Internet Tech

Why you can’t link to a podcast episode →

Published January 1  ·  All posts on Jan 1  ·  

The other morning I was spun off on a tangent. I was writing a blog post about a Godin/Koppelman podcast episode. I know full well you cannot link to episodes, so I just said the usual “go search…”

I sometimes give my blog post drafts to Claude.ai for critique. For this piece, it pointed out I should just link to the episode… cue my frustration. It’s a valid critique, and I don’t fault that Claude instance for not understanding the reality . . .

So we talked about it until it did understand. Then I told it to write me a prompt (because I didn’t want my writing critic going farther afield) for a Claude-code instance. It took Claude-code about 10 minutes to do the work, which I posted publicly for discussion:

Why you can’t link to a podcast episode

I particularly LOVE its list of sources; There’s so much great reading in there.

Its analysis actually surprised me. I had assumed this was a technical problem. It’s not.

There was a time when I’d make a web site, email people (eg James Cridland), and start trying to rally people into fixing something. But those days need to be behind me, I simply cannot take on another new thing.

My hope? Someone somewhere sees that topic over on the Podtalk Community. Learns something about the problem and gets energized to do something about it.

I love podcasting, but this isn’t a fight I can lead.

Maybe you can?

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Sometimes I consult for large corporations →

Published July 24  ·  All posts on Jul 24  ·  ,

So Verizon’s new CEO sent me an email…

Where shall I begin?

First — You can’t simply reply. I get it. It’s hard to have a mailbox on the Internet these days. So many bounces, to deal with (I’m serious.)

Second — So when you go to drag-select, copy and paste that “s.sampath@verizon.com” email address, you discover it’s not what it seems.

Pasting into your email client’s “To” field, you actually create a list of multiple recipients: The first recipient is “s”, then the second is “sampath”, etc—none of which are the email address you meant to copy and paste. So you have to type it into your email client. Not a big deal, but probably enough to stop most people. If they really cared, they’d just give us an

<a href="mailto:s.sampath@verizon.com">s.sampath@verizon.com</a>

and let us just click or touch it, et voila!

Okay, but why can’t we copy and paste? Because in the HTML source in their email, it’s actually:

If you can read HTML, you see there are HTML entities jammed in various places in that email address. I had to lookup the entity &zwnj; — that’s a Zero Width Non-Joining space. Meaning it’s not visible (“zero-width”) and it’s job is to keep whatever is left and right from “joining”… in the sense that complex characters can join to make a glyph— For example: An ‘a’ and ‘e’ can join to make the single character ‘æ’ if your language supports that. (But, of course, English does not have any joining characters at all.) I’m confident this is just an artifact of their bulk-email-sending composer software; it’s common for such things to “defend” an email address in the middle of text from harvesting looking for emails. So this wasn’t maliciousness on Verizon’s part.

Third — …but it’s ironic that, in a message that contains, “It’s not just better service — we are setting a new standard, beginning today,” I have to flip between windows as I retype that email address.

Fourth — Because I’m a level-39 nerd wizard, I do reply to these things. (I mean, I start a new email message addressed to that email address.) And because we (said wizards) are quick to anger and regular Internet users (ie, Sampath) are tasty with ketchup, I send things like this…

I’ll followup when I get my 17.5%.

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Long live the indie web, indeed →

Published July 1  ·  All posts on Jul 1  ·  

So, here’s something of a little manifesto or rallying cry:

  • If you only spend your time on Facebook/Twitter/Medium then stream in, stream out – you’re going to get what you ask for. A fleeting set of stories loosely bound.
  • So, spend time in the corners of the web. Subscribe to some newsletters. Bookmark some forums and blogs in your browser and show up regularly. It’s hard, there’s no stream. But you’ll start to find the mom & pop internet not the shopping mall internet.
  • Dabble with your own space. Dabble with your own voice. Own your own platform.
  • But don’t stop there – own your own distribution too! Build a newsletter. Build a messenger bot to alert people to new posts. Build your own stream. Create a shared delusion of showing up regularly.

Long live the indie web.

~ Tom Critchlow, from Indie Blogging & Distribution

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I was a frequent user of the Internet before the web. Today is vastly better than then. The web straight up kicks ass, and the web is not just alive and well, it’s flourishing. If you aren’t seeing great content, you simply haven’t yet figured out where to look for it. Go look. (Right after you go read the above, of course.)

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It makes no sense →

Published February 6, 2025  ·  All posts on Feb 6  ·  

Whenever anyone tells me that some platform is great, I always nod and think to myself … for now. For now.

~ Bob Sassone, from Bluesky is not going to save you

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I don’t understand why no one else is saying this: Until I see anyone else running separate federation instances, it’s still just another monolithic platform. This again? If the AT Protocol (what Bluesky is built upon) is really great, how do I run my own instance to join the federation?

If you see only one instance, then it’s a platform. When you see multiple instances talking to each other, then it’s a protocol.

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Sometimes I simply have to clean up →

Published January 10, 2025  ·  All posts on Jan 10  ·  

14+ years ago I started this blog. For many months it was basically my way of posting photos, which were also posted to a particular social platform. After about a year, I started posting more quoted stuff, and including the URL. There’s a little feature in WordPress (which powers this site) that if you drop a bare URL into a post, it will be auto-improved to be a clickable link when the post is displayed. So I took advantage of that and dropped bare URLs into thousands of posts.

Fast forward over a decade and obviously link rot is happening. So I’m changing to use page titles, and linking to the URLs. That way, when the link rots, at least a reader can see the title of where it used to go.

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It’s nuanced →

Published January 4, 2025  ·  All posts on Jan 4  ·  

That’s why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history’s first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.

~ Cory Doctorow, from Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital

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There are many things I deeply appreciate and enjoy about the way I do short-form blogging. But one thing I am aware is missing, is more-considered analyses. I do believe that federated systems are the way to keep things from getting completely out of control—as they are today with the big platforms and their enormous machinery behind the scenes. But that belief of mine remains stymied by the reality of how people and communities actually work in real life.

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Publishing while maintaining perspective →

Published November 3, 2024  ·  All posts on Nov 3  ·  

This is perhaps the greatest conundrum of our current technological era: the desperate need to connect with one another, because it is our only hope of survival; combined with the fact that nearly all the means of connection available to us are deeply—possibly irredeemably—fucked. Syndication, as I am currently experimenting with it, is then an effort to try and navigate that terrain, to find some productive way to play in the outskirts, to let the work out into the world while (hopefully) minimizing the misery that is reflected back.

~ Mandy Brown, from A peasant woodland

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Yes, to everything from Brown (and not just this particular piece.) Beautiful thoughts therein around why one should “publish own site, syndicate elsewhere (POSSE)”—my methodology since the beginning.

Unfortunately, the Internet went from “publishing your own stuff is difficult”, straight to “it’s easy to publish on platforms other people control.” To this day, it is still quite difficult to get your own domain name and begin publishing in a way that you control your own content. Worse, we went from people discovered and read your stuff (back in the “publishing your own stuff is difficult” era) to the now where no one can find or read your stuff regardless where you publish it (unless you pay money to the platform brunch-lords.)

Fortunately, if you have a little bit of time and a little bit of curiosity, you can still find everything that people are publishing.

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Back in my day →

Published July 21, 2024  ·  All posts on Jul 21  ·  

I think I’m doing better work than ever, and it is getting noticed, it just doesn’t tip the needle anymore. I’m not suffering for traffic, but “new” traffic is definitely coming from unusual and unpredictable places that are nearly impossible to capitalize on.

~ Brett Terpstra, from Back in my day…

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The root of the problem is simply that the pendulum swings. Back in my day (me saying that, although the “day” is the same as Terpstra’s) it took a bit of technical chops to really be using the internet. Those with the chops, also tended to build things; not necessarily build from scratch, but at least use the tools others built from scratch to build things. The big thing we all built was the Web. Today, people don’t much use the Web, and precious few still build the Web.

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Dependency →

Published June 28, 2024  ·  All posts on Jun 28  ·  

So how can we develop more mindful use of our phones, and become less dependent on them?

~ Leo Babauta from, How to Break Dependence on the Phone – Zen Habits Website

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What do you want to do instead? …not just in terms of phone use, but in one’s life generally.

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In the beginning →

Published June 10, 2024  ·  All posts on Jun 10  ·  ,

Perspective is endlessly fascinating to me. What is it like to look back on decades of one’s own efforts? What’s it like to look back on one’s efforts if they’ve shifted the world?

Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web […]

~ Tim Berners-Lee from, Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter – World Wide Web Foundation

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Well, that’s an ‘I’ statement with a little punch.

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