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 - 2024-05-02T21:39:12Z

- 2024-05-02T21:39:12Z
I asked ChatGPT and Meta.ai to draw a typical residential street in north Queens.

First browser-based blogging tool - 2024-05-02T15:29:21Z

In February 1999, playing with blog writing in the browser. This was a new idea at that point. Full-size screen shot.

Two podcast episodes - 2024-05-02T15:13:38Z

If you want a new perspective on the election, two recommendations.

• Greg Sargent interviewed political consultant Joe Trippi, who explains why third parties could make all the difference in the election.
• Chris Lydon interviewed Richard Slotkin about the four major stories of American politics.

Both very illuminating and immediately influenced my thinking.

What became of 1999.io - 2024-05-02T14:09:41Z

TL;DR: It's gone -- you can't get there. Because it uses Twitter for identity. It and bingeworthy.io are the two apps I miss the most.

1999 was a rewrite of blogging software from the point of view of both 1999 and 2016. Both timeframes. I had learned a lot inbetween, and the art of online interaction had moved forward a lot. I had become a user of Facebook, and was impressed with how their software worked. I was imploring them to turn it into a blogging system, it was achingly close. When I realized they weren't going to do it, I set out to do it myself, how I imagined Facebook would do a blogging system. Of course I didn't have their source code, so I built it from scratch.

Because 1999 used Twitter for identity, I couldn't use it. I also couldn't use Radio, because it ran on Windows and a now-obsolete version of the Mac OS. It's made me think that maybe in a few years or even months you might not be able to use FeedLand or Drummer. Then I thought about how I can better future-safe them for users. And that led me to adding a simple feature to FeedLand that will help if a FeedLand server you depend on should go off the air. See the next post, below.

Protecting your FeedLand subscription lists - 2024-05-02T13:56:43Z

First and foremost, you should keep a current backup copy of your subscription list. It's very easy to do.

• In FeedLand, choose My feed list in the first menu.
• Click on the white-on-orange XML icon, in the upper right corner of the page.
• That will open a standard OPML version of your subscription list. This is the format that all feed reading software understands.
• In your browser, choose the Save Page As command in the File menu (or something like that, there are lots of browsers) and save it along with your other backups.
• You can also automate it if you can run a script that gets stuff over the internet. Once a night would be fine, not a huge burden on the server.

I added another way to preserve your feed list, using localStorage.

• Every time you sign in FeedLand now saves a copy of your subscription list in localStorage.
• And if the FeedLand server you're using should happen to disappear, if you have not taken a backup in a while, if you have a tab open, you'll at least have a copy in localStorage.
• If you want to see it -- visit feedland.org or feedland.com, wherever you have an account, and do a hard reload. Then open the JavaScript console, and enter this line:
• console.log (localStorage.savedUserSubs)
• If you have questions, here's a thread.

If not now, when? - 2024-05-02T19:38:26Z

- 2024-05-01T18:41:41Z
There's a FeedLand Blogroll Toolkit if you want to adapt it to work in your blogging environment. We already have a WordPress plugin.

- 2024-05-01T18:25:14Z
F. Murray Abraham, pictured to the right, played the part of the bad guy in a fantastic movie about the Inquisition. We're headed that way in the US. A man very much like Bernardo Gui will be advising women and their doctors on what is permitted in women's health care.

- 2024-05-01T13:00:58Z
If you're a blogger, here's something to think about. Whose writing influenced the way you write? Here's my list: Kurt Vonnegut, My uncle Ken (not his writing, rather his way of telling stories), my father, Russell Baker, Robert Hunter (lyricist for the Dead), Douglas Coupland (specifically MicroSerfs), the Suck.com guys, everyone who was writing at Hotwired in 1995. I'll think of others, but those are the ones who come to mind. I have been a constant reader since I was a little kid, so there's a mix of writing styles from authors I don't immediately remember. I should also do one of these lists for who inspired my software.

- 2024-05-01T14:31:01Z
My father taught me how to organize my thinking when I was trying to figure out how something works. And that's basically what I've spent my life on, figuring out how things work. The most interesting and gratifying was understanding things that didn't exist until I pieced their story together.

- 2024-05-01T12:28:11Z
I have to admit I like Tyrese Maxey of the Sixers, who spoiled a Knicks victory last night that would have closed out the first round of the playoffs. It felt like the Knicks had won the game when Maxie single-handedly pulled the Sixers back into contention. Now the Knicks are up 3-2 with the next game in Philadelphia tomorrow night. But! I didn't flip out this time like I did for the last game, and I think it was because I was able to watch it on local TV with the familiar play by play guy, Mike Breen, and the best color guy for any sport, Walt Clyde Frazier. If he wasn't flipping out why should I. One of the things I love about his narration is that he uses words incorrectly, kind of like Archie Bunker. I keep wanting to say "I do not think it means what you think it means," but then I realized, last night, for the first time, it's freaking poetry! A lot of it even rhymes. And it's a poem that will go on as long as the Knicks do. Unfortunately I don't think the MSG crew is going to be doing the next game. And btw, they do a much better job of camera work than ESPN. Maybe it's because the TV people have been able to iterate the camera setup the same way I iterate the UI of a piece of software. The same company owns the TV network as owns the arena as owns the team. It's all totally horizontally integrated. At dinner the other night a friend asked, if the owner of the Knicks wasn't a putz. I said of course, he's the worst but, the Knicks now are being well managed. So maybe he's mellowed out a bit?

- 2024-05-01T14:21:54Z
When I log on to meta.ai, these are the suggestions. None of them relate to things I'm thinking about. I haven't been a student or interviewed for a job in decades. But I've been on Facebook for many years, and I had to connect this to my Facebook account to use it, so presumably it knows all that Facebook knows about me, about me. How long before this is customized?

- 2024-05-01T12:33:47Z
I'm looking for a quick and easy and ideally free way to upload an MP3 of a podcast and get back a transcript. I have a feeling that a podcast I recorded yesterday will work better as a written document, but I don't have the patience to transcribe it myself. I asked on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, ChatGPT, Meta.ai.

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. In the summer of 2013, I discovered the #indieweb group via a poster mentioning the https://indiewebcamp.com in a comment to one of DW's posts. Maybe the word "silo" has been used for a long time to describe social media sites, but the term got popularized in my conscience by the Indieweb site.

I added #webmention support to my Junco code because of the Indieweb group. The Indieweb people "use" social media sites differently. They own their own domain names. They post articles and notes to their own blog sites. But rather than manually cross-posting their info their many social media presences, they use software that makes it appear that the Indieweb users are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. just like everyone else, but that's not the true.

Indieweb users may never log into their social media sites, but their content gets posted to those sites, and the comments, likes, shares, etc. at those other sites come back to their personal sites. It's interesting.

Since I don't "use" Twitter and Facebook, having my info posted automatically at those other sites is unnecessary. I use Instagram but mainly as a notetaking app and a place to store photos. But lately, I rely more on Flickr. Again. I've been using Flickr for many years. I don't use Flickr to network with others. I use it to store photos that I then embed into my own web publishing apps and sites.

This past summer, I created my Waxwing app to be a simple image uploader that speeds up the process of using images within my web publishing apps. But I still use Flickr too.

I'm not interested in networking with people beyond my own message board ToledoTalk.com that I started in January 2003.