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 - 2026-03-09T22:23:20Z

- 2026-03-09T21:15:30Z
Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t because I don’t know."

- 2026-03-09T14:33:46Z
An app I'd like someone to do. I want to underline the word reason in a blog post I wrote, below. I want to point to a page with a definition of the word, as a verb, not a noun. As far as I can see there is no page on the web for that. Your app will have a dialog at the top of the page where you type the query, and it generates a page with a static URL that I can point to where the definition will display if the user clicks my link. I would paste the URL where I want it. And that's just the start, the key thing is short replies to queries needed to support something you're writing. I'm surprised Google doesn't do this. And I'd much rather use someone other than Google, but it has to be someone who will be around for a while. You can put an ad on each of the pages, but don't overdo it, or you'll incentivize a competitor.

Manton's Inkwell - 2026-03-09T22:23:20Z

My friend Manton Reece has a new feed reader called Inkwell. The thing that's great about Manton is he tries out new ideas. This is a feed reader of experimentation. Let's see if this works, Manton asks. We'll find out. I love that creative people are using RSS in new ways. I think before long they won't laugh at the idea that RSS is at least as good as AT Proto. (That's a joke, RSS is so much better in so many ways.)

BTW, I'm not sure how Inkwell will fit into my life. I want to try the features of his product, but I am already in FeedLand, all my feed subscriptions emanate from there. I could import my feeds into Inkwell, it supports OPML import, but the subs would not stay in sync. Something for Manton to worry about in a few months or years. No doubt a lot of people are going to love Inkwell, I love it because it's new and creative and represents a substantial investment in RSS. We all got an upgrade today thanks to Manton.

If you want to get an idea of how it works, he did a video demo for his beta testers.

AIs can reason - 2026-03-09T14:08:58Z

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app.

Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently.

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be.

And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood.

- 2026-03-08T16:30:34Z
Let me tell you something about AIs. They are not in any way ready to develop the kinds of apps I make. I spent a full week trying to get it to do so. What happened here is that we all were blown away, correctly, with what ChatGPT could do, and loved that it kept getting better. I've used it and Claude to make apps, and that is also amazing, unprecedented, maybe the biggest innovation ever. But. It doesn't have the memory you need to keep a full app in memory at once. And the tools we have now, compilers, editors, runtimes, do remember the whole thing, they are really good at that, but they don't understand at the level a human can and does. And sessions are too limited. And it makes unbelievably huge mistakes. Maybe they will get there, but we also had high hopes for the last breakthrough, the web, in its early days, and it didn't achieve its promise. Turns out the web gets you Trump, and Trump just discovered he has nukes. Cory talks about enshittification and that's right -- but it's even worse than that. The tech industry always oversells the innovation. I am one of them in that regard. In this one I'm so far just a user. Also I haven't given up. Still diggin!

- 2026-03-08T16:11:09Z
Carville is obviously right. No political party can afford to demonize a group of voters based on gender and race, esp when they make up approx 33% of the electorate.

- 2026-03-08T16:15:32Z
Reporter at the Guardian: "We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie." It's true. I was covering tech realistically starting in 1994, was writing for Wired, people thought I was being too hard on them, but I was actually like you too easy. But people didn’t want to believe tech was evil, they believed that the young people that were running tech were idealists and maybe they were when they started, but by the time the billions started flowing and they stopped caring about people and started only caring about money. A piece I wrote in 1996, after going to a tech industry conference."

He was a trust buster - 2026-03-08T16:29:43Z

- 2026-03-07T16:51:26Z
Claude is not doing well today, seriously not working well, think it must be they're coping with a large influx of new users.

- 2026-03-07T14:19:27Z
I was looking forward to Season 4 of Industry, but found the first episode unwatchable. Lots of yelling. New characters angry and arguing about nothing, dramatic music mocks the awful writing and acting. Does it get better? Reviewers loved it. I've seen this before. Previous seasons were great, so the next season automatically must be great too.

Cory, RSS has never been dormant - 2026-03-07T20:46:25Z

I love the piece Cory Doctorow just posted, but he says something that follows a pattern, the way journalists can say something's dead because they heard it as conventional wisdom.

• Development around RSS has never "lain dormant." That's a perception not reality. Let's stop handicapping what we agree is a very useful and freedom-building system like RSS. You're telling the story that makes people believe it's gone. It is not gone.
• Without the NYT the rest of the news publishing world would probably have never adopted RSS. The NYT drove the liftoff of RSS. Google's product did come to dominate, but there were excellent feed readers long before that.

Happened to the Mac too

• In the early days of the web, it was conventional wisdom that there was no new software for the Mac, all the developers were flocking to Windows. Maybe all the devs were, but the best web server and development software, writing software, was on the Mac.

A blogroll for 2026

• BTW, since you mention Kottke's blogroll, I'd love for you to have a look at mine. You can see it on my blog at scripting.com, or on the WordPress version of my blog at daveverse.org. A screen shot.
• It's a realtime blogroll, the blogs appear in the order in which they last updated. You can expand each item to see the titles of the last five pieces, with a 300-char excerpt, and a link to read the whole thing. It's the blogroll I wanted in the early 00s, a clear indication that there's nothing dormant going on here, Cory.
• You can install it on your own system, it works as a WordPress plugin, so it's especially easy to use it on a WordPress site.

My old ass

• I'm working my old ass off developing for the web and RSS every freaking day Cory.
• I won't stop until we have a social web running with all replaceable parts, no lock-in, as decentralized as the web itself and of course RSS is part of the web.

- 2026-03-06T21:51:20Z
Mastodon: Good Mastodon accounts to follow for news?

- 2026-03-06T20:05:29Z
Remember when, just weeks ago, the Dems told the military that they must not obey illegal orders. We passed that red line when they obeyed orders to start a war that had not been declared by Congress. The video was posted on Nov 18 last year. None of the news stories I found said what the date was or provided a link to the video.

- 2026-03-06T21:59:16Z
I remember liking the first three seasons of Industry on HBO, so I just watched them again. It's a Succession clone, in a way, not exactly the same story, but the same type of story. I waited until the final episode of Season 4 had aired to start at the beginning. So now I'll be watching fresh stuff, which is kind of scary because I found that I had forgotten some of the big plot points, I wonder how much of the new season I'll understand. I also found it dragged toward the end of Season 3, where they do a trick with the audio, make it sound really portentious and dramatic with a promise of evil, for events, which without the music would seem mundane, tiresome, kind of pathetic actually, embarrassing and just plain stupid. But at least it was just part of one season, there are some series that are all about nothing, made to seem important. I try to imagine the writers' room at such shows. Do they know how ridiculous it is? Maybe they don't care. Next up is The Pitt, which everyone says is great, esp doctors, tried watching it but couldn't stand the gore.

- 2026-03-06T19:59:48Z
If you have an X account, esp if you have a lot of followers, please RT this post. I'd like to get my real account back. Thanks for your help.

- 2026-03-05T23:05:40Z
On the other hand, it's hard to get Claude.ai to really apply itself to my own software. It likes to drive. Same with ChatGPT.

- 2026-03-04T14:16:25Z
The thing that's amazing about Claude.ai is that it understands how software works. I can talk to it about software the way a football coach would talk to a player about football. I gave it some instructions in English about how the outliner was going to evolve. I asked if it remembered how Rules worked in MORE. Yes, it explained it correctly. Then I said I'd like "faceless" rules, where we could edit the source so the outlines looked the way we wanted them to look, using Rules. In the time it took me to write a sentence here, it finished the job. I added a home page for the AI outliner folder with links to the other docs in the folder. Then I did a bunch more changes, I could go on like this forever. It was like working with a team on a product, only the team turns around new versions in seconds, and eventually runs out of space (gets tired?) and I have to start another thread. I just did a transition and it seemed to pick up pretty close to where we left off. I have a lot of ideas here. Expect an explosion of new versions of popular software writing by individual people. We'd better make sure the standards of the web are really well documented.

- 2026-03-05T03:58:10Z
What if friends treated their friends as nicely as they treat dogs. When you sensed they needed a little support, you'd look them in the eye and say "Who's the good girl?" Rub behind the ears. When they sit give them a treat. Inside of us, everyone, including you, is a little pup who just wants to know they're in the right place doing the right thing.

- 2026-03-04T21:05:59Z
We had a problem today with one of the servers, it meant a bunch of services weren't working. Never found the actual problem, but something changed and the misbehaving server started working. Learned a lot about managed databases on Digital Ocean.

- 2026-03-03T14:54:55Z
I asked Claude.ai to "write me a nice little spreadsheet program that runs in the browser." Here it is. It looks like a spreadsheet app but it's missing most of the really good commands, like defining the value in one cell with the sum of two other cells using point and click. If you go down this path, ask it to keep a user's guide current, and then ask it to put in features, and just describe them in standard spreadsheet terminology. The trouble starts when you want to make something that doesn't have a standard terminology yet because it's new.

- 2026-03-03T18:33:27Z
Then I had to ask Claude.ai to write me a nice little outliner that runs in the browser. And it did. With a flourish. It was designed to make me the guy who designed outliners for most of a lifetime, and I have to say it was very nicely done, for a two-minute project. Even for a two-week project it's pretty nice. Then I asked it to do a priorArt outline, and it looks really good in the this.how template. The power of standards. And I had a full day of work even while Claude.ai was doing these mind bombs for me.

- 2026-03-03T18:57:59Z
I asked for a feature of the outliner from Drummer that it automatically opens a file in read-only mode if there's a URL parameter with the address of an OPML file. Like this.

Really Simple pizza - 2026-03-03T19:22:57Z

- 2026-03-02T15:03:13Z
Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)

I tuned into the Fediforum - 2026-03-02T16:11:00Z

I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)

They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.

Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.

It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference.

Some of my takeaways from the meetup.

• Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be.
• What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.
• Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed.
• Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄
• More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new.
• I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects.
• One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress.
• I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong.

- 2026-03-01T17:33:57Z
If you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.

- 2026-03-01T15:35:30Z
A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.

opmlProjectEditor format - 2026-03-01T14:33:12Z

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff.

It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it.

I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that).

Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this.

Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub.

I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops.

Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format.

- 2026-03-01T14:11:59Z
Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always.

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.

Excerpts from DW's post titled "Leave nothing but footprints":

The universe just laughs at your ambition. Hah! You're a mere speck of dust, says the universe, a speck that exists for an infinitesimally short period of time.

Don't try to change the world. Instead, try to work with other people.

Observe. Think. Share your experience, but strive to not change a thing.

That emphasized part seems like an odd thing for DW to suggest. I vehemently disagree with it.

My wife and I will continue to help change a small part of Toledo for the better by volunteering with an organization that helps parents to educate their children before they start school.

It's why I created the website http://babyutoledo.com/ for the non-profit. I'm better with technical functions, and my wife is better at interacting with people directly.

The goal of Baby U is to end generational poverty. That's a lofty goal, but if successful, it would be a positive change for the Old South End area of Toledo. How can that be bad?

DW ended that piece with:

It's better to just be kind to each other. Your name may not ring down through the ages, but at least you will have lived a good life that you can be proud of.

That's all good, but why can't changing something for the better and being kind to each other exist together?

It seems that DW contradicts himself a little with his next post titled "Why tech insiders must be on Facebook." Some excerpts:

I know a fair number of people who don't use Facebook or don't understand Facebook, and I think these people are hurting themselves, if they want to be part of tech as it goes forward, and in some sense they are hurting the web, by trying to be part of a network that does not involve Facebook.

My head hurts when I read his opening, authoritative statements.

Again, DW rails against silos, and he claims to support the open web, but in this post he believes that a tech person will miss out on future tech and hurt the open web if they don't use Facebook. That seems senseless to me.

And what about his previous post:

It's better to just be kind to each other. Your name may not ring down through the ages, but at least you will have lived a good life that you can be proud of.

Maybe people who want to live a good life are too busy to use the hot social media sites, or maybe they don't want to be a part of the vitriol that can exist with Facebook and Twitter.

It's possible that I don't use Facebook and Twitter because I've been running a message board for 13 years. In the past, I enjoyed using my own playground for heated debates. I've toned down my rhetoric over the years, which means the site's overall tone has softened too.

I'm no longer interested in flame-throwing with other message board users, and really don't want that kind of activity to occur on a site that I fund. And that's why I will never permit traditional comments to occur on my publishing apps Junco, Grebe, Scaup, and Veery. At most, I'll accept Webmentions.

I still occasionally write about my disdain toward local politicians, but even this activity has decreased significantly in recent years because it's so boring. I guess that I care less about what local officials do because nothing changes. It's better to attempt change by getting involved with other orgs.

But why does DW care if people don't use Facebook? Just move on. Don't worry about it. He added:

This morning Scoble got on the case of Bijan Sabet, out of the blue, as he often does, with a rant about how Facebook is the best place to be.

Scoble is the king of the zealot supporters of Facebook. Wow. I hope that it's okay to call him names.

Scoble said:

Deleting Facebook is idiotic.

Anyone who deletes Facebook is anti social. Best video distribution system. Best conversations. Best content.

I was planning to delete my Facebook account this week because I don't use it. After reading Scoble's intolerance, I'm convinced even more that I don't need a Facebook account.

I'll gladly be an idiot and anti-social by not having a Facebook account. I won't lose sleep. I won't miss anything because the World Wide Web is still huge without Facebook. I know how to surf the web. I won't feel cheated or handicapped. I won't feel anything because I rarely logged into my Facebook account anyway. I don't have the Facebook app on my ph