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 - 2026-02-08T02:50:02Z

- 2026-02-08T02:27:33Z
BTW, this is what Scripting News in WordPress looks like. I really like it. Just writing. And a modern 2020s blogroll. Room to add more features without too much clutter. The beginning of an upgraded web?

- 2026-02-08T02:50:02Z
My favorite recent snarky slogan. "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right." I know so many people who should take that to heart. Acting on being offended is no longer a luxury you can afford. Find ways to work with others, everything depends on it.

- 2026-02-07T15:50:42Z
Doc has a idea how to stop teams from tanking. Get rid of the lottery. He's right of course. Think of the futility of tanking in the NBA when last year the #1 pick went to the Dallas Mavericks, who were not a lottery team with only a 1.8% chance of getting the first pick. They got a player who looks to be a great star but you can't always tell if a #1 pick will turn out to be a star, sometimes they do, but often not.

- 2026-02-07T15:30:21Z
An increasingly high percentage of the videos on FB are fake. Some are entertaining, some are boobs (an amazing number) and some are pretty freaking dangerous, to the extent people believe they're real.

- 2026-02-07T14:06:32Z
Observed programming behavior. After getting something complicated working, you figure it's all downhill from there, only to realize there's another big hill you have to climb -- you know -- the thing that looked so easy.

Greatest inventions and products - 2026-02-07T14:22:16Z

Om Malik says the internet is the greatest invention of his life, and since we're roughly the same age, that would be my life's greatest invention too. I think it would be if it weren't such a tragic invention, one whose growth was cut off by the very thing he quotes John Doerr saying, it could be harnessed to make huge amounts of money.

• Back in 1999, Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr commented: “Believe it or not, the Internet is actually underhyped.” He called it “the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.” He was so on the money. Twenty-five years later, 10 out of the world’s 12 trillion-dollar companies are internet or internet-related companies.

Doerr would, of course, look at it in terms of money, because money is his business. But because of that, we ended up crashing our political system and haven't gotten past that yet.

If we had kept the one thing about the internet that made it different, we could be far ahead of where we are now, and perhaps would have arrived at a different form of network that didn't favor the kind of people it favors.

Three things that made the internet special:

1. Every part is replaceable.
2. You can use each part to make something new.
3. Each part is as small as it can be.

BTW, I know Doerr. He was the backer of Symantec, the company that bought my company in 1987, then took it public a few years later and thus made it possible for me to make software for the rest of my life. He's a really nice guy. I've only met a handful of people in my travels that had mastered something important so well but managed to still care about people. ;-)

So if the internet is not the greatest invention, what is? I haven't spent much time thinking about this, but my initial choice is AI. Because it's so hugely powerful and yet almost entirely undefined. Uncharted territory, which is all human knowledge. It might be the invention whose product is invention. Whatever it is I'm sure the things it does now will be seen as we see the first moving pictures. A demo of the greatness to come.

What about products? A single act of creativity that made a huge difference. I might suggest Unix is the greatest product of our lifetimes (not invention). Or perhaps Visicalc. People would likely say the iPhone, but I still want something in that form factor that I can write software for and share with others without having to go through a company like Apple. So in that sense the iPhone might have been a negative invention, it cut off possibilities for an amateur development community to develop, as it did on the Apple II, Mac, PC, etc.

PS: If you had asked me in 1999 is the internet the greatest invention, I would have been as enthusiastic as Doerr. There was nothing but blue sky then. Everything was possible, and we were going to do it all!

The reboot that news needs - 2026-02-07T22:00:12Z

I want news to work.

I would love to see a standard model for community news orgs, starting with the city of Washington DC, with some of the reporters who were recently laid off.

But the community would be very much a part of this. No more news without community involvement. Let's make it community published. How does that sound?

And bloggers would be part of the story flow, we're amateurs so we work for free, and we take an oath. We bring other expertise. We can tell you when the tech companies are lying, for example. Professionals can still do both-sides news. Bloggers will follow all the integrity requirements of journalists, but then so will the journalists (let's not pretend all journalists even try to play by the rules, btw).

There will be no paywall, instead there's a toll system, like the EZ-Pass we have on roads in the US. How how we pay to ride the subway. We pay per article read. A user can buy a subscription, if they think it would be a better value than paying per article. No more paywalls that say "if you want to read this article you have to subscribe." That would be an essential part of the deal for readers.

No ads. Let's get rid of them. They suck. Now there's incentive to put the punchline near the end. Tell the story and sign off.

The readers can buy shares in the news org, with maybe very little hope of getting a return in dollars, rather in a more functional community.

The veterans from the Washington Post could have the most exciting job in news in generations -- finally making the news work for the people they serve. And no more oligarchs pulling the strings. As readers we know you're often full of it because of who owns you. We're not that stupid. ;-)

And I am sure the independent developers of the web would love to write editorial and publishing software for the new enterprise. We won't charge for it. And we won't lock you in and we will support standards everywhere so all software is replaceable. You can check my references on this, I think this ethos for technology is as central as the Hippocratic Oath in medicine.

I want news to work.

- 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, new APIs, etc.

- 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. 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.

Best conversations? No way. Not better than ToledoTalk.com FOR ME.

And selfishly, I'm more concerned about ME and not what others think, regarding the benefits of Facebook. I know that Facebook provides benefits, especially regarding updates from favorite small businesses, non-profits, and other orgs. Baby University maintains a Facebook page. I don't maintain it.

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 phone.

We are the new cool, hip people :)

Bijan Sabet ‏added common sense:

I'm not using these products for business. I want to use products that I love. And I don't love FB.

Simple explanation. And I don't understand why Facebook fans object to someone else's way of thinking. Intolerance?

DW wrote in his blog post:

I differ with Scoble on why you should be on Facebook, but not that you should be there.

DW rambles on for a while about the music industry 50 years ago or something. I didn't understand the relation. He finally got back on point.

If you want to be current with tech as it goes forward, you must be in the loop on what's happening on Facebook, if only because every person you hope to sell technology to in the future is using it. They will judge everything in relation to what they have experienced on Facebook.

Ah, okay. Well, since I don't personally sell technology, then I assume that it's okay for me not to use Facebook.

I can read about Facebook tech and their innovations by what shows up on Hacker News or Techmeme. I don't need to use Facebook to be aware of what the company is doing. I stay current with the tech that interests me.

DW concluded with:

So someday, if you withdraw from Facebook, you will face a competitor who embraced it, and you will lose. That's why you should be there.

Idiotic, anti-social, a loser, that's all fine with me because I'll continue to try to be kind to others and live a good life that I can be proud of.

And I don't need any of the social media sites to complete those tasks.

I could understand a small business owner needing a Facebook page along with a custom domain name that hosts at least a blog site. It infuriates me that some small businesses only have a Facebook page, and they don't maintain a site on their own domain name.

But hey, different strokes. Whatever works. It's fine with me.

Excerpts from DW's post titled "Re Twitter easing the 140-char limit":

This feature is good because people don't click links. It also brings Twitter to parity with Facebook, which means it can compete in the news distribution business that it pioneered.

Facebook needs competition, and we need Facebook to have competition.

Maybe DW needs Facebook to have competition, but I don't.

And I'll use links. I need links. Since I truly believe in the open web, then linking will always be a part of my web DNA posting. I'm fine with going against the crowd and being in a small minority.

It sounds like DW is an open web poser.