Mastodawn

This week saw something we rarely see these days: pushback on Trump’s agenda from his own party—on the ballroom, on the slush fund and even on the Iran war. The reasons for this sudden spine-finding are numerous, but the effect is the same. My write-up in the link in the replies.

Knightmare 11h ago

Voting is Your POWER 1d ago

Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a city budget that completely eliminates a $12 billion deficit left over from the Adams administration, the largest gap since the Great Recession. He accomplished it by taxing the rich, working with Gov. Hochul, and firing pricey consultants—not cutting services for working New Yorkers!

https://prospect.org/2026/05/12/mamdani-announces-balanced-budget-without-cuts/

Mamdani Announces Balanced Budget Without Cuts

Buoyed by billions in assistance from the state, real talk about what it takes to run New York City, and some taxes on the rich, the mayor closed a historic leftover budget deficit.

The American Prospect

Knightmare 11h ago

The Verge 13h ago

Google appeals search monopoly ruling, says it won business ‘fair and square’ https://www.theverge.com/policy/936175/google-search-monopoly-ruling-appeal

Google appeals search monopoly ruling, says it won business ‘fair and square’

Google filed its appeal of a ruling finding it has an illegal monopoly in online search, arguing it competes on the merits.

The Verge

Knightmare 11h ago

Aaron Rupar 13h ago

Tom Emmer: "These nonsense polls that are out there telling us how the the president has never had a lower approval rating -- what last week showed everybody once again is Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Donald Trump still holds the strength. There's never been anybody like him."

Knightmare 11h ago

Aaron Rupar 13h ago

Trump: "Under our leadership, 5 million people have been lifted off food stamps just in a short period of time"

Knightmare 11h ago

vga256 14h ago

two years ago i finally lost my mind dealing with wordpress and markdown for clients.

it forced me to write an entire website construction kit in php from scratch (kiki). it forced me to learn how to write a customizable markup language (bug). all so i would never have to touch wordpress and markdown ever again.

https://tomotama.com/kiki

two years later, there are now dozens of kiki instances run by sysop-admins around the world. it's incredibly gratifying to see the web made less shitty by just elbow grease and diy learning. the instance admins are a blend of writers and coders who painstakingly find bugs, dig into the source, and inspectorgadget workarounds. improving it and patching it is a lifelong commitment, even if it doesn't pay the bills.

in the coming week is a feature that 0.01% of users will take advantage of, but i'm so happy to add it, to keep the dream of an indie web alive: kiki will now generate RSS 2.0 compliant podcast feeds. i thought regular old web RSS was bad. but RSS for podcasts is about 10x worse 😅

the attached screenshot is a new site i'm building with kiki 1.2.0, which autogenerated a podcast feed using metadata in each post.

this morning i'm updating a client's wordpress site, and for all my moaning about how bad RSS is, i can't believe how much worse wordpress is. 😆

#indieweb #smallweb #selfhosting #kiki #rss