Pondering Dave Winer's early Jan 2016 posts

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 - 2025-11-16T19:42:15Z

- 2025-11-16T15:55:33Z
Follow this on Mastodon at @scripting@daveverse.org.

- 2025-11-16T15:44:58Z
Here's a screen shot of what the Daveverse home page looks like. It's got all the stuff from scripting.com. It's not a perfect rendering of my Old School blog, I have more features, but it's pretty good. I'll be testing this out and thinking about it now, as we go forward. But here's the milestone: I have a WordPress place to hook into now that has pretty much everything I write outside the tiny little text boxes. What I write in WordLand or Drummer, the two places I write for real. The rest of it is throw away nonsense, a waste of time. No one reads anything, everyone fighting for attention.

- 2025-11-16T15:34:49Z
I was going to tell you how much I like the Lever podcast, and wanted to recommend it, but they make it impossible to find the RSS url for the feed. The usual hacks don't seem to work. Since I'm subscribed to it on Pocket Casts, I thought I might be able to find the URL on their web interface, and it's possible I might have found it that way. Nope. It just points to the web page for the podcast, which did not have the RSS feed. I know they must have one. I was looking for a way to download my OPML file, would be nice if you could do it from the desktop.

- 2025-11-16T14:23:46Z
We ought to be thinking about a filtering system for feed readers based on loose instructions written by users, and shared on the web, to be parsed by our AI. Design your personal algorithm with an AI engine. Share the good ones with your friends, and have it work on the web, in any feed reader. There are ways to do that. If you're working on such a project, let's hook it up to FeedLand. It does a lot of feed reading, and has a nice API for downstream feed readers. It's a good place for an AI-based filter.

More Pluribus spoilage - 2025-11-16T13:56:55Z

Spoilers follow. Like Doc, I have trouble getting into TV series, but not Pluribus, probably because it came from the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two series that I have watched from beginning to end at least three times.

The star of Pluribus, Rhea Seahorn, was my favorite in Better Call Saul, as Kim Wexler. So I expected a continuation of those shows, and in some sense Pluribus is much like them, but the main character Carol, is nothing like Kim -- who is by far the coolest character in any of the shows, and that's saying a lot.

That's okay because the sweetest character yet in a Vince Gilligan comedy (all these shows are comedies btw, even though the plots are super heavy), is Carol's sidekick, Zosia, played by Karolina Wydra. She's basically the voice of the Others, but the illusion is so alluring, one character in the show has already (understandably) fallen in love with her. And we know that Carol has formed an attachment too, despite her best efforts to hate her. ;-)

BTW, this post is the first one that's cross-posted to the daveverse site. There still are some things to fix, but this is a nice piece of software. Basically implements what I've been calling Inbound RSS, not for a social web app, rather for WordPress (which in my mind is becoming more of a social web system every day).

My Discourse System (MDS) - 2025-11-16T19:42:15Z

I wrote this as a comment on Doc's blog.

Doc, I’m working on a discourse system that works better than comments, imho. One thing it does is let’s me use the full fidelity of the web instead of forcing me to type in yet another inadequate text box with none of the features of my blog editor.

I’m working on a Unified Text Theory (UTT) for the web. Instead of scattering Stupid Little Text Boxes (SLTBs) all over creation, let’s come up with a nice text router, that means our writing can be in one place, but through the magic of pointers, can appear to be in many places. (Actually there's nothing magical about it, pointers are very basic computer technology, when I learned to program on a PDP-11 in 1977 it very much had pointers.)

It’s mostly a matter of GOST (an acronym for Getting Our Shit Together).

All this is a preamble to say that my comment on your post can be read here.

https://daveverse.org/2025/11/16/3096/

It’s also on scripting.com.

See how that works. You can’t really tell where it is, but if I make a change to it, somehow the change appears everywhere.

And I’m using my favorite editor to write. Not the dinky one provided by the web browser.

And of course this should be on my blog too. Damn. I’m still doing it.

- 2025-11-15T15:13:59Z
Today's song: Folsom Prison Blues.

- 2025-11-15T16:40:56Z
Interesting thought with a small Pluribus spoiler. We should all think of our AI pseudo-people with as much disdain as Carol has for the "people" who watch over her. They aren't people, in either case. In Pluribus they give you the hint in everything they say. It's not "I think this" it's we. I'd like my chatbot friends to use similar language. Never behave like a person. That should be as forbidden. We'll regret not controlling this, I think.

- 2025-11-15T15:06:34Z
Tim Bray did an analysis of how the Sarah Kendzior suspension on Bluesky would have played out in the MastoVerse.

- 2025-11-15T15:35:58Z
I have been thinking, for years now, why not reconceive the discourse system on the social web to factor out moderation. It is the web, so anyone can add a feature any time without having to rewrite the whole web. I've been trying ideas out for years, but people preferred silos. Hoping now there are enough people to start a bootstrap. Won't be much of a discourse system if people don't course. 😄

More testing stuffffff - 2025-11-15T16:15:09Z

With any luck this will be the last of the tests for this particular feature.

If this continues to work, tomorrow or Monday I'll switch it over to cross-posting to daveverse instead of the throw-away test site.

Below are the debugging messages I used today. Nothing really happening here. ;-)

• This is one of those days I am pretty sure I have nothing to write but as I get going I'll remember stuff. Maybe. As you've probably surmised I'm still working on tests. These are called regression tests. Yesterday I got the whole thing running, but knew I still had to move things around, and turn some features off that weren't needed. So every time I do one of those things that could shake things up, I have to try it again to make sure I didn't break it. This is the page I have to look at for the result. The cool thing is that the wordpress site is starting to feel like scripting.com, the software runs that quickly. But there are a lot of bits of software running all over the place that have to work in order for it to feel that solid.
• How did the regression test go? Wellll, I did break a bunch of stuff. But I put the pieces back in place. And with any luck this post will show up on the other end. It did.

- 2025-11-14T18:25:34Z
I absolutely love Pluribus, but it has the hardest freaking name to remember. I love stories like this, with new assumptions about what is, and people coping with what may or may not be great, or boring, or who knows what. I know they've got me thinking about it all the time, and that is what I like in a good televised story.

- 2025-11-14T14:35:26Z
It's kind of weird for me to be hanging out around WordPress, but I like it. They've been very welcoming. It's kind of like I imagine it would be for Ward Cunningham to be working with Wikipedia. It may not have been everything he wanted from wiki's but it might be the best place for him to develop new features, most likely to have an influence on the way wikis are used in the real world. It's also kind of like it might have been if Doug Engelbart had been willing to hook up with Living Videotext back in the day. I had a couple of dinners with him in Palo Alto where I presented the idea. We had a growing user base of outliner users, our products had commercial success that weren't possible in the 60s and 70s, before there were personal computers like the Apple II or Macintosh. If he could help us, it would be good for both of us, I reasoned. He had his own codebase, and was working with a bunch of other people, and was happy with the setup. In 2025, I have ambitions for WordPress, I think it can play a bigger and different role in the web than it does. I believe there's a new class of developers and users who could benefit from the stability and scaling of WordPress. It's a good community, it's basically the web itself, which means imho that it can grow to be new things to new people. Anyway, you can see why this post has to be on both scripting.com and on my daveverse site as I discussed yesterday.

- 2025-11-14T18:08:09Z
Now I have the other half of the bridge working. This post is full of the testing I did on this, and yes it all worked. I'm going to post something new and see if it makes it through to the other side. And you get to see if it works or not. And now I'm going to make a change. Having made the change I want to see if it made it through. It's kind of remarkable to me that I got this much done in one day. That's what happens when you invested in good tools. And this is where the changes have been visible, on a scratch site used just for these occasions. Tomorrow, the third day of this project, I clean up the loose ends and then we should be good to go with the posts I make on scripting showing up in daveverse. Then I can get started with the next project that depends on this.

- 2025-11-13T14:17:08Z
Good morning. I like how things are going in FeedLand and WordLand today. The dots are starting to connect.

- 2025-11-13T14:54:42Z
You will probably see a series of test posts here, as the day goes on.

- 2025-11-13T16:56:41Z
Here's what I'm doing. I want to get all my blog posts together in one place. I still want to use Electric Drummer to write stuff for scripting.com, there's a whole system built around it being where it is. But, I want all the posts on scripting to also appear on the daveverse site, so that the first version of my discourse module can be simple to create, debug and use. So I've got the first half working, I've got a script that hooks in via WebSockets to FeedLand and is notified every time Scripting News updates. It mirrors the updates to a site on WordPress (for testing) and once it works, I'll have it send the stuff to daveverse. That part remains to be done. Not sure if it'll be a desktop app or a server-based app. But now I need a break. ;-)

- 2025-11-13T21:43:57Z
Some pre-dinner testing. This was correctly recognized as a new item. And I've made another change, this should be picked up as well.

- 2025-11-12T21:55:02Z
A short podcast about Sarah Kendzior, Johnny Cash and Bluesky.

- 2025-11-12T15:31:21Z
The big news is that there are now docs for source:markdown. The goal is to have a writer-friendly standard for text that's as useful as the one for audio. As with everything in RSS-land, cooperation among the different vendors was never its strong point. I hope to change that, and hope to build a network for written text as open and powerful as the one that developed for podcasting.

- 2025-11-12T15:38:08Z
I've added the NetNewsWire blog to my blogroll.

- 2025-11-12T15:29:00Z
Fixed a longstanding performance bug on the scripting.com home page. Sometimes it'd just sit there for five seconds. Really embarrassing. It should feel faster now. Still diggin!

- 2025-11-11T16:00:13Z
New developer notes for source:markdown. Report problems here.

- 2025-11-11T15:55:55Z
An example feed that has lots of source namespace elements.

- 2025-11-11T13:52:56Z
Today I'm going to work on re-shaping the docs for source:markdown because it seems to becoming a thing that people are supporting in their feeds and in their feed consumer apps. We're going to have discuss how it's supported, on both ends. What goes into a source:markdown element, and what does not, and how should readers use it. I will assume the role of benevolent dictator, as I did with RSS 2.0, with a bit more of an understanding of what's important. See Rule #1 in Rules for Standards-makers. "The only reason we have open formats and protocols is so our software can interoperate." And the Rule of Users: "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."

- 2025-11-11T15:37:00Z
As part of the process I reviewed the developer notes I posted in 2022. I see why there was confusion, it was so early in the process. I'm replacing those developer notes with new ones, that's based on more practical experience.

- 2025-11-10T23:19:38Z
Scripting News' feed now supports source:markdown.

- 2025-11-10T23:18:52Z
BTW, if you have a question about source:markdown, or want to raise an issue, this is the place to do it.

- 2025-11-10T17:36:25Z
Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was going to write a short post about how I never thought about how good Credence Clearwater is, until Andrew Hickey did a whole longish episode on them. The story isn't that interesting, but the music is great, lots of fun. Never realized it. Right now I'm listening to Born on the Bayou, lovin it.

- 2025-11-10T17:30:59Z
Now that Cory Doctorow has put enshitified into our vocabulary, I find myself looking for evidence of it in AI, and finding it everywhere. There is a common thread. Amazon Alexa has a really nasty habit of finishing a song by asking me if I want to listen to some other version of it. I'm sure that seems like a nice friendly thing to the product people at Amazon, but please -- I'm grooving on the energy of the song, and the last thing I'm thinking about is some asshole robot interfering with my train of thought with a question so stupid only a machine could think of it. Okay I think that qualifies for enshitification right there. Can we have a rule that AI bots must by defalt behave like a computer. I, your human overlord, the one who is paying the bills, will ask the questions. And you will not speak until you are spoken to.

- 2025-11-10T15:27:47Z
Good morning sports fans!

- 2025-11-09T13:56:12Z
My religion is Working Together otherwise known as interop.

- 2025-11-09T23:52:11Z
WordLand is one of the few products that works hard to make sure that it has effective competition. It lays out a welcome mat for competitors. That's what DemoLand is all about. I think I finished it today, have to do another review, maybe two, before making it public. It is the opposite of a product that's meant to dominate. It's more like MacWrite, to fill a niche as an invitation to others to come play. Remember in the web, all parts are replaceable.

- 2025-11-08T15:23:08Z
Screen shot of DemoLand a new thing I'm doing that shows a developer how to hook an editor up to WordPress using the same server I'm using for WordLand. If they do, our products will work on the same data, in Markdown of course. The user will get to use two different editors to work on the text. This is important because in the social network I'm imagining every part is replaceable. It takes work to make that real, but I have done the work. In this network the user will have choice of writing tools. Unlike products like Substack, for example, where you're forced to use their built-in editor.

- 2025-11-08T14:14:46Z
I need to have my posts from scripting.com flow through the daveverse site, because the WordPress view of my writing is becoming more important. I find myself copy/pasting again, and I have to start viewing every one of those as a bug to fix. That might be the biggest mess of all of them, the idea that humans are intended to do things that computers are meant to do for us.

What are users for? - 2025-11-08T13:45:42Z

Google tries to speak for me.

Reading a friend's email, I click the Reply button, and without asking, it writes a reply for me. Thus, if I want to speak for myself first I have to delete the message it created, signed with my name, w/o permission.

Here's a screen shot with a red arrow pointing to the AI's writing.

I do my own writing, always, and forever. I'm not a Luddite, btw -- if you read my blog I try tech and I use it if it fits. I'm looking for new things tech can do. But this time I was forced to use something I never wanted to use. That disgusts me. How dare the machine think it can impersonate me.

But it gets worse. They buried the opt-out settings, and they don't actually turn anything off. I asked ChatGPT how to do it. It showed me where the settings are, I turned them off, saved changes, reloaded the page, and the same suggestion is there. It's still speaking for me.

Now they certainly haven't rolled this feature out to journalists, because the news would be full of rage. Journalists, like other literate people, generally have the basic ability to speak for themselves. And journalists use a pulpit that Google is probably still a tiny bit scared of.

Also, it's hard to come up with an example you can share publicly because it only does this with replies to emails from people you know. I tried it with spam-like messages and there it is willing to let you speak for yourself.

This raises a philosophical question for Google and its AI bot. Of what use are users?

- 2025-11-07T15:23:36Z
The kind of email I like to get. From Manton: "Just wanted to let you know that I added source:markdown to all Micro.blog-hosted RSS feeds by default this week. You can see it in my feed." That's one nice lookin RSS feed. He added: "NetNewsWire support was the last nudge I needed to add this." The Power of Brent. It's good to stay on Brent's good side. ;-)

- 2025-11-07T13:26:02Z
​AI changed the basic capabilities of computers. Some technologies will do fine in the new world, like SQL databases. But the stuff we do — that's going to change radically. Will anything be left? No one knows, imho. Best thing we can do is keep going on the path we were on, and look for ways to involve AI tech in a way that will bring the power of AI to writers.

- 2025-11-07T13:26:44Z
The previous post appeared on my daveverse blog which is something I'm especially proud of because it's the result of a fantastic collaboration between my codebase and Matt's codebase. Could not have happened without the wpcom api. That single bit of software imho is going to spark a rebirth of web applications and with that, the blogosphere. That is, if I have my way. Now one thing I still have to fix is the problem of posts appearing in more than one place without copy/paste. Have not conquered that yet.

- 2025-11-07T13:15:57Z
Stephanie Booth asks about yesterday's post about dynamic OPML in Pocket Casts. I responded with a few comments, and a promise to write a post to show how this works in FeedLand, which already has the feature, but unfortunately is not a podcast client.

- 2025-11-06T14:10:41Z
I went to NYC yesterday, drove both ways in the same day, which is a lot of driving. It was exceptional for me, two big cities in three weeks, Ottawa and New York. Had time to sit in Washington Square Park, then I rode a Citibike up to where I used to live near Columbus Circle. On the way I shot a video of a woman on West St with a sign that said Honk For Democracy. I thought it was a nice shot, and typically NYers drove right by her, no honking, unfortunately. I also shot a video in Washington Square Park. NYC is photogenic, interesting, and still where I come from, proudly.

- 2025-11-06T14:13:23Z
I went to see a discussion between Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick, two people from tech who I have worked with, but hadn't seen in a while. I wanted to chat with both of them, and did, which was well-worth the journey. I liveblogged it. My chat with Matt helped me understand what we're doing. One of the things we talked about is an idea I thought he would understand and love. It relates to their podcasting client, Pocket Casts, which I use.

Dynamic OPML for Pocket Casts - 2025-11-06T14:10:23Z

On its surface Pocket Casts is a straightforward podcasting client. You use it on a mobile device to subscribe to shows, choose the ones you want to listen to, those go into a queue, you can move things up the list, or start another, etc.

It also has a web client you can use to add and remove subscriptions, from your desktop. This is important because we discover podcasts on the desktop too. In your normal web surfing you may see a podcast you want to follow. Then how many steps does it take to add that to your subscription list on your phone? That's the trick in software design, is it too much work to justify the benefit? If it is, you won't do it. But if we can make it easy, as easy as subscribing to a news feed, you might. Ideally it should be one click followed by a confirmation.

How could this work? A new feature for OPML subscription lists. Today it's used as the import/export format for lists. But that's a one-time thing. Instead I want to give Pocket Casts the URL of an OPML file with my podcast subscriptions from the desktop.

The same feature could be used to share my choices with other people. I already publish a podcast subscription list with the world, or Jon Stewart could share his favorite podcasts by comedians. And when he adds or removes a feed, that change is synchronized with the all the users who subscribe to it.

The short version is "subscribing to subscription lists."

I decided to write up this idea publicly because I've written about the idea so many times, it's not a secret and if I had a podcast client it would already be there. If people at Automattic are excited by the potential, let's start planning the feature, and software that can plug in on the other side of the interface. I'm still learning how this works, to collaborate with a very diverse organization, spread all over the world, and they don't even all work for the same company.

If we do this feature, first it'll be largely experimental, something that podcast-loving devs will make for ourselves. As we use it we will think of ways to make it easier to use. It won't take long imho before this is a popular feature in podcast clients.

- 2025-11-06T00:09:56Z
I liveblogged a chat between John Borthwick and Matt Mullenweg tonight in NYC.

- 2025-11-05T16:27:48Z
Don't forget the new WordPress News.

- 2025-11-05T14:13:00Z
Every FeedLand timeline has a link to its OPML subscription list under the traditional white on orange XML icon.

- 2025-11-05T13:10:41Z
To people who do WordPress plug-ins -- have a look at the feedlandSocket repo. It sends notifications of news items to any subscriber, via websockets. News items are simple JSON, and contain information in the feed item, and system info like id and when it was received. This makes it easy to stream news to a plug-in running in a WordPress site, that can then do anything with the news they like. It's incredibly simple to use, and we provide all the JavaScript code you need to embed in a browser-based app. Here's a place where you can ask questions.

- 2025-11-05T13:43:33Z
New release of FeedLand, v0.7.9. It's a Node.js server app, using MySQL, and I think it's stable enough that I can start linking to updates here. It's not for poets, though I do know one who got it running. Check out the feedlandInstall repo.

- 2025-11-05T12:32:49Z
Democrats swept yesterday's election. A reminder that you should ignore pundits when they say what they've been saying about Democrats since Trump won last year's election. They assume people are stupid and aren't paying attention to the prices in the supermarket. And the price of health insurance. And the mask-wearing storm troopers occupying Los Angeles and Chicago. Heather Cox Richardson said at the end of last night's piece that "politics will be a whole different game." Republican incumbents now know that there better be big change, or they'll all be losing next November. They may find themselves more on the people's side than Trump's, now that they know for sure the two things are different.

- 2025-11-05T14:23:19Z
And it's undeniable, the voters said no to Schumer and the current theoretical Democratic leaders. They can't be in charge of the future, otherwise we're lost. So the voters figured it out. Let's make sure everyone hears this, they seem to be saying. You better be able to lead us or don't bother applying for the job.

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.

I could be considered anti-social because I don't use the hot social media/social networking sites, and that's okay by me. I'm fine with being labeled and called names. I won't get offended.

I like message boards, wikis, and blogs. If that's old school or archaic, then that's okay too because I subscribe to the theory that every human being is unique. Why would zealot fans of social media sites assume that everyone should enjoy using those sites/apps? And why do these zealot fans get irritated that some people have the nerve not to use those sites?

I don't care if these social media sites exist. More amateur content gets created. That's a good thing. They all have pros and cons. But I'm simply not interested in them. And I'm not alone with this thinking.

I'm not going to get upset because people use Facebook, and I won't waste my time trying to convince people to stop using Facebook. I don't care if people use Facebook.

I enjoy building and using my own websites. That probably puts me into a minority of a minority. Many Indieweb users also build or install their own software to manage their personal sites. Different breed. What's wrong with diversity?

What's odd is when the zealot social media fans try to convince us that we need Facebook and we must post to Facebook, etc. I don't know why they seem to be upset when people decide to delete their Facebook accounts.

Again, what's wrong with diversity?

I have many interests. I post to my niche sites. I read the web in my own way. And I have been doing these activities for 15 years or more. I don't need help nor guidance from anyone in this area.

I wonder if the zealot fans of social media are creating a new form of acceptable intolerance that's directed at people who don't share their fandom of
the hot social media sites.

From DW's post titled "Leave nothing but footprints":