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Dave Winer posts in early January 2016

My current bookmarks page of sites that I visit or feeds that I consume includes a link to DW's feed near the top of the list. I access his feed multiple times per day to see what new insights he has posted. I'm mainly interested in his thoughts and projects regarding web publishing.

I agree and disagree with his tech posts. I don't care about the other topics. I don't access his Facebook or Twitter pages, except in extremely rare occasions. I read the RSS feed from his blog.

Here is how I read Dave Winer's writings: feed page.

I use my custom "feed" command that is included within my Junco code that powers this site. The feed command also exists in the Parula code that powers my message board at ToledoTalk.com.

Here's how it works. The feed= is surrounded by two curly braces at each end. The line must begin at the start of a new line in order for it to work.

Scripting News - 2024-03-28T15:56:04Z

- 2024-03-28T15:56:04Z
The first time ChatGPT argued with me. It said I was wrong, but in fact, it was wrong. Doubly foreboding.

- 2024-03-28T15:43:57Z
Working on a big software project is like hiking the Appalachian Trail. You keep a diary so people who come through there next year and the year after will know what you tried and why it didn't work. Like using a GET when the RESTful thing is a POST. I once got excoriated by a famous security expert in public for doing this (XML-RPC only uses POST) but I had and have the best intentions. Back then in 1998, when I made the choice, I was juggling a billion flaming bowling pins. Back then there was no ChatGPT to ask about prior art. I had to move on. Well here we are again in 2024. I hope the next person traveling through the area in question sees what I didn't see. People who have worked on my code know that if you read it in an outliner, you'll see lots of blog posts like this. Some functions have comments going back to the early 90s and not just from me. Outliners are great for writing code, because a long comment takes up exactly one line until you expand it. So you can go on and on and not stop until you're finished. Thank you and have a nice day. šŸ˜„

- 2024-03-28T14:51:24Z
An algorithm for content moderation for reducing the human contact trolls have. If you notice an account that gets blocked by a lot of people who don't follow them after they reply to one of their posts, then slow them down or throw out their replies. Eventually if it keeps up, you pretty much know it's software, and you can delete the account. I guess. Just thinking out loud. ;-)

- 2024-03-28T01:45:21Z
My gods the Knicks are masters of the universe this year.

- 2024-03-28T01:40:43Z
I wish I could send ChatGPT a pointer to a page I'm working on and ask it questions about my CSS. Or imagine ChatGPT running in Node, supervising my server app, looking for problems, odd usage patterns, and later looking for optimizations. And that's just the beginning.

- 2024-03-28T01:57:50Z
Journalists who say AI is just hype are wrong.

- 2024-03-27T22:55:27Z
I saw these Sony buds advertised and I had to try them. They're now my favorite way to listen to music and podcasts. Most ear buds in my experience don't do very well with bass, and I love music with a strong beat. Sony makes great inexpensive headphones.

- 2024-03-28T01:57:35Z
I'm looking for evidence of useful federation with an open mind ready to become a believer.

- 2024-03-28T02:02:23Z
I think micro.blog is going to get very interesting once the APIs for all these random social networks fill out.

- 2024-03-28T01:48:11Z
I tried the new Starbuck's chicken sandwich. It was the worst thing I've ever had. Avoid.

- 2024-03-27T15:43:25Z
Issues with feedland.com earlier in the day appear to be resolved. :-)

- 2024-03-26T17:26:35Z
I dream of a day when I can subscribe to a podcast on my desktop and have my mobile podcast app know about it automatically. (To be clear, using open formats and protocols, so that this convenience does not lock me into using one podcast client, obviously.)

- 2024-03-26T17:05:18Z
Experiments. I pasted the URL of a Mastodon post into a Threads post. I was kind of expecting it would use the power of federation to just get the post and put it in Threads. I asked a similar question on Mastodon, pasting the URL of a Threads post into a Mastodon post. As in the other direction it did nothing with it.

- 2024-03-27T01:19:09Z
YouTube TV lets you watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and BBC on one screen.

- 2024-03-26T16:25:50Z
On Threads: My goal for the next few years is to get the feed world and the social web world to merge, and I'm pretty sure the style of reading of the social web will prevail because it is the rational most news-like way to read news.

Maddow didn't go far enough - 2024-03-26T12:31:10Z

I don't usually watch Maddow on Monday nights. I lost my faith in her when she went after Facebook a few years ago, not that Facebook didn't deserve her attention, but her arguments while condemning them were exaggerated. I knew the facts, she left out important details.

She steered viewers into believing things that weren't true. Didn't exactly lie, but pretty close. I figured if she does that for stories I know, then she's probably doing it other times when I wasn't so well informed.

But the Knicks were blowing out the Pistons on the next channel over, and I had tuned in Jen Psaki, who as luck would have it, at the exact moment I switched, was explaining how the fact that she served in the Biden Administration before joining MSNBC was very different from the controversy over Ronna McDaniel, who Maddow went on to explain was basically a terrorist and traitor and Trump co-conspirator (not just an enabler), and not in a war that was over, but one that was still being fought, and not insignificant because this fascist movement has control of one of the two major parties in the US and McDaniel was instrumental in that. There are good arguments that she should be in a prisoner of war camp, not employed by one of America's major news networks.

That NBC hired McDaniel as a contributor says something awful about Maddow's employer. And Maddow, if she has any details on that, isn't saying what they are.

I've had this problem with other reporters in the past whose owners were caught up in some controversy that made them newsworthy. The reporters refused to cover it, or even be a source for others who were. This is where journalism goes wrong imho. Maddow should know the details, and if she does, she is obligated to share them, because they are significant, and go to how much trust any of us should give to any news coming to us from NBC. Maybe she has to quit to do that, and if so, go ahead and quit. Because the shadow it casts over everything touched by NBC, which includes MSNBC and Maddow is just too freaking long. It's similar to the "news" she reported on Facebook, except now instead of steering us to believe lies, she's holding it back, and instead of it being about one very powerful social media company, it's about the future of the government of the US. And maybe she doesn't know, as Upton Sinclair once said: ā€œIt is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends on [them] not understanding it.ā€

I don't blame Maddow for liking her job. But as a reporter, there are more and more reasons not to trust her and esp to not trust the company that employs her. When it was obvious she wasn't going to tell us the story behind McDaniel's hiring, or even name the people responsible for it, I switched back to the Knicks, where at least I think I understand who they are and what they're trying to do.

Update: MSNBC backed down on hiring McDaniel.

- 2024-03-25T13:57:19Z
This is a screen shot of my blogroll. I can have posts from Mastodon or Bluesky here. But not Threads. It's really easy. Just support outbound RSS and we can add you to the club.

- 2024-03-25T13:35:10Z
I was glad to have 3 Body Problem to binge over the weekend. Created by the showrunners for Game of Thrones based on a much-loved series of science fiction novels, which btw I have not read. This was emphatically not Game of Thrones, though some of the actors played roles in both series, and in each case that was awkward. Not the best actors, they didn't get much screentime in GoT, but here, they get the big lines and omg it was embarrassing, they don't pull it off. Creepy. I loved the first four episodes, incredible story, and the special effects, awesome. Then it really started to stink in episodes in 6 and 7, endless stupid dialog with music that made every stupid thing like a climax of a sort. But I was still watching, and then it came back roaring in the final episode. On the other hand it's like so much of today's TV, superheros, epic conflicts, resolution, good guys win. A cross between Lost and Ender's Game. A space adventure and the supernatural. Net-net -- it was worth it. A good distraction, I will probably watch Season 2.

- 2024-03-24T22:57:29Z
I still love reading my own stuff in the blogroll. Learning how to make stuff look good in a tiny little format like that. I don't mind having a small space to deploy in, but I like to have lots of room where I write. Linkblogs and blogrolls go together really well. Blogrolls work best for smaller groups of people and projects, not the huge number of followers people have on the twitter-like social web. But I think even a few hundred items in a blogroll work, as long as it's dynamic, and it's reverse chronologic.

- 2024-03-24T22:48:16Z
Never thought I'd be so glad to see the xml-rpc site back up and running. I found out about it being off by someone sending an email asking if they could buy the domain from me. Otherwise I'm not sure I would have noticed. The whole idea is to put these static sites in a safe place and forget about it. But clearly there are no safe places and someday you might get dragged back to try to debug some work you did a bunch of years ago.

- 2024-03-24T12:59:52Z
Braintrust query: I have not been able to reliably get to a bunch of my sites that use HTTP this morning. For example, feeder.scripting.com, a site that I use to test feeds. Also xmlrpc.com. It's possible that something broke overnight in my server. Or Digital Ocean is having a problem? Doesn't seem like it's something Google is doing to punish me for using HTTP, though that is always the first thing that comes to mind. I tried moving the XML-RPC site to a different server, but the problem follows it. No changes have been made to the site in years. Not exactly what I had planned to be digging into on a nice (but cold) Sunday morning in the mountains. I started a thread, if you have any insights. At least scripting.com is still working, but it's not served through my software or Digital Ocean.

- 2024-03-24T22:14:54Z
So I went ahead and moved xmlrpc.com to a HTTPS server. The other day I forgot to mention that style sheets might not be readable when you move from HTTP to HTTPS, leading to this striking breakage I saw when I first got to look at the site in its new location. And now thanks to Google and the EFF, I get to spend time debugging something that worked just fine in 1998 and every year since then. Should I send them the bill for my time? Fuckers.

- 2024-03-23T16:00:12Z
I've had my blogroll for a couple of weeks now, and I've got it on-screen a lot, as I'm developing another user interface that has the blogroll in it. This blogroll is much like the one I had in the 00s, but it's in motion, and it's a source of news and ideas. It's also doing the thing that Twitter used to do, it lets me have a way to see what specific people are interested in. I expect more of that as new people get this kind of blogroll. Right now I'm pretty much the only one. The next step is getting the blogroll running in WordPress. And then getting it running on Om's blog and Doc's blog, both of whom have real experience with the art of blogrolling. From that, I expect to have a better idea of what the editorial UI should look like for people creating and managing these blogrolls. We'll iterate until it's pretty easy to set up and manage one. Also to be clear, I want it to run in other platforms, this is not exclusive to WordPress. It's just the place where the people are right now, the ones I really want to work with. But I wouldn't mind it running in Substack for example, if there are any writers there who find this compelling. That would require cooperation from the company though, their platform as far as I know, does not support other-party plugins.

- 2024-03-23T23:04:02Z
I saw someone get upset that ChatGPT can beat humans at debate, but we humans, esp here in the US for the last few decades, haven't been taking good care of ourselves intellectually. It would be one thing if we placed a high value on being informed and thoughtful, but we're going the other way. However, if we were aiming to be as smart and knowledgable as possible, we'd be losing to them anyway. The machines have infinitely expandable memory, and we don't and we lose stuff, and we hallucinate a lot more than they do. But why is it a problem if a machine does something better than we do, even something we (foolishly) think we're the best at. That's why we make machines. I have a great car, and live in a house that's heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. If I want to travel to the other side of the world, no problem. These are all things that machines do for me. One thing a machine might not be good at is inspiration. I asked ChatGPT to give me a good idea for something to write today. The idea it came up with: "The Day the World Forgot How to Yawn." I rest my case.

- 2024-03-22T12:37:48Z
Back in the 80s before many of you were born, you could buy a word processing program, which was basically a text editor, and you could use it to write and then when it came time to send that writing to other people, you would print it. And get this the printer could take its input from any of those writing tools. There were no tiny little text boxes. The printers didnā€™t come with their own editors, you had choice and therefore there was lots of competition. Amazing, right?

- 2024-03-23T03:33:48Z
What if climate change comes to where you live in the form of tornadoes that last 30 days.

- 2024-03-23T03:27:51Z
If only Brendan Eich had incorporated UCSD Pascal units into JavaScript. It was easy to make modular reusable bits of code.

Broken images suck, Google - 2024-03-23T03:19:33Z

Something the HTTPS evangelists must not understand: there's substantial breakage when you convert an HTTP site to HTTPS. Every image in every page breaks. Broken images make a statement, they're like broken windows, they say no one gives a F about this site. Well I care about the archive of scripting.com, I hope people understand that. I have been creating a record here since 1994. It'll be 30 years in October.

Instead of trying to blackmail me into breaking my archive, Google should be helping to preserve it. And not just mine, the entire early web. We poured our hearts and hopes into this, and massive amounts of time, without which Google would not exist.

I know Google doesn't have a heart and it isn't a living thing, but it's bad PR to make that so freaking obvious.

I think that perhaps Google is already run by the machines. Maybe it was the first such company.

To remind you of what Google's idea of the ancient web is, I put a broken image next to this post.

Thanks for listening.

Everyone's driving to Vermont - 2024-03-23T02:52:01Z

To ski, because it's snowing bigtime.

For the total eclipse of the sun.

Why we're lucky WordPress is here and other topics - 2024-03-21T12:55:05Z

I spent some time this week reviewing the UI of Radio UserLand, released in 2002. It was both a feed reader and a writing tool.

One would have thought, btw, that from that start that all subsequent blogging tools would have the same connections, even if the functionality was not all in the same product. But then came Twitter and Facebook, and they said they weren't blogs, and presumably would start a new tradition with new user expectations. And that worked. The new blogging platforms were silos.

So the integration opportunities were limited, something that took me 11 years to fully appreciate, and to give up on. I was in a intellectual cloud, not thinking straight.

Meantime, the tradition of blogging was preserved by WordPress. As a blogging tool, it supported the same connective features that Radio did. There were some it couldn't cover because Radio was a desktop app, not a web app (though it looked like a web app, you installed a piece of software on the desktop).

This was the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea realized.

So for example, we had upstreaming, which was a one-way Dropbox, a number of years before Dropbox existed. This meant that the link between the CMS and the server went through the file system. The product didn't live long enough to fulfill the potential of that feature. The idea was that you could use any editor you wanted to write something that was posted to the blog, you could choose to have it rendered through the site template, or uploaded as-is.

The editor we supplied with Radio was one of those tiny little text boxes, but I hoped that better editors would emerge. I wanted to make one myself, combining the outliner in Frontier with scripting, to drop posts into the folder structure that Radio expected.

Radio's tiny little textbox circa 2002.

Years later I tried to do it with Dropbox itself, with a product called Fargo. Dropbox was so incredibly close to the ideal user-owned storage server system, but they wouldn't go the final step, in creating a class of content that could be shared with two or more apps but not all apps. So the user didn't have enough control for it to work.

The idea of multiple apps working on the same data would be revolutionary. How do I know? Because that's how computers worked before the web. So to make the thing I want to do work, now, in 2024, I'm going to have to create my own storage system for the user, and I will pay for it, at least to start.

Hopefully at some point I'll be able to turn that over to Automattic and have them run it, or if they don't want to, maybe someone else will. But it has to be there for the web as a runtime environment to support the same diversity of software that the PC and Mac did in the generation before the web.

Technology does go backwards, a lot -- we lose valuable things without any thought, when we could keep them.

BTW, that's why it's good to keep some old people around, we might remember the things that were lost. I'm trying to make sure the really good ideas, the keepers, get another chance.

Another random morning bit -- something subtle in the blogroll you might not have noticed. It has no trouble dealing with titled or untitled posts. Blog posts typically have titles, social media posts do not. RSS is opinionated about this -- it says you should support both views. But the feed reader folk ignored that guidance. My little blogroll shows you how to do it, it's pretty simple. If it doesn't have a title use the description.

Think of it this way. What if motorcycles, cars, trucks and bikes couldn't all use the same roads? What kind of way would that be to run a civilization. Same thing with feeds.

There's a screen shot of the blogroll to the right, with Scripting News highlighted and expanded. Some of those posts have titles and some don't. You and I as developers care about that, but we shouldn't show that difference that in the user interface. The users don't care and rightly so. It's confusing and takes their attention away from the writing.

Another topic. Something I noticed in WordPress's RSS feeds. If I start a post out with an empty title, it uses the post ID to form the URL for the post. That's the right thing to do imho. But then if I add a title, which can happen, it changes the URL to use the title. But URLs shouldn't change. It also changes the guid, so a feed reader will think there were two posts when there was just one. Now I don't know if they can change it at this late date, I imagine there are workarounds out there. But I noticed this the other day, and thought I should mention it. Why not just use the post ID for the guid, esp since it says the guid is not a permalink? And use it in forming the URL. I totally understand the benefit of using the title in the URL. But you can't depend on the title being there.

Finally, to answer the question raised by the title of this piece -- WordPress is, among other things, a perfect time capsule of open technologies from the early days of innovation on the web, and widely deployed and able to deliver all their benefits, if we widen our view of social media to be a social web, and simply create places where posts with and without titles are equally supported. It's that simple. Without WordPress we would have to build all that, and wait for it to deploy in numbers, to matter in the market. All we have to do now is make the connections.

- 2024-03-20T16:36:28Z
Manton Reece gives Facebook the benefit of the doubt. I have at times been that optimistic. And there are good well-intentioned people at every bigco. The problem is, when you get to the top, they don't actually give a F about any of this. They like to keep their users where they are. Right now Facebook is hoovering up people who are looking for something new in the Twitter space. So it helps to encourage people to believe that there will be a way out if they want to try something else. But everyone knows for real that that isn't what's going to happen. This is in the tech playbook. When you're growing, you want everything to be open. When there aren't any more users to get from other places, well, that was a nice idea.

- 2024-03-19T21:36:19Z
Paul Kedrosky is paying for feeds coming out of Twitter and subscribing to them in Feedly along with his other feeds. This is smart and futuristic. No reason to have two or more social webs, let's get them all working together.

- 2024-03-19T14:48:01Z
I was looking around the old social web circa 2003 and found the blogroll on my Radio UserLand blog home page. Screen shot to the right. It shows that the art was very much still being practiced then. It looks cared-for. All themes designed by Bryan Bell. I am going to set up a demo of the home page, because I want to look at it as "live" as I can get it, and see if there are ideas there I want to bring forward to 2024.

- 2024-03-19T13:14:01Z
Developing great products is something like the NBA which they always say is a business, esp when a player you love is traded. Happened recently with a point guard, Immanuel Quickley, traded from Knicks to Raptors. He wasn't the only heart of the Knicks, but he was one of them. He has a competitive grace you don't see very often. Quickley was one of those guys you knew would be the starting point guard on some NBA team, he was that good. But he was unlikely to get there on the Knicks, so we can be happy for him because he is the starting point guard on the Raptors, but we lost something important there. But the business side, if done well, opens the door for bigger love. I love watching the Knicks win they way they are winning now. That's what I want from developing software. I want to create a global team of truly independent developers, filling the void left by the predation of the silos. There won't even be a business model for much of what we do, but there will be lots of teamwork and lots of fun, because the best accomplishment is when we do it as a team. We're going to play a game we started to play in the mid-90s, and somewhere somehow forgot we could still play it. We can. I am old now, I feel it, I can't produce end-user software much longer, but I don't want to leave until we have this thing rebooted.

- 2024-03-19T17:11:19Z
I got politics.newsriver.org working again. Things got pretty shaky in news product land. I'm trying to figure out a general formula for getting things working again. And as I update them, I'm switching them over to HTTPS. Once again I have to put in a plug for Caddy. A real time-saver.

- 2024-03-19T17:23:49Z
Did the same for bloggers.scripting.com. I found what may be a bug in PagePark believe it or not. An ancient workhorse of Dave-Net.

- 2024-03-19T21:16:55Z
And nbariver.com and mlbriver.com.

- 2024-03-19T13:30:30Z
When they report on Trumpā€™s financial situation they donā€™t take into account that the property, golf courses, buildings, etc are all mortgaged beyond the max, thatā€™s what the NY trial was about, him lying about values for the purpose of getting loans on the property. So his equity in these investments is probably 0 or even negative (because of the fraud). No one is going to loan him anything on the properties, because he has no equity, and the story they tell about New York state liquidating his assets, there almost certainly is nothing to liquidate. Anyone who owns a home and has a mortgage can understand this, it works the same way even if the property is much more valuable than a family home. I asked jokingly what his credit rating must be, but it's a good question to ask, would help regular people relate to the situation.

- 2024-03-18T17:34:51Z
This is amazing. Some of my friends at Automattic quickly put together a toolkit for WordPress that allows it to host my blogroll. There are still some missing pieces and some CSS glitches. But this is exactly where I hoped we would be at this point.

- 2024-03-18T15:20:42Z
Read this on Threads. The thing that's great about this moment is that people are just beginning to get the possibility of not being locked into silos. They don't know how to parse my posts and screen shots, because I can do something they never thought they'd be permitted to do. Well we've got some visionary and lovable techies at Masto and Blueski who want you and I to be able to do that. And we've been building on that. And will continue to do so, Murphy-willing.

- 2024-03-18T14:31:25Z
Blogroll fix. The blogroll was grabbing the up and down-arrow and Return for keyboard navigation, one of my favorite blogroll features. Put the cursor where you want, and arrow through the list. Press Return to expand, and again to collapse. Then down-arrow and repeat. But sometimes you want to use these keys for other functions. So I changed it so you have to click the blogroll to set the focus. Its border turns blueish, and the keys work as described. Press the Tab key or click outside the blogroll to take the focus off the blogroll.

- 2024-03-18T14:19:55Z
I'm working with developers again, thank goodness. I once thought I could make server products or toolkits for people I called "poets" -- motivated writers. I have given up on that, at least for the time-being. I think a properly motivated intelligent writer could get developer-like results, I've seen it happen (Brent Simmons, Dan MacTough). They make really good developers because they understand the user perspective so well, it still lives inside them. The problem seems to be motivation, and a poet knowing that they need to be super-motivated and have the time, to get anything technical to work. If they knew what was required, my 2024 theory goes, and had studied for it, the way they studied for their degree, they could not only be successful, but they could contribute to the developer process. Analogously, we all have to learn a little cooking just to get through life, but only a few people are chefs. Julia Child, a hero of mine, believed she could teach anyone to be a good-enough cook. But I bet she was frustrated by human reality. šŸ˜„

- 2024-03-18T13:26:57Z
Now that I have ChatGPT around, my Lorem Ipsum text for testing can be slightly more interesting.

Linkblogs work differently - 2024-03-19T00:10:42Z

Linkblogs work differently in blogrolls. When I click a link it takes me to the site the blog linked to, not to the blog.

So.. When you click the link in the screen shot below it takes you to a Metacritic review of the program

Screen shot.

- 2024-03-17T20:09:24Z
Through it all, news.scripting.com remains my most popular site.

- 2024-03-17T20:16:46Z
It's so funny, the editor of Wordle on a podcast on Friday, 1000th puzzle day, said there are some puzzles that you might not solve in six moves not because of skill rather because of luck. I was pretty sure when I took my second guess, but that's just when the cursing started. By the third guess I thought she's screwing with us! I should not have listened to the podcast.

- 2024-03-17T20:21:18Z
We have a 140-char limit, but offer an effortless way to see more.

- 2024-03-17T19:49:39Z
On Mastodon: I've done this before, starting 25 years ago. Find some new connection I can make because someone was wise enough to add an RSS interface. I get to have an aha! moment and a good laugh at how great this is and then write a freaking blog post about it, and people think man this web thing is pretty cool.

- 2024-03-17T16:04:00Z
Note to self, make a Chrome extension for my blogroll.

- 2024-03-17T16:01:05Z
On this day in 1999. Not much happened in RSS. But I'm going to keep checking for the next couple of weeks.

I'd like to excerpt from and comment about three DW posts that he made over the past couple days.

Dave claims that he likes the open web, and he often rails against silos, such as Twitter and Facebook. A couple years ago when I discoveredI heard the #indieweb use the word silo to describe social media sites

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