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 - 2026-02-06T16:42:48Z

- 2026-02-06T16:42:48Z
I've been watching Jake do the Headless Frontier work with two different AI bots -- ChatGPT and Claude.ai. And as he's doing that, I'm slogging away the same way I've always done it, working on the top level user interface of WordLand in browser-based JavaScript. I don't see a way around it, because I have a special way of working on user interfaces, and we're still quite a ways away from the bot being able to do vibe coding at that level. It's fascinating to watch Jake revive code I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. He's a very accomplished user of it, being transformed, with the help of the bots, into a kernel-level developer of what's basically an OS built around a scripting language, object database and with the internet latched on after the whole thing was done, and then ported to Windows. I stopped working at that level before all that michegas happened. I have looked at the code Jake is working on to see what became of it, and wasn't horrified, I recognized my work, but I wouldn't ever want to work on that myself. I imagine some commercial developers have already rebuilt their testing and support functions for products around ChatGPT-like systems. If you're an old Frontier fanatic, that's where our product is once again getting out in front. When Jake is done it'll be one of the first big systems totally managed in an AI system. It should be relatively easy to add new verbs to the language, even to add new features to the language.

- 2026-02-06T14:56:52Z
Another example of ChatGPT utility. "I have a function named Boo. Inside it has an icon that when you click it, it calls Boo to view the parent of the item. But I don't want it to call Boo directly because that leaves the previous instance of viewFeedItem around. In JavaScript what's the best way to defer the call to Boo so that the two instances are unrelated, and the first instance goes away." I was pretty sure as I wrote this that setTimeout was the answer, but ChatGPT offered it as the first choice, and explained why it was the best. It's like having a code consulant ready to help. And it really does help to know it parsed it the same way I did.

Sports galore! - 2026-02-06T14:06:41Z

Good morning sports fans!

Boy are we getting some fancy sports action.

The Olympics have already started, with Milan as the host city. The opening ceremony is tonight. My longtime friend, the brilliant and beautiful Anna Masera, will be attending. She's from the nearby city of Torino.

And of course there will be lots of sports action on Sunday, when by coincidence, the Knicks are playing the Celtics in Boston.

And also in case you're into American football -- the SuperBowl is on Sunday in my former home base of Silicon Valley, featuring the New England Patriots (booo) and the Seattle Seahawks (booo two). 6:30PM Eastern on Peacock and NBC. (They say "simulcast" on NBC, which means what?)

Meanwhile I'm sooo freaking tired of working on reading and replying in WordLand, but I gotta get it done. I hope to have a test version up real soon, like maybe next week. I'll write some more about that in a bit. I want people to be prepared for the new design, you won't be replying on my site, you'll be replying on yours. This is the price we pay for true distribution. But when you're reading the posts and replies, it's all seamless. No cost. And, if my site goes away, your writing remains where it was, where you wrote it, on your site. This is what's new about WordLand. We respect the web and we respect you. I'm not trying to lock you in, just trying to set an example for the rest of the tech world. Give us all a way to avoid being locked in the trunk while the tech oligarchs have stadiums and train stations named after them (and if they think that makes them immortal, please tell me who Mr or Ms Shea was? Heh.)

Now one thing some people are sure to be upset about, up front. WordLand only knows how to write to WordPress sites. It's kind of a miracle we can do that, mostly owing to the fantastic API they have created. After we get that going, of course I want to work with other blogging systems to make sure their products can be used in the same way. Working together we're going to give the good old web a new feature! But right now I'm the only person working on this, and I'm pretty old for doing this kind of work, so please be kind. Thanks.

- 2026-02-05T14:57:55Z
I still love my Keurig coffee maker. The coffee is delicious and hot and it's truly a technology marvel. So simple and easy to learn.

- 2026-02-04T22:49:29Z
I'm going to WordCamp Europe in June in Poland. Can't wait.

- 2026-02-04T23:35:15Z
News from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. Writeup is here.

- 2026-02-04T23:29:10Z
Here's a news page with stories from the most-quoted blogs on Hacker News. A brilliant idea. All I did was give each item a category, and shortened the URL. The brief writeup is here.

- 2026-02-04T22:47:17Z
No one else can see this message. You are the only real person. The rest of us are alien robots sent here to test you.

- 2026-02-04T17:29:23Z
I wrote an app that implements Inbound RSS for WordPress sites. Three months ago, a few little glitches but remarkably reliable. Open source. That's how I have scripting.com output hooked up to daveverse.org input. It stopped working this morning, not sure why. This is actually a test to see if this works. (Postscript: It did work. But I have two earlier posts today that did not get through.)

- 2026-02-04T15:44:46Z
Automattic shipped a WordPress plugin that adds a source:markdown element to a WordPress feed. This is very cool. We've added this to the feed for daveverse site.

- 2026-02-04T15:30:30Z
We need a short name for ChatGPT-like product. If I want to make a general statement about products in the category, there is, as far as I know, no word to use. Same with Twitter and tweet, so I call them twitter-like products and use tweet for posts to any twitter-like product. The whole idea of a different name (like toot, skeet) for each service is linguistic travesty. Anyway, ChatGPT-like is also an unacceptable term. If it had a fun name like OurMind -- then OurMind-like would work. If only William Safire were here.

- 2026-02-03T14:15:06Z
Interesting post on Twitter by an OpenAI co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, about the value of RSS. I've seen it said elsewhere, that RSS and ChatGPT are particularly well-suited for each other. I don't understand the connection, other than RSS is always useful, as a way of formalizing the output of an app so other apps can use it as input. Another thing AI apps have in common with work we've done in the past is the ability to script apps, which was one of the big features of Frontier esp on the Mac starting in the early 90s. This started out just for desktop apps but worked just as well for web apps, once that opportunity became available. I felt strongly that the Mac with it's very functional GUI could benefit from a powerful system-level scripting language with the UI objects being scriptable, and the data of the apps accessible via script. That kind of duality is still a common theme in computer work, I'm doing the same kind of thing with WordPress, as the OS for the web, and making it possible to create different UIs in ways that earlier social web apps can't. I think that functionality as with the others will pair very nicely with ChatGPT and its cousins.

- 2026-02-03T14:46:24Z
Screen shot of system.verbs.apps as it appeared in my frontier.root frozen sometime in the early 00s. I wrote a quick Mastodon post about this. So many stories to tell about each of these projects. Looking at the list and realize we got all those people to work together. They don't talk about that when the write the history, but that is the real accomplishment. There is so much really good tech that ends up lost to history because people wouldn't open their eyes and see that they weren't alone. That might be the biggest flaw in the design of our species, that it's so rare that we get together on the way things should work. Other examples -- MP3, QuickDraw, HTML. And so much time wasted replacing things that already worked fine. (Think of all the programming languages invented in the last 20 years. What a waste of resources. No doubt the AI's have already created a meta-language to compile all that code into. If they could think, what would they think of us for not paying attention to each other.)

- 2026-02-03T15:02:16Z
1996: Nerd's Guide to Frontier.

- 2026-02-03T17:32:04Z
for developers who don't use ai -- here's the kind of question i ask chatgpt. "i have a div that contains icons that are either svg's or font-awesome i's. if it were text, i'd use font-size to control the size of the icons, which won't work here. what's the right way to do it?"

- 2026-02-03T18:24:49Z
apple is a company, very good at selling itself as a lifestyle. but there's only one person, who's been gone for 15 years, who could keep that reality distortion field inflated.

- 2026-02-02T15:41:17Z
I have an array built into every app I do, on server or in the browser, called snarkySlogans. When I need a bit of text to test with I just choose a random snarky slogan. They are little truths that have occurred to me over the years. You're free to steal this code, they do come in handy at times. There's a snarky slogan to cover that -- "Only steal from the best." Another one I really like: "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."

- 2026-02-01T22:00:02Z
Why did we need all those programming languages?

- 2026-02-01T21:58:21Z
Imagine building blocks to assemble your own social web app. A toolkit you could plug into your bot.

- 2026-02-01T15:41:59Z
I was surprised to find that nirvana.userland.com, a site that was new in 1998, is still running.

- 2026-02-01T15:09:25Z
January is archived, as is 2025. On to the future! :-)

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

• Jan 4, 2016 - Leave nothing but footprints
• Jan 4, 2016 - Why tech insiders must be on Facebook
• Jan 5, 2016 - Re Twitter easing the 140-char limit

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