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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-09-17T21:11:33Z

- 2025-09-17T21:11:33Z
I had a great talk/podcast interview yesterday with Matthias Pfefferle about everything I'm interested in re WordPress and networking, and our interests overlap a lot. I was explaining how I wanted to see a whole market of editors. You could see them as "For WordPress" but there's another way to look at them. They're plug-in replacements for the dreaded "tiny little textboxes" we see in twitter-like systems. Those awful little things. We know so many ways to make better editors. Now imagine that we store your Mastodon posts in WordPress documents (we do). And you see how the pieces start to fit together. Think of WordPress as the command line of the social web. And it really will be the web, not a promise of someday maybe being the web. It's like a Wordle puzzle. You have to move the parts around until you see a picture develop. Another fun thing, WordPress has a great simple REST api that's been around since 2017, and it covers most of the product functionality and is debugged, scaled and stable. It probably is the simplest API for ActivityPub. Now does that blow your mind? This is how you know this is the web, because your mind keeps exploding once you realize the things you could do just by connecting two things together and it works because they interop. Matthias has been working on this stuff since 2008. Our paths didn't cross until earlier this year.

- 2025-09-17T21:02:41Z
This town, at the end of the Metro North line, looks like an ideal place to park yourself for easy access to the city, yet a fairly country experience.

- 2025-09-17T19:19:12Z
There have been reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.

- 2025-09-17T13:12:51Z
In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS 0.91 in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative, and definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)

- 2025-09-17T16:48:00Z
A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.

- 2025-09-16T20:18:51Z
It's really simpler than really simple.

- 2025-09-16T17:18:55Z
Here's an idea. Why doesn't Apple make a laptop with a light shining out to highlight the user's face so they look better when they're on a Zoom call. I bet someone makes a device like this to clip on a laptop. Right??

- 2025-09-16T16:45:07Z
Until we start working together it’s going to keep getting worse.

- 2025-09-16T15:30:34Z
I've started calling ChatGPT boss as in OK boss.

- 2025-09-16T14:54:48Z
ChatGPT is great at SVG. Describe the icon you want and in a few iterations you have it, even if it's not in Font Awesome. I would have killed to have this a few years ago, before FA came out. This is the best of both -- use FA if they have the right icon, design your own if they don't. It also makes me think that now perhaps SVG-based user interfaces are within the realm of possibility. CSS is no way to design UIs. I have a podcast in the pipe about this. If you want to know what I mean, look at the docs for QuickDraw.

- 2025-09-16T14:43:44Z
Now would be a good time for everyone to watch this movie. This is where we are now. It's not in the future. Getting this info will help. Spread the word. Download a copy too. It's a great movie.

- 2025-09-16T14:21:12Z
To people who read my blog. If you have a quick thought about something you read here, it's ok if you send me an email. It should be short and not personal, if it adds some info or perspective that might be interesting, or if you just agree feverishly (not so much if you disagree, please) drop me a line. My return address on the nightly emails is my real email address. And you can find the address on the About page on my blog. Also sometime soon I think there will be a way to read my blog inside WordLand, so you can post a response to something I wrote, on your own blog, and I can get a link to it. I think this is the best of both worlds. You maintain the integrity of your blog, all your comments are in the same place, and if I think my readers would benefit, I can link it into my blog. I don't think we need comments, in other words. I think our blogs are powerful enough with some new code.

- 2025-09-15T21:38:10Z
Podcast: WordLand, the timeline and checkboxes.

- 2025-09-15T15:07:23Z
I've gotten a lovely response to the Que Sera Sera post I linked to here. It's from 1996, I was reporting from a tech conference I was at where there were all angry men on stage threatening everyone else. They may not have known they were doing that, but it was awful. And so different from the web we were just beginning to understand at that time. I'm going to start going through the posts that I remember making a difference at the time. No better way for me to remember what the web is, going back to these memories when it was all fresh and new, before the leaders of tech realized what was going on. Google didn't ship for another two years. It probably wasn't even in development at the time. Yet I think the last section is a good anthem for the web, for those of us who think it's time to cut pop all the bullshit off the stack and get back to our roots.

- 2025-09-15T14:36:19Z
I had a flash last night during the Emmys. The Bloggers of Mastodon. I loved the concept right off the bat, so I wrote a blog post using in WordLand that went through WordPress and landed on Mastodon. It all works. Where are the other Bloggers of Mastodon? Let's start a club!

feedland.org or feedland.com? - 2025-09-15T14:07:03Z

This question has come up quite a bit lately.

People don't know that there are two places you can use FeedLand, feedland.org and feedland.com.

There's a lot of history here, and some uncertainty about the future, so there's not much I can do other than explain the situation.

First you're welcome to use either of them.

feedland.org is running on a simple small server on Digital Ocean, and feedland.com is on Automattic's VIP network.

If feedland.org gets overloaded, it gets slow.

if feedland.com gets overloaded, it adds more servers and should stay about the same at all times.

You should pick one and use it and not have two accounts, but people accidentally create them, because in some places we point to .com and in others we the default is .org. It's because we haven't gotten it together yet.

There are also performance issues on .com -- ones that we still need to address.

That's about all I can say at this point. At the same time I'm working on a whole other product while all this is happening, and I'm not that young, and really can only work so many hours a day before I have to stop. A fact.

And I'm really glad so many new people are trying FeedLand. I use it myself in so many ways. And it will be deeply integrated with WordLand in the next release. I'm not kidding.

- 2025-09-15T01:33:24Z
The Bloggers of Mastodon.

- 2025-09-14T22:55:36Z
A very smart application of AI. Google could add it to the debugger. When my program crashes deep in jQuery code, with no stack crawl, it could suggest what the problem might be without me have to try to describe it for ChatGPT. The Google AI debugger would be able to look everywhere any anywhere in the virtual machine. Much faster than I can. As a programmer I hope they're working on this. Or maybe it's already out in testing form?

- 2025-09-14T16:36:16Z
A couple of days ago I saw a post from Evan Prodromou asking if I had seen a product announcement, and was wondering what I thought of the name. The name of the product was Really Simple Something. I said it was the first I heard of it. I did a little digging using ChatGPT and found they can do this, it’s not illegal or unethical. But it’s also true that you could invent a new format and call it HTML even if it isn’t what we think of as HTML today . The W3C would have no recourse. If you wanted to make a new CSS to compete with the existing CSS, no one can stop you, and you can call it CSS. Not a good way to run the internet imho. But that appears that's how it works. So as much as I didn't like what they did, esp the fact that the first I heard of it was a public announcement, and had no time to prepare or maybe even help them do something better, I guess we have to accept it. RSS has been through this before and came out okay. I just wish it would stop at some point. It's a useful thing, deserves love and support, not just from me, but from everyone, esp people who run companies that depend on it. You benefit as much as I do. End of sermon.

- 2025-09-14T14:12:56Z
Last night's email didn't go out. I found and fixed the bug, and the mails went out about 10.5 hours late.

- 2025-09-14T00:45:25Z
I've found new freedom on my WordPress blog that's also on Masto.

- 2025-09-13T14:13:01Z
How did a healthy well-fed and educated 22 year old man from a good family throw his life away and for what? To kill a 31 year old family man who dedicated his life to making massive numbers of people miserable? What’s more tragic? And how many other Americans are on this track?

Embrace the creativity of others - 2025-09-14T00:18:19Z

I wrote a piece in October 1996 after attending a conference of the tech industry that as it turns out was in its final stages. This was one of the last times it met. I was coming from the web, and wanted to see if anyone else was ready to change how we work with each other.

• Here's an invitation to truly embrace the creativity of others. Instead of beating your breast about how great you are, try saying how great someone else is. Look for win-wins, make that your new religion. Establish a policy that nothing will be announced unless it can be shown that someone else will win because of what you're doing. How much happier we would be if instead of crippling each other with fear, we competed to empower each others' creativity.

I've been following that ideal ever since, people seem to misinterpret it for subservience or weakness, or a pretense to cover another kind of greed, when it's really sincere, and all about strength. Sometimes people say yes, and when that happens magical things happen. I swear to god. I've been there. I've done it, it's not something you can do on your own, by definition. It's rare when people actually help each other and thereby create something. It's why the Beatles are such a great story. Someday I still hope to be part of a group like that. Right now, it's still totally everyone for themself. That is breaking. Read the news. But I believe if we did start really collaborating and not just talking about it, things would change very very quickly. Things would happen that can't happen until we work together.

I had it figured out in 1996, but still haven't figured out how to make it happen, and time is running out.

- 2025-09-12T14:47:32Z
I did a podcast interview yesterday with Nathan Wrigley at WP Tavern. I had a great time, and learned a lot. It's interesting that while I am not a member of the WordPress community, there is a big intersection between that community and one I do belong to -- the web. WordPress was founded on the principles and idealism of the web. It's baked in. So it might be the largest community of users, not exclusively developers, who have the same values as the web, which are very very powerful values. I'm rediscovering them and it's wonderful. It means I can plug your app into my server and they work first time. It's the just works part that makes it the web. It makes you suck in your breath and go, I'm there now. One interesting thing that came up was the subject of altruism, which is something I reject re myself. It doesn't work if what I do is altruism, because we all must be somewhat committed to the success of our competitors, because if we don't we are locking people in. It's so important that users have freedom of movement. If they don't things stagnate like our 19 years of Twitter. I'm going to be Nathan's show again, and again if he'll have me, to check in on the progress of my humble project to create a new layer, combining WordPress and all the other good stuff that isn't hooked up to it yet. I could not have hoped for a better introduction to The Land of WordPress.

It's really simple - 2025-09-11T12:39:36Z

Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets.

Around the time of the 20th anniversary I decided to swing back and see what more we could do with RSS. It had been sitting there basically going nowhere for most of those 20 years. I want to be clear, there were good and useful products created and supported, but there was none of the innovation that would have happened if it hadn't been so severely injured by Google and the many VC-backed startups hacking away at it.

A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That's what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn't be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.

Anyway, around the 20th anniversary, in the leadup to it, I decided if no one else was going to invest in RSS, I would, and let's see what comes of it.

The result was FeedLand which is fundamentally different from all the other feed readers in that its subscription model is patterned after the twitter-like social media apps. Everyone's subscription list is public. I can look at your list and you can look at mine. You can also put categories on the feeds you subscribe to and route them to other servers doing other things, through the magic of the web. And get this -- you can even subscribe to a category of my subscriptions. Lots of power there, but still it's simple.

FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, WordLand is a real editor that supports the basic writing features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. Markdown is like MP3. If you're mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It's there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you're mixing text you're mixing Markdown.

So while everyone was dancing on Twitter's dumpster fire of a social network I decided to build on something much bigger. The web. RSS and Markdown. WordPress and FeedLand.

The name Really Simple Syndication is supposed to make you smile, while most techie formats make you want to pull your hair out. RSS reads pretty well even if you know nothing about feeds and XML. I wish the browser people hadn't insisted on masking it with ugly CSS style sheets. I like lifting the hood of a car to see what's there even though I don't know what many of the things in there do. I learn by doing it.

RSS isn't ugly, it's brilliant, and shouldn't be fear-inducing, hence the promise: it's really simple.

- 2025-09-10T16:10:58Z
Today's song: When you awake.

- 2025-09-10T14:00:16Z
Podcast: A new model for blog discourse.

- 2025-09-10T14:08:55Z
Stephanie Booth, an OG blogger of great renown, now has a FeedLand blogroll on her WordPress blog. It is I believe going to make her blog feel less lonely. If anyone else wants to get one going, I have more confidence that it's pretty do-able. Screen shot.

- 2025-09-10T14:02:45Z
Heh. Yesterday I started writing a post about something Brent wrote on his blog, and then I must've gotten distracted and didn't finish it. I will now proceed to explain.

- 2025-09-10T14:03:21Z
Brent said he cares about desktop software but not about phone and tablet versions of same. I found that liberating. It's always been a pain in the ass to do something beautiful on the desktop only to have to destroy its utility by squeezing it into a space with no keyboard or pointing device that's more accurate than my finger (I have huge fingers, and a normal size phone). I found it liberating, but -- I'm working on the design of an app that should work well on either a phone or a laptop, and I've had that in mind the whole life of the product. But now I realize in a new way that it's a choice. It always was, but it didn't feel that way.

- 2025-09-09T17:38:54Z
I read something on Brent's blog the other day that changed my thinking. He said

- 2025-09-09T13:05:34Z
WWND. What Would Navalny Do? Think about it.

- 2025-09-09T12:26:14Z
The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we'll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them. It's true. Why didn't anyone see this coming? Well we did see it coming, but the Dems were too dumb to do anything about it. They're supposed to be the "woke" party, isn't it funny that they're so un-woke about something like keeping Americans fed!

Bullet points from yesterday's podcast - 2025-09-09T11:44:46Z

I asked ChatGPT to provide bullet points for yesterday's podcast. I thought this time it did a really good job. It did misunderstand some things I said, I just deleted those, below.

• Blogging lost to Twitter because Twitter had one-click subscribe.
• Subscribing in feed readers required too many steps: copying URLs, menus, pasting, confirming.
• This friction discouraged adoption compared to Twitter's simplicity.
• Feed reader developers (2002-2006) competed instead of cooperating, creating cluttered subscription buttons.
• Twitter succeeded because it eliminated that friction.
• FeedLand solves this with one-click subscribe and checkboxes next to feeds.
• Users can see others' subscriptions, similar to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook.
• Private feeds are possible but niche; public following is standard and expected.
• Emphasis on factoring UI: reduce steps, as with "Edit This Page" in 1999.
• Rebooting the blogosphere requires cooperation and a universal "follow" button.
• FeedLand's checkboxes make subscribing or filtering feeds simple.
• Introduces "Radio WordLand" release with advanced checkbox features.
• FeedLand timelines can be filtered live using checkboxes tied to feeds.
• Example feeds: Daves WordPress blog, Great Art feed from Bluesky, linkblog, Scripting News, podcast, WordCamp Canada 2025 feed.
• WordCamp Canada keynote in Ottawa, Oct 16-17, 2025.
• WordLand integrates categories for organizing feeds.
• Commitment to "Edit This Page" feature: too valuable to abandon.
• Broader goal: restore writer-friendly features Twitter removed (links, styling, no character limits).
• Criticism of Bluesky/Twitter/Threads for perpetuating character limits and stripped-down writing.
• Aim: build software that forces platforms to support the web by user demand.
• Automatic/WordPress bringing ActivityPub to blogs is "heroic" bridging web and Mastodon.
• WordPress posts in Mastodon retain titles, styling, links, and images -- better than Twitter/Bluesky.
• Believes competition will pressure other networks to drop artificial limits.
• Concludes with confidence: momentum is building, new features will roll out soon.

- 2025-09-08T21:24:20Z
Podcast: Why blogging lost to Twitter and other folk songs.

- 2025-09-08T16:37:31Z
I've been calling the next release Radio WordLand. If you know the history you'll understand why. I'll start posting screen shots soon.

- 2025-09-08T15:06:06Z
Screen shot of a post by Evan Prodromou on Masto yesterday. "You publish where you want to publish, Dave. We'll find a way to connect to you. That's the whole point." Indeed that is the whole point. I say it like this. "Interop is all that matters." If our products interop that's pure love. The rest of it is baloney. Maybe I'm not a nice guy. Not my job. We've being fucked over by "social media" for 19 years now, and the new ones who say they're open, and on the web, and decentralized, are not. The only way out of this mess is what Evan said. BTW, I sent Evan a pointer to the subscription list which is my outflow. I use OPML for the list and RSS for the feeds. That's where you will find my writing.

- 2025-09-08T15:17:45Z
I watched the movie Seven last night, and I can't stop thinking about it. It got a shitty review in the NYT, which usually means I won't bother with something, but this time I decided to give it a try. The reviewer, Janet Maislin, didn't like the acting of Brad Pitt. I thought Pitt was an unlikeable jerk, but I also thought that was the role, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't care. I also couldn't figure out what city it was. It wasn't NY, but Maislin says it was. Usually in a movie set in NY, I recognize many of the locations. There are only a few places movies are shot in the city. But again, I didn't care. What keeps me thinking about it is the story. I'm not going to spoil it. Don't read any reviews before watching it, they pretty much all get in the way of the storytelling.

- 2025-09-08T14:11:55Z
How to be part of the rebooted blogosphere.

- 2025-09-07T14:53:42Z
Two videos every US resident should watch to prepare for what might be coming. 1. The Lives of Others. A drama set in the eastern part of post-war Germany before the wall came down. People lived their lives, but their relationship with the government and the military would seem very strange to an American of 2025, But more of this is definitely what's on the way, and the technology for watching what you do is much better now, and our neighbors aren't any different, which is what the Germans depended on. 2. The Handmaid's Tale. Same kind of police state as in Lives of Others with a Christian twist. Everyone is a member of a caste. Most women are infertile since some unspecified disaster, and the ones who can reproduce exist only to reproduce. There are women who clean the house, and do a few other things. There are certainly other books, movies and series worth tuning into, but these are the ones I recommend now. Handmaid's Tale is also a book, which I have read, but the show on Hulu goes into more detail.

- 2025-09-07T17:15:37Z
New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook into FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. There's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the few weeks.

- 2025-09-07T17:21:26Z
Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this.

New version of FeedLand - 2025-09-06T13:22:04Z

There's a new version of FeedLand, v0.7.0.

Here's the thread where we discussed the testing of the new release. It worked everywhere we installed it, so it seems fair to open it up to people running their own FeedLand instances.

The only features it adds are ones needed to use it with the new version of WordLand, coming soon now.

But if you have the time, it requires an update to the database, so it's not the usual thing. It explains at the beginning of the thread what the change is to the database.

Here are the instructions for doing the upgrade.

If you're installing a new instance, the instructions are the same as always.

If you have trouble, post a note on the thread.

Thanks to Scott Hanson for validating the new version. It's always important to have someone to check my work.

About feedland.org - 2025-09-06T12:24:34Z

Yesterday's note on scripting.com about feedland.org was not the whole story. In the end I thought it made more sense to start the database over from the start.

There were a few users who subscribed to feeds that were constantly updating, and they never came back to use FeedLand. So as soon as I started it back up it started loading new items at a very high rate, and after a couple of hours it was still going. There aren't that many people using feedland.org, so I thought the best thing to do is to start over and hopefully people will figure out how to resubscribe to the feeds they want to follow.

Then I felt that people might be able to use a few tips on how to get going again, so that's what this post is about.

Sign off and on

First thing you should do is sign off and sign back on.

You will still have the credentials in your browser, but the server doesn't know about them, so when you try to do something that requires you being logged in it will fail. But if you sign off and on again, that will take care of that problem.

To sign off, choose the command in the system menu at the right end of the menubar.

Once you're signed off the only option will be to sign back on. :-)

Screen shot.

Restore subscription list

How to restore from a backup of your subscription list.

From the first menu, choose Subscribe/From an OPML File.

Here's a screen shot.

Questions?

I started a thread on the support site for questions.

- 2025-09-05T14:57:20Z
I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. The server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-)

- 2025-09-04T14:14:46Z
BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).

- 2025-09-04T14:22:56Z
Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be of an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, may affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have low regard for non-professional people writing on the web.

- 2025-09-04T14:48:57Z
ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don't do that, and made a couple of suggestions which didn't seem to make sense based on what ChatGPT had told me. So I tried what they suggested and it worked, and went back to ChatGPT and asked what it thought, and it said yes of course that worked, and would you like me to show you how to do it even better. I guess it takes a path and never goes back to see if there isn't a better one. We've been through this before. Anyway, always be circumspect about it's advice, it's not just hallucinations you need to watch for. That said, with help from both ChatGPT and Digital Ocean, I now have a better setup, and it should run without the problem we hit yesterday.

- 2025-09-04T15:27:13Z
AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.

- 2025-09-03T17:20:39Z
Podcast: Last chance for the open web.

#rss