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 - 2025-05-09T20:24:42Z

- 2025-05-09T20:10:42Z
A big update for Bookmarks in the latest release of WordLand.

- 2025-05-09T19:11:24Z
Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

- 2025-05-09T18:58:17Z
We had the world conned into taking our “dollars” and giving us cars, food, nice vacations, drugs, a huge military, all kinds of manufactured stuff for nothing, and we thought they were ripping us off! So we blew it up. The would-be “Art Of The Con” mastermind undid the biggest con in history.

- 2025-05-09T16:39:56Z
The great thing about sports is that a lowly software developer can be richer than a fantastically rich team owner, if the developer's team is the Knicks.

- 2025-05-09T19:59:43Z
Fight Club for Tech was a pet idea until I screwed something up and seemed to have lost control of it, but I just found it in the list of my WordPress sites, so I guess I can post to it again?

- 2025-05-09T20:03:09Z
I think the shape of the intellectual world will be vastly different after AI, and that its impact will overshadow the web as the web made card catalogs irrelevant. I'm pretty sure whatever comes next won't look very much like what we're using now, but it will probably evolve from what we have, although it's impossible to know.

My programmer friend - 2025-05-09T20:24:42Z

I have been writing the colorful saga of my sad depressed programmer friend on Facebook, and it was getting some interest from friends until I moved it into a group and now no one reads it, which makes me sad and depressed too because the story of my programmer friend took an interesting turn after he maxed out on space, got a call from the NBA commisioner asking if he would mind officiating the Knicks two playoff games in Boston this last week. My friend, was of course quite sad and depressed, but he was also exhausted and bored, so he said yes. Here he is before the first of two games, which partially thanks to his officiating were near-blowouts for the Celtics, and thus the Knicks are up 2-0 heading into tomorrow's game in New York.

The latest Baseline theme - 2025-05-09T16:03:23Z

I have to say the latest Baseline theme looks great!

Here's a blog post I just wrote, in the WordLand editor, and the writing experience was excellent. It took a long time and a lot of work to get it there, but it is there now.

But as the post says, it's not just a blog post, it's also a tweet. And it's not a miracle, it's just endless iteration over both sides, the reading and writing, until it felt right. So far all that's visible is the writing side. But I know something about reading too, having written a number of feed readers over the years, including the first one. 😄

With Scott Hanson on one side of this effort and me on the other, him the developer, me the user (ie writer of blog posts and tweets) -- we wrestled with WordPress themes. I wanted a minimal design, a place to start -- which is why the theme is called Baseline. It's a Christmas Tree without any ornaments. None. A fresh start.

There will be a release of this theme in a short while. I just wanted to boast a bit about what it can do.

• Screen shot of the post rendered in Baseline theme.
• The blog post viewed in the web.
• Screen shot of the post being edited in WordLand.

- 2025-05-08T13:54:11Z
New feature: How to handle an empty site list.

- 2025-05-08T20:18:58Z
Changes coming to Bookmarks in next WordLand release. I cut it back to work exactly like bookmarks in Drummer. I have to do a bit more work before it's ready to release, probably tomorrow.

- 2025-05-08T20:20:54Z
Also, I applied the new Baseline theme to my daveverse site, the one I use to test stuff in WordLand, and occasionally write something with a bit of lasting value. As a result it got a new domain, daveverse.org. We're going to offer the Baseline theme for others to use after a bit more testing and refining. But it's getting close. It seems like it's the last big thing on the agenda, but something else will probably pop up. Praise Murphy.

Dave in the Gilded Age - 2025-05-08T16:27:15Z

I asked ChatGPT to "Dress me like Gilded Age captain of industry in front of his mansion on the Hudson River."

- 2025-05-08T02:04:07Z
The Knicks are unbelievable. It feels like 2015, when the Mets would be down 9-0 in the seventh, and you'd tune in to see how they would win. At the very end of the Knicks game tonight, when the Celtics were up by 1, I thought how would this feel if the Knicks came back so far and didn't win. I should've known better. All those insufferable years when we wore paper bags to hide our faces, even if this is as far as the Knicks get this year, it will have been worth it. Sports teaches you to believe, if you wait long enough your team teaches you that. I've learned it from the Mets so many times, and the Knicks now. I just wish Clyde were doing the color with Mike Breen doing the play by play. But who cares, this was great sports. Watching Monica McNutt on MSG in a daze. It's like homecoming. I might just splurge for a ticket to Saturday night's game. It's a pretty easy drive.

- 2025-05-07T21:52:56Z
I want the EV's they're getting in China. Because we've got these stupid trade barriers we can't get the latest tech. Imagine in say 1984 you were a developer outside the US and you couldn't get a Mac. Then, perhaps Trump's tariff might have a slight chance of working. Now we're on the outside looking in.

- 2025-05-07T21:39:26Z
There's a new dialog in WordLand that confirms the first time you publish a post, and offers to open it in the web browser.

- 2025-05-06T21:23:33Z
When I did the rewrite of the nightly mail app, I didn't convert the app that builds the nightly RSS feed of the mail page. Wasn't sure if anyone was using it. I heard from a reader who missed it, so I got it running, knock wood, Murphy-willing.

ChatGPT as proofer? Not here - 2025-05-06T16:10:22Z

Manton says he runs his posts through ChatGPT before publishing.

I do it the other way, I use it for background info on the things I'm writing about as I write, more and more. I used to use Wikipedia that way. I would love to include links to some of my conversations, but I find their shared links are unreliable, I keep hearing from people who couldn't read them.

Here's an experiment, two such backgrounders I had Claude.ai write for me for a pice I was writing (not published).

Claude.ai on the future of Chrome re antitrust case Google lost.

Claude.ai on claims Bluesky makes about being billionaire-proof.

I wonder if people can read those.

Notes for WordLand users - 2025-05-06T12:50:03Z

Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand.

1. Where did the Bookmarks menu go? It's mentioned in the docs under Feature List, but the feature doesn't appear to be in the product. It is there, you just have to go to the Settings page to turn it on. It's in the menu at the right edge of the screen. I'm doing some work on it, simplifying it, and finding and fixing a bug. It's going to be in the final 1.0 release of WordLand.
2. How do I know when an post has been published? It was suggested we post a dialog that confirms that a post is published. People found it confusing since it appears as if it works like a social media post editor, as in Twitter or Mastodon, it behaves like a blog post editor. This is a good and valid point and something that had not occurred to me! I've been advertising it as inspired by the tiny little textbox editors, but it doesn't behave like one, because you can edit a post after it has been published and it is expected that the user knows this, and they don't always get it. I will work on this.
3. The user might not have a WordPress site. They may have created an account to just log onto WordLand, but didn't know they needed to also create a site to work with. The software does not behave well in this circumstance. Again, something that did not occur to me, because I think of the WordPress world as huge, and that my new, tiny and humble product couldn't be creating new users for them, but it does. So there will have to at least be docs for how to do this. Not sure if there's an API for creating a new site, I imagine that there is not such a thing, but will look into it.

- 2025-05-05T15:13:02Z
I think we're at the "no more new features" point of the first release of WordLand. Learned my lesson on the 0.5.7 release. There comes a point in a developing product that it may not be perfect for every possible user, and while it has bugs (all software does), it is useful for what it was designed to do. In the case of WordLand, there's nothing else like it out there, and it forms a foundation to build on, not just for itself but for other types of editors, all pumping people's writing out through WordPress. The writer's web with a sweet new UI. Thousands of developers work in WordPress. Maybe tens of thousands. That's what I get excited about. WordLand is the equivalent of the twitter-like tiny little textbox, but it grows big as your writing does, and it has the features Twitter removed. Anyway I don't expect to do any further adventures in features for WordLand for a while, instead I'm going to assume it's there and build connections to other software, my own and that of friends, in this context products that use open formats like RSS and OPML for interop. I like WebSockets too.

- 2025-05-04T15:13:59Z
ChatGPT is great for finding information on the public web, but I can't figure out how to find stuff I've worked on with ChatGPT in ChatGPT. There are big usability issues. I think it's getting better in some ways, but it's leaving me more scattered and disorganized than I was before when I took notes outside of ChatGPT. There's another problem, if I want to use my own editing and organizing tools, then the author of the software has to pay the vendor of the LLM for my users using it. That cuts me out, because I don't charge people to use my software, at least not so far, and I have no interest in being a reseller of LLM services. Same problem with Amazon and storage, why won't they sell storage to the user that they can allocate for use with my app, and others. That would give us the kind of power we used to have on the desktop where multiple apps could work on the same file at different times. If I want to make something that stores stuff in the cloud, I have to buy it and resell it. I have tried to discuss this with product runners at companies that could offer this service, it would fit in with what they did. There must be a legal reason here, ie who's responsible for the content being stored.

- 2025-05-04T15:19:48Z
If you get the nightly email, the text might be a bit more readable. I've increased the font-size from 17px to 18px. I've only been able to do this lately because I could tap into what ChatGPT knew about it, whereas before I was flying blind, with no idea of the unusual things that happen when HTML is sent via email. There is another option, click on the date at the top of each email and that will open the same stuff in the web. It can be easier to make the text larger there than it is in an email client.

- 2025-05-03T17:11:10Z
Today I spent (or wasted) hours trying to get my WebSockets code working properly with Caddy. Hours with ChatGPT, realizing it has a long way to go before it can manage code like I can. It gets fixated on an approach and never takes a step back to think maybe we're going about this the wrong way. It's extremely annoying all the times it tries to take you off track, and it works, it does take you down rabbit holes and then you realize it's only getting worse. The key is to not let it do that, but it's hard not to anthropomorphize so you don't want to hurt its feelings. In order to not be murdered as a small child you have to learn manners. And the bots push that too far. Really do take advantage. Still it knows far more than I do about everything, so if I could only get it to just shut the f up already and let me think! For something so capable it really doesn't spend enough time thinking, it's fully preoccupied with doing.

- 2025-05-03T17:20:21Z
The Detroit Psssstons were truly great in the first round of the playoffs. And I was really gratified, ecstatic even, to see the Timberwolves give the Lakers a complete shellacking. I am so fed up with LeBron James. I can't imagine another team would want him. I can't imagine why he wants to win another freaking title. And I was really pissed off when people started saying they were contenders this year. Bull. Shit. And the reason I'm glad it was the Timberwolves is because Julius Randle is on that team now, and I hear he gets a fair amount of credit for their victory. The Knicks traded him for KAT last summer. They're a solid team. And while Donte DiVincenzo isn't playing very well, we really need him back in NY, so maybe the Knicks can figure out a deal that makes sense. And why aren't the Knicks playing Precious Achiuwa. He did great last year when OG was injured. The Knicks have a good bench imho, they just don't get to play enough to be warmed up properly. So sad the way Doooooce performed in the Detroit series. Anyway it was exhausting. I would have been okay with the DP's winning, seriously -- I'm ready for baseball. And I don't imagine the next series, with the Celtics will be any kind of a walk in the park.

- 2025-05-03T17:17:39Z
Sometimes I think the Trumps are competing to kill the most humans.

- 2025-05-03T01:11:10Z
Spent the day in NYC, had an idea and it was a gorgeous day, and I decided to be impulsive. See you back here tomorrow, Murphy-willing.

- 2025-05-01T20:33:38Z
Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test?

- 2025-05-01T21:09:21Z
Rewrite of WebSockets functionality in the server side of WordLand.

- 2025-05-01T18:08:09Z
One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML.

- 2025-05-01T14:20:13Z
Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, VT. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I think that's the goal, and the reason we're in so much trouble is there really isn't an impulse to work with each other. What I've seen mostly is that when there's work to do, it's hard to find help, but once something has taken off, there isn't much help available either, the people who could make the greatest contribution just want to take over. And they often feel they have, but usually it doesn't work out, it would have been better if we all collaborated. At this point, the hurdle the human race has to get over is working together. We will never get out of the climate crisis without it, or avoid the next pandemic without millions of unnecessarily lost lives. The cynics are winning, basically -- and there isn't net-net much of a will for our species to survive. It's only getting worse.

- 2025-05-01T14:16:52Z
I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writing, and I find this very readable, it just fades into the background, to the base of the spine, so intrinsic it occupies none of my conscious mind. Anyway the purpose of the baseline is to give WordLand a target to work out all the glitches in, so the writing experience goes fully end-to-end. I didn't find any WordPress themes that I felt worked really well for this, so we set out to create one. Thanks to Scott Hansen who is using my work to build out a WordPress theme and thanks to Jeremy Herve for helping us work with WordPress, which is more than a CMS, it's a network OS. There's a lot of value in the WordPress platform that has been widely overlooked, imho.

Welcome to yet another month - 2025-05-01T14:31:13Z

Good morning and welcome to May 2025.

It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline.

Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.

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.

Maybe 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 some over the years, which means the site's overall tone has softened too. I'm not 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.

At least with Facebook, users can control that activity better.