You know, like, QuarkXPress, I loved and it's a wonderful

01:57:37 ◼   ► tool, but it's not for publishing to the web. So the idea that you want to make people pay to see

01:57:42 ◼   ► the stuff, but here we are, right? And what is it, how frustrated are you by that trend?

01:57:47 ◼   ► Tom: I mean, purely as someone who wants to point people to things that they can actually read

01:57:54 ◼   ► without paying money, it's very frustrating. But at the same time, if you look at the New York

01:57:59 ◼   ► times or you look at the Atlantic or any of these other publications, it's like,

01:58:03 ◼   ► that's where those paywalls or those, you know,

01:58:07 ◼   ► membership programs or however you want to put it,

01:58:10 ◼   ► like they're paying for a lot of good writing and a lot of good journalism.

01:58:15 ◼   ► It's also paying for a lot of garbage,

01:58:17 ◼   ► but I'm interested in linking to the good stuff and you know,

01:58:20 ◼   ► and I get email all the time from people who are like, this stuff is paywall.

01:58:24 ◼   ► What are you doing? And it's like, well, like I would love it if it weren't,

01:58:28 ◼   ► But this is where this particular piece of writing was.

01:58:31 ◼   ► And I think it's worth your attention.

01:58:33 ◼   ► If somehow you happen to have a subscription or if you can somehow

01:58:37 ◼   ► get around it with incognito window or deleting your cookies or right.

01:58:42 ◼   ► But it's, it's really frustrating from my standpoint as a blogger who likes

01:58:46 ◼   ► to, you know, link to a lot of different things, I think that there's

01:58:49 ◼   ► a couple of things going on here.

01:58:51 ◼   ► It's like there's consolidation and then there's paywalls and

01:58:54 ◼   ► increasingly that consolidation is happening behind paywalls.

01:58:57 ◼   ► And so you get this double whammy where people aren't writing for a lot of different crazy things,

01:59:03 ◼   ► although now, you know, with sub stack is, is I think trying to push back on that.

01:59:07 ◼   ► But, you know, sub stack is itself paywalled for the most part.

01:59:11 ◼   ► And medium is that way too.

01:59:14 ◼   ► And you know, it's, it's, so you're, you're, you're getting kind of this double whammy squeeze from both ends.

01:59:19 ◼   ► I at least admire more when a paywalled site, and I don't want to, I don't want to speak poorly of sub stack

01:59:25 ◼   ► substack because overall I think substack has been a force for good and is pushing in the right

01:59:34 ◼   ► direction. It is pushing back, pushing the web and independent solo or like two people or three

01:59:41 ◼   ► people teams or whatever back towards where I think it should be and where I think we lost this

01:59:47 ◼   ► opportunity. So overall I'm two thumbs up on substack. But one thing that irritates me about

01:59:52 ◼   ► substack is when a post is paywalled it's usually below the fold and it so I'm like oh this was a

01:59:59 ◼   ► free post great I can link to it and then I then I hit the spacebar to scroll down and it's uh

02:00:05 ◼   ► so in some ways I admire a paywalled site that at least covers up my whole browser window right away

02:00:14 ◼   ► like the Financial Times like I hate it right but at least the Financial Times tells me right away

02:00:21 ◼   ► this whole thing is paywalled. Huge frustration. And the FT in particular has also been very

02:00:26 ◼   ► consistent. Like they've had a paywall for I think a long time. And Wall Street Journal too,

02:00:31 ◼   ► right? Wall Street Journal famously kind of broke the nut of it with $100 subscriptions,

02:00:39 ◼   ► like a lot of money. And everybody was like, well easy for them because the people who want to read

02:00:44 ◼   ► the Wall Street Journal are business people who can write it off to work. Which is true,

02:00:49 ◼   ► but still just knowing your audience isn't a fault, right? But they've had that paywall from

02:00:54 ◼   ► the beginning. They never yanked it out. The Wall Street Journal was always like, "Fuck you, you're

02:00:58 ◼   ► gonna pay." But I get around it with the Wall Street Journal and I don't know what. I should

02:01:02 ◼   ► probably someday, I've still never done a reader poll. I should because there are many questions

02:01:08 ◼   ► I have about my audience that I don't know. I think I know my audience, but one thing I suspect

02:01:13 ◼   ► is that a lot of them subscribe to the Apple One,

02:01:18 ◼   ► just give us $30 a month and we give you everything,

02:01:21 ◼   ► more iCloud storage, and Apple Music, which is the big one,

02:01:25 ◼   ► and you get it, your Apple TV,

02:01:27 ◼   ► so you can watch all the Apple TV shows,

02:01:29 ◼   ► you get the Apple Fitness, and you get Apple News.

02:01:32 ◼   ► I don't like Apple News, 'cause it's too many ads,

02:01:36 ◼   ► but the Apple News includes the Wall Street Journal,

02:01:40 ◼   ► so when I link to the journal,

02:01:42 ◼   ► I almost always include an Apple News link,

02:01:44 ◼   ► thinking at least some decent chunk of my readers,

02:01:47 ◼   ► being Apple nut jobs, probably have,

02:01:51 ◼   ► if they don't subscribe to the journal,

02:01:52 ◼   ► they have an Apple News link and can click that and read it.

02:01:55 ◼   ► But the journal still has so much original reporting,

02:01:59 ◼   ► especially in my, the areas I'm hyper-focused on,

02:02:03 ◼   ► and I wanna give credit to original reporting

02:02:07 ◼   ► rather than link to somebody's regurgitation of it,

02:02:09 ◼   ► which annoys me, but on the other hand,

02:02:12 ◼   ► I know that most people don't subscribe

02:02:14 ◼   ► to the Wall Street Journal, so it's frustrating.

02:02:17 ◼   ► The other thing about that that I think the trend is

02:02:21 ◼   ► subscriptions and memberships

02:02:25 ◼   ► and whatever you wanna call it work,

02:02:29 ◼   ► and people like them because once you're in,

02:02:34 ◼   ► you get this premium experience.

02:02:36 ◼   ► I have this theory, and I would,

02:02:40 ◼   ► I think I'm exactly right that the resurgence in email newsletters, which is absolutely a resurgence,

02:02:48 ◼   ► right? It was like, because like email newsletters were a big thing before the web or when the web

02:02:52 ◼   ► was like a thing that people didn't know what to do or it was so friggin slow, but people got email

02:02:58 ◼   ► in the early 90s and then like somebody figured out, well, we could write like a publication and

02:03:03 ◼   ► just email it to people and it was awesome, right? There was like the longest standing independent

02:03:08 ◼   ► publisher I can think of is Tidbits, tidbits.com, which started as both an email newsletter

02:03:15 ◼   ► and a weekly hypercard stack.

02:03:17 ◼   ► [laughter]

02:03:18 ◼   ► >> TARADINO Wow.

02:03:20 ◼   ► >> BRIAN KARDE Right?

02:03:21 ◼   ► It was like once a week they'd put out an issue and you could go to the InfoMac archives

02:03:26 ◼   ► and there's like an FTP address and they'd post it to Usenet and you would download the

02:03:31 ◼   ► hypercard stack.

02:03:33 ◼   ► And I think the way it worked, it was very clever.

02:03:35 ◼   ► You didn't have like a folder full of stacks.

02:03:37 ◼   ► It's like whatever you downloaded,

02:03:39 ◼   ► it would add to your tidbits hypercard stack, right?

02:03:42 ◼   ► So you just get the new issue,

02:03:44 ◼   ► and it didn't clutter up your drive.

02:03:45 ◼   ► But they were a plain text email newsletter

02:03:48 ◼   ► in the early '90s, I think literally before

02:03:51 ◼   ► Tim Berners-Lee invented the web,

02:03:53 ◼   ► or at least before he made it public.

02:03:57 ◼   ► And now it's a big thing again.

02:03:58 ◼   ► But my theory is very simple.

02:04:00 ◼   ► People like email newsletters because the email,

02:04:03 ◼   ► it's not because it shows up automatically

02:04:06 ◼   ► in their inbox, which is, you know, it's a factor.

02:04:09 ◼   ► But it's that once it's there,

02:04:11 ◼   ► you just start reading and you scroll down

02:04:14 ◼   ► and then you get to the end and you're done.

02:04:16 ◼   ► And there's no ads in the middle, nothing ever, ever,

02:04:21 ◼   ► it technically can't even happen.

02:04:22 ◼   ► Nothing ever pops up while you're reading

02:04:25 ◼   ► and says, "Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?

02:04:28 ◼   ► "Here's an X," you know,

02:04:30 ◼   ► because you're already on their newsletter, right?

02:04:32 ◼   ► It sounds like the dumbest thing in the world,

02:04:34 ◼   ► But it turns out in today's web, it's so corrupt with ad tech

02:04:39 ◼   ► that just being able to read from the beginning to the end

02:04:43 ◼   ► without any interruption in the stream of the text

02:04:46 ◼   ► is actually a premium reading experience.

02:04:49 ◼   ► And for the most part,

02:04:50 ◼   ► you can only get it now in email newsletters.

02:04:52 ◼   ► You can't get it on the web, which is bananas.

02:04:55 ◼   ► Like the fact that you and I don't interrupt our stuff

02:05:00 ◼   ► with ads in the middle, it makes us unique.

02:05:03 ◼   ► I mean, which is crazy.

02:05:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, it does.

02:05:07 ◼   ► It does.

02:05:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, there's a blog that I read regularly

02:05:10 ◼   ► that started adding an email pop-up,

02:05:12 ◼   ► and I'm just like, "Dude, come on, seriously?"

02:05:16 ◼   ► Like, I know it juices your numbers, but--

02:05:17 ◼   ► - Don't.

02:05:18 ◼   ► I think the New York Times has always been forward-thinking.

02:05:22 ◼   ► They've always had a pretty good website

02:05:24 ◼   ► for a newspaper, always,

02:05:26 ◼   ► and I think it's why they're thriving

02:05:28 ◼   ► when other newspapers, or at least succeeding,

02:05:31 ◼   ► not thriving, while other newspapers haven't. But even them still, to this day in March 2023,

02:05:39 ◼   ► clearly value their print edition more than they do the web edition in terms of design and in terms

02:05:50 ◼   ► of what they're willing to do. They never put an ad in the middle of an article, in the middle of

02:05:55 ◼   ► of a column in the print edition. They never have and they never will, but they do it on

02:06:01 ◼   ► the web. Every article has, as you scroll down on your phone, there are ads in the middle.

02:06:06 ◼   ► And even if you're using an ad blocker that blocks the ads, it puts gaps in the article.

02:06:12 ◼   ► And they also add stupid things that aren't ads and don't get blocked elsewhere on the

02:06:17 ◼   ► web or elsewhere on this topic, or here's a carousel or something that isn't part

02:06:22 ◼   ► the article, right? They're like, "Why in the world are you trying to keep me from reading to

02:06:28 ◼   ► the end of this article by making me click to a different article in the middle of the article?

02:06:32 ◼   ► Why are you doing this to me? Thank God I've got a strong enough attention span to do this."

02:06:37 ◼   ► And it would infuriate me if I'm the one who wrote the article. And I write this article,

02:06:43 ◼   ► and I want people to read it from the beginning to the end, and my own publisher is trying to

02:06:49 ◼   ► steer people away from it halfway through. And the New York Times does it, and they're one of the

02:06:54 ◼   ► best. It's—do you want to get really angry? Here's also on my topic list, 404s. 404s.

02:07:03 ◼   ► Okay, good about 'em.

02:07:06 ◼   ► How many do you think you have in the kakidat org archive?

02:07:10 ◼   ► Links to—

02:07:11 ◼   ► Oh, you mean the entire—oh, geez.

02:07:13 ◼   ► Dead links. In other words, dead links.

02:07:15 ◼   ► Oh my god. Yeah, I mean, thousands?

02:07:19 ◼   ► Most of what? Probably over 50% I would say, the majority.

02:07:25 ◼   ► I could probably do it and maybe it's the sort of thing Andy would probably want to do,

02:07:29 ◼   ► Andy Baio would probably want to do. I bet if we exported our sites, I bet there's a very smooth

02:07:37 ◼   ► curve that is very consistent and has never changed that there's about a four to five year

02:07:45 ◼   ► year horizon where links start going 404 or dead, whether the whole website's defunct or just they

02:07:53 ◼   ► change their CMS or their URL structure and don't add redirects that from the beginning, so like

02:08:01 ◼   ► starting around 2006, 2007 for me, but probably starting around 2002, 2003 for you, four or five

02:08:08 ◼   ► year old links start going bad and then by the time you get to 10 years it's a majority of them

02:08:14 ◼   ► And the longer you know, the early years of Daring Fireball almost every it really is sickening to me

02:08:20 ◼   ► how much of it is dead. So I built this thing, I don't know, a few years ago. It's not

02:08:24 ◼   ► active anymore, but it was called like the what did I call it? Oh, the accidental bookshop.

02:08:29 ◼   ► And basically I went through and I crawled all of my archives for every single book that I've

02:08:34 ◼   ► ever linked to at Amazon and then compiled, you know, basically most popular links and

02:08:40 ◼   ► all that sort of stuff. And the very first links I ever posted to Amazon, they still all work.

02:08:46 ◼   ► Back in 2000, I think 1999 was probably the first time I linked to Amazon. Those links all still

02:08:53 ◼   ► work. If you click on a link to the Matrix DVD, it goes to the page for the Matrix DVD.

02:08:59 ◼   ► JS It might be out of stock, but it's still there.

02:09:02 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly. But even stuff like I will go back, I'll be writing a post or whatever,

02:09:11 ◼   ► and I'll have to go look at a tag page of mine to figure out what I've written previously about it,

02:09:16 ◼   ► and I'll see YouTube embeds from six months ago. They're already dead.

02:09:20 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah.

02:09:22 ◼   ► Because the channel goes private or the thing gets deleted or just like whatever. But yeah,

02:09:28 ◼   ► it's a problem.

02:09:31 ◼   ► Yeah, well like with youtube and I know you link to a lot more youtube than I do, but I do

02:09:36 ◼   ► But with youtube, I think what happens is a lot of times archived and again

02:09:41 ◼   ► Archived meaning like six seven months ago stuff then gets hit with a copyright challenge or something

02:09:48 ◼   ► And gets pulled and whether it was a legit challenge or not the channel creator

02:09:53 ◼   ► Isn't doesn't really care because the youtube game is so much about

02:10:00 ◼   ► your latest post is, your latest video is the only one that really matters and is the only one

02:10:05 ◼   ► getting any traffic. And it's much more like surfing, right? It's just you're in the moment

02:10:12 ◼   ► and all they're trying to do is keep from the wave knocking them off, you know? It's, you know,

02:10:17 ◼   ► it seems very nerve-wracking to me, honestly, and I don't think I would do it, you know,

02:10:22 ◼   ► even if I were younger. But they're just, they don't care, you know, not that they don't care,

02:10:27 ◼   ► You know, and some obviously some channels do care, but yeah, even YouTube links go bad sometimes

02:10:33 ◼   ► surprisingly quickly. Yeah, I've long had and again, you know, I'm running out of time here

02:10:38 ◼   ► and for all these ideas I've had, but I've long had an idea to automate somehow finding dead links

02:10:45 ◼   ► in my archive and then trying to find if there's a archive.org archive that I can then rewrite the

02:10:53 ◼   ► link or add, you know, append at the bottom of all those posts, this link is dead, but here's

02:10:59 ◼   ► an active link to archive.org, which I, you know, at this point, it would be—I would never,

02:11:07 ◼   ► I could never do it, even in my wildest dreams of productivity and un-procrastination,

02:11:13 ◼   ► I could never do it by hand. I could either—

02:11:16 ◼   ► AO: Yeah, no.

02:11:16 ◼   ► I could either automate it or I could hire somebody to do it by hand, but it would be

02:11:22 ◼   ► a month. It would surely be a months-long project even if I hired someone who was very productive

02:11:29 ◼   ► for eight hours a day. It's that many links. And the other part that makes me so queasy

02:11:38 ◼   ► and ill and angry is that even that pipe dream of rectifying those dead links from literally

02:11:48 ◼   ► sometimes just five years ago or less, but certainly the ones from 10 years ago and the

02:11:53 ◼   ► 15 and 20 year old ones are mostly dead. Even that pipe dream of doing it is all hanging by the

02:12:01 ◼   ► single thread of archive.org and the internet archive. One thing that's a nonprofit foundation,

02:12:11 ◼   ► volunteer, or not volunteer, I know Jason Scott is paid, and volunteer's not right, but funded by

02:12:18 ◼   ► volunteer contributions. They don't have ads, they don't seem to have a huge benefactor or

02:12:25 ◼   ► something. I don't know. I have no—zero idea why somebody like Google doesn't just give them

02:12:31 ◼   ► more money to make it faster, you know, because Google could give them a literal couch change,

02:12:41 ◼   ► and it would probably make a huge difference to them. But if not, if something ever happened to

02:12:46 ◼   ► the—you know, the Internet Archive is literally our modern library of Alexander in terms of its

02:12:53 ◼   ► singular nature as an archive of all that stuff on the web. Even Wikipedia, which is awesome,

02:13:01 ◼   ► because of its open nature, there's copies of that database, right? So if something happened

02:13:07 ◼   ► to the Wikipedia Foundation, at least a copy of where it stands would be all over the place.

02:13:14 ◼   ► It wouldn't be lost. I don't know if the culture of it and the—you know, somebody could pick up

02:13:23 ◼   ► where they left off culturally and internal culture-wise in terms of the way that they

02:13:29 ◼   ► somehow have made it work with their rules on editing and style and stuff like that.

02:13:35 ◼   ► I had an idea and, you know, I'll blurb it out here. I might have blurbed it on a previous

02:13:41 ◼   ► podcast. So I used to be more precious about my—I would like to write an article about X,

02:13:45 ◼   ► so I'm therefore not going to talk about it because I don't want anybody to steal it.

02:13:49 ◼   ► But as I've got, you know, I told you my list of "I would like to write about X and never get to it,"

02:13:57 ◼   ► you know, is an entire second copy of Daring Fireball of original content, never written

02:14:03 ◼   ► content. But I have an idea for an article that Wikipedia in a way as a standalone entity is the

02:14:11 ◼   ► original vision for the web because it's easy to read, the articles link to each other where it

02:14:23 ◼   ► makes sense. It's not quite because I do think Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the web

02:14:31 ◼   ► included things like your site and my site where we have a personal voice, right? Like,

02:14:36 ◼   ► It could be a personal voice. It could be an institutional voice. And one thing lacking from

02:14:42 ◼   ► my analogy of Wikipedia is the web as it was originally envisioned is nothing has a personal

02:14:48 ◼   ► voice. It's all written in the institutional voice of Wikipedia as it should be, right? But in spirit

02:14:54 ◼   ► it is. But the rest of the web is absolutely antithetical to the original spirit of the web.

02:15:02 ◼   ► including the fact that, I mean, 'cause one of the,

02:15:06 ◼   ► I think Tim Berners-Lee himself wrote it,

02:15:08 ◼   ► the famous cool URLs don't change mantra.

02:15:12 ◼   ► All right, let me take one more break here.

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