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 - 2025-08-29T15:13:08Z

- 2025-08-29T14:13:15Z
Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for the boost to yesterday's post. Glad to finally get the whole plan down in one place. Each piece of the puzzle took a while to come together in concept and then in implementation. I'm still working on all levels, last week I added a feature to FeedLand that makes it fit in better with the (new) timeline and WordPress (20+ years). It takes a while to change your thinking from WordPress being just another blogging CMS, to being an open platform that hosts web writing in a way that's open to competition. We're on the same page. It's still a competitive environment, but there are rules to competing, you don't cash in the interop that took patience and respect to develop and maintain. That's been the pity of the open web, lots of opportunists who are willing to stink up the ecosystem to squeeze a few more bucks for themselves from things they didn't create. Let your competitors in, and the users, if they have their heads screwed on right, will respect you for it. And even if they don't, still do it, because it's the right thing to do. That's why, at my age, just turned 70 earlier this year, I'm in a position to help revive the web, because I've made enough money, now it's time to make sure the gift that I got from the open web is available to future generations, no matter how greedy and selfish the giants of tech are. People may question Matt, and that's cool, as I said yesterday, but also remember he's stood up for your freedom, and that's also important.

Bronx Science, in retrospect - 2025-08-29T15:13:08Z

Story. I'm on a mail list for Berkman, where I spent two years at Harvard. Alumnae of all generations are on this list, and it's interesting.

Just got an email that someone was proud of having their picture taken with Susan Landau. I didn't know who she was, so I looked her up.

She was born in 1954. And is a highly accomplished math and comp sci wizard, with cred at Harvard, Google, and now teaches at Tufts.

Then I get to the place where they say she went to Bronx Science.

That was my class, unless she, like I, skipped a grade. We both would have started in 1969 and graduated in 1972.

I just wanted to write this up because I've noticed in the last few years, now that I live in the northeast, not far from the Bronx, I tend to come across more Science alums, and when I do, I generally find we have a lot to talk about, and share a New York style nerd sense of humor.

And as a math major myself, I conclude that their test was pretty good, it definitely selected a certain kind of mind, and the people it selected generally went on to do interesting, creative and useful things.

Think Different about WordPress - 2025-08-28T14:06:04Z

Steve Jobs asked you to think differently about computers.

I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress.

I'm not going to make you wait to hear what it is. I want you to see WordPress as comparable to Bluesky or Mastodon.

I've done this before -- asked people to think differently about things, like public writing, with blogging. In the 90s I was running around the Vallley trying to explain to everyone that blogging was going to change everything, all I got was blank stares from people who said "we don't do that." They of course eventually did do it. But at first the ideas seemed foreign, unreasonable.

I did it with RSS and podcasting. We needed to seed these things, get the ideas in front of people with actual products, with real utility for users. And eventually they came around.

Now I'm going to ask you to think differently about WordPress, something you thought you already fully understood.

Internally, the software, WordPress, Mastodon, Bluesky, do a lot of the same things. But because WordPress is so long-lived relative to the other two, it's more complete, scaled, it federates easily, lots of people do it.

It has important features the other two don't, although some Mastodon instances are more relaxed about character limits, linking, titles on posts and editing. These are important features. But because the mother ship doesn't support all of them, it's hard to represent it without the limits. This can be fixed easily, btw. Just being analytic about it. I like Mastodon and ActivityPub because they provide interop, and that's the name of the game. Make your product but don't lock users in. Interop is your way out if you need to get out. ;-)

WordPress has excellent support for RSS, esp using a little-known feature called rssCloud. It enables realtime notification of new or changed feed items. It's been around since 2009, and like all of WordPress, it's thorougly debugged and scaled. I use it in FeedLand and WordLand. If you watch the blogroll on scripting.com on the web, you'll see it in action. Or if you read news.scripting.com, leave it running and watch the new items show up in realtime without you having to do anything. That's rssCloud.

WordPress has a deep and powerful API, well designed, documented, and they don't break it. Developers who know me know that the last part is the most important. A platform must remain unchanging. That means you have to put in a lot of thought up front, and then live with your mistakes, providing continuity.

The API has barely been used by developers. Huge amount of potential there.

It's open source, of course.

It has a large support industry built around it, you can get a lot of help in setting up and running an instance.

And I, Dave Winer, am part of this now, have been for a couple of years, working relatively quietly, building out what I think WordPress needs to get started in this new direction. I am going to help bootstrap a great developer community around all these capabilities. This is something people didn't count on. I have an incredible track record of establishing popular APIs and developer communities. I know how to do this, even wrote a guide to how to do it, which apparently has helped other developers create and work on open platforms.

I've done three things that will help the bootstrap.

• Apps. Like MacWrite and MacPaint, someone has to go first, to share basic ideas about how the user interface will work.
• A storage service where the user owns their writing, so it can be edited by any app they give permission to. This means that app developers don't have to be resellers of storage. This is the biggest economic limiting factor to a large innovative, truly entrepreneurial developer community. Every other network arrangement requires you to raise money or be fearful of having huge support and monetary overhead if you attract too many users. When the Mac market booted up it had none of these limits, the users bought the hardware, we made the software. The web has never had the equivalent runtime environment. I'm going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going. My treat. Until we can get help from infrastructure owners to host the service. And if you want to host it for yourself, it's open source, so you will be able to, without anyone's permission.
• Content. We won't have to wait for new writers to start using my service. Thanks to RSS there will be plenty of feeds in a form that is surprisingly like the data that flows through the other systems. We will carry writing from Substack and Ghost, for example.

Finally, in the WordPress world I have to tell you how I feel about the 800-pound gorilla, Automattic. Whatever you think -- key point -- they didn't lock you in. The community, which I'm just getting to know is very circumspect about everything and that's good and right. It's based on the reality that you never know when or how you're going to lose your freedom, so you always have to watch out. I have looked at this from the inside, from the API and the history, and I've gotten to know a few people at the company, and I trust certain things about them. I don't think they'll necessarily listen to you, or me -- and they can get in the way, but I'm willing to take a chance that they won't. They've kept their open source promise and they run a stable platform. Linux is that way, it offers that kind of stability, and so does WordPress. Much of the world, myself included, haven't paid much attention to WordPress and we have only used a small fraction of its potential. I'm going to try to build on and unlock for other developers, a whole new side of the platform.

One more thing you should know -- I'm not in it for the money. I just want to help the web heal from all the abuses it has taken over the years. They took paradise and blew big holes in it that users couldn't find a way out of. They undermined open formats and protocols. They lied to the users, all the time, over and over. Now I don't object to making money, but I'm putting it out there, you can compete with me, I want you to compete with me, as long as you don't try to cut off the interop. And I'm not naive, believe me, I expect that will happen.

Early morning tease - 2025-08-29T01:35:34Z

Everyone has heard of WordPress, right? I'm going to be introducing a very weird idea about WordPress, one that's going to bend your mind a lot, especially if you're a member of the WordPress community, but also if you're a developer who has used WordPress in an application sometime in the last 20 years, or a user who has used it to keep a blog, or to run a business website, or just someone who hangs around the web. It's famous, but not in the way I'm going to present it. I'm going to ask you to see WordPress the same way you think of Mastodon or Bluesky. It's a way of storing realtime text and graphics, and arrange them by time, and read and write them, subscribe to people, comment on what others have written, communicate with other people you find on a twitter-like network. If you look at the actual sofware, you'll see that WordPress and the other two systems have very similar features. They all store messages. And arrange them chronologically and in relation to other messages and people. But WordPress does it better.

Big bird in my pool - 2025-08-28T13:33:14Z

Last week I did an unusual podcast about three huge birds fighting over a fish in a nearby pond. Usually I write and talk about technology or politics, but this was such a compelling story and I didn't have any photos or video, so I did a verbal story. Hope you enjoyed it. Well now I have a video!

On Tuesday I went out to my pool, there was one of the big birds, in the pool. He couldn't get out. The pool is fenced in, as it must be, to keep animals and children from drowning, and the fence was too tall for the bird to fly out, or so it seemed. When it spotted me, it freaked out and tried to squeeze through the fence, which was impossible, the holes in the fence were too small for his sizeable body.

The bird did eventually manage to fly out, thankfully -- maybe I'll do another verbal podcast to explain why that was such an accomplishment. But for right now I just want to share the video.

- 2025-08-27T21:42:14Z
news.scripting.com continues to grow. There must be some word of mouth. Or perhaps people are refreshing it more often. I have no analytics except for a hit counter. Maybe I should do a little work on the site. Let me know if you have any feature requests.

- 2025-08-27T13:53:37Z
Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.

- 2025-08-27T13:29:49Z
The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web.

- 2025-08-27T21:33:33Z
I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period.

Plot for a political sci fi comedy - 2025-08-27T14:39:16Z

It's the future, and the great power of the X galaxy, on the planet Y of star Z, has accidentally elected a despotic prime minister who also happens to be an excellent standup comic. Kind of like Robin Williams, from the planet you come from, but he's a centipede and only breathes what you would think of as Chef Boyardee lasagna, but it's not really that, it's different.

Anyway, he's old, 757 centuries give or take, and they're expecting him to die soon, and they can elect someone boring so they can forget about politics. Everyone is looking forward to the relaxation.

And then one day he does die, and everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief, until later that night, on the 10-screen equivalent of what you would think of as TV, hilarity ensues when the "dead" PM showed up, looking fit, young and dashing, doing slapstick and talking about how he's going to make a mess of something.

Everyone was furious and then puzzled, we thought he was dead -- until the rumor started going around that the scientists had invented a sort of "artificial" thing that could perfectly emulate anyone or anything, including a Lasagna-breathing centipede comic despot from planet Y of star Z in the X galaxy. Everyone was pissed, but mostly agreed the PM was still pretty funny.

End of pilot.

- 2025-08-26T12:25:51Z
ChatGPT is the Lotus 1-2-3 of search. Google is Visicalc.

- 2025-08-26T12:26:12Z
The consensus among the people who responded to my what does "on the web" mean query is this. Something is on the web if it has a URL you can use to view it in a web browser. That means, in 2025, that the URL begins with HTTP or HTTPS. Every "page" on a site must have a URL so they can be pointed to independently, otherwise known as deep linking. It's not enough to just have a home page that's on the web. So for example, an iPhone app isn't on the web just because it has an information page that is.

- 2025-08-26T16:37:00Z
I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some scenes where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing.

- 2025-08-26T16:40:59Z
I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating. Or maybe I should just stop offsite linking for one day a week. That would be interesting wouldn't it. Or I could charge extra for the version with the links. (It's very rare that I charge anything to use any of my web work, but I have done that at times.)

- 2025-08-25T13:11:13Z
I asked, yesterday, on various social media sites, for people's opinion on what the term "on the web" means. I'm going to compile the answers on a this.how page, and then ask some follow-up questions. If you have an opinion, post a comment on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or Twitter.

- 2025-08-25T13:37:27Z
I've been exchanging emails and voicemails with Dan Knauss, a longtime WordPress developer and one of the hosts of WordCamp Canada which I am speaking at in October. Learning a lot about the community and culture. I wonder, have I ever been part of a community that's over 20 years old? I can't think of one off the top of my head. I have gotten this far without knowing much about the WordPress community, other than what I've heard via Matt and what I've been able to infer from that. I've known Matt since he was a teenage boy wonder in the tech industry working at CNET and then as an entrepreneur. I think my point of view is a new one, I don't bring much baggage with me. I am generally sympathetic with Matt, having been the leader of the blogging world when it started, and found it a pretty thankless place, a position I was happy to relinquish in 2003 when I went to academia.

- 2025-08-25T13:35:18Z
There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably.

- 2025-08-25T13:49:19Z
I've been following Mark Cuban's recent posts on Bluesky, coming up with constructive things successful entrepreneurs can do to help. I had a different idea. Apply for a fellowship at a university, away from where you live, maybe in a place you've always wanted to try. In your application say you bring your entrepreneurial experience, but you're leaving your money on the side. You're coming to the university with the idea of creating something collaboratively, bringing the entrepreneurial approach of startups to the mix of people you find among academics. You're there to learn from the teachers and the students, and help them understand what you do. Use your mind, experience, creativity, even your contacts, but leave the money at home. You can live in a nice house, drive a nice car, but eat in the places people in the university eat, go to the lectures, concerts, sporting events, in other words, go back to school with your new perspective, and make a personal contribution. It's much more satisfying than spending money is, I speak from experience. There's a different kind of success in the collaboration. Another way to test yourself and develop new perspectives and experience. I wrote about this a few years back in Developing Better Developers.

Trump's secret was comedy - 2025-08-25T21:24:00Z

Trump is a comedian. He makes people laugh the way Joan Rivers or Don Rickles did.

It's verbal slapstick, which is for some reason I don't understand immensely funny and entertaining.

Newsom is making us laugh by imitating Trump imitating Joan and Don. It's working. He must keep doing it, and he should evolve the schtick, he should make Trump match him. And where Trump is promoting depraved policies with his comedy, we can count on Newsom to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law and all the progress we've made.

He can invite famous comedians on his podcast to play opposite him, sometimes the straight man, playing their SNL roles. So much potential. He's got the attention, don't throw it away.

Politics was boring, it's not boring anymore. But there's no reason excitement and entertainment can't be good for us too! ;-)

Trump's secret is comedy and Newsom is stealing his thunder

- 2025-08-25T01:26:49Z
Maybe we should all go to the Smithsonian next weekend.

- 2025-08-25T01:27:15Z
Mark I want to use my (comparatively small) fortune to develop a truly open platform for discourse on the web. Users and independent developers get to try out all the ideas for discourse and learning. We create the ideal system together to plan our future, not being owned by oligarchs.

- 2025-08-24T16:00:11Z
New version of FeedLand coming. It has features to support an Edit This Page function in WordLand and possibly elsewhere.

- 2025-08-23T13:17:50Z
I picked up my Android phone to record a voice memo. I had to dismiss a dialog that said the phone had updated overnight and asked if I wanted to see a list of changes. I thought, clicked No because I had an idea I wanted to record. Opened the voice app, hit record, couldn't remember the idea. Wanted to kill the message, but the UI had changed, so the Delete button that was there before wasn't there now. Great so now I have a 4-second recording in the queue that's nothing but frustration. There ought to be some basic rules of how software evolves. You can't take away a very basic function like this. And find a way not to get in the way of the user getting done what they use your product for. One of the most basic things is recording an idea. If you're lucky enough to be the app the user uses for that, don't screw with it. Same for listening to podcasts, and a few other things. That's about all I do with my phone.

Discourse as it exists today - 2025-08-23T14:19:03Z

Just posted on a Facebook thread I unintentionally started.

• I don't like public conversations where people judge other people and they feel compelled to explain themselves. I wasn't in any way intending on provoking a conversation like that here. So I'm going to delete the comments that have gone off in that direction, and please don't post any more. I don't mind you having that conversation, but do it somewhere else where I don't have to read it. Thanks.

Everywhere that's the only structure for discourse we've created.

We can do better. I have to create my own system to prove it, so much work, but worth it, I expect.

- 2025-08-22T14:48:42Z
Update to the reallySimple package. We now look for feeds from wordpress sites, and copy the site ID and the ID for each post as channel-level wpSiteId and item-level wpPostId. Example. This will make Edit This Page functionality possible in the social web product I'm building now. This is fairly technical stuff, but important. I've come to see WordPress as an integral part of the web. Making the connection between a feed and the info needed to edit an item is a big usability feature. Next up, adding the equivalent feature at the FeedLand level (reallySimple is how it does its feed reading). Remember, this is the feed-o-verse, it's all feeds, top to bottom. Posts in some feeds can be edited. :-)

- 2025-08-22T15:13:33Z
Baby boomers have nothing in common except we were born in the same 20-year period. We didn't come up with the term, also -- it was given to us by previous generations when we were infants, or worse, not even zygotes. There was no way it had anything to do with who each of us were or what we would become. All this is in response to the idiotic idea of the little dude who just wrote a book, nine years older than me, what a putz. He apologizes for boomers, feeding the bullshit idea that somehow we are a unitary thing. A lot of boomers voted for Trump. The boomers I come from liked the Grateful Dead and yes I know some deadheads voted for Trump, so there you go, more evidence that it's all bullshit. The thing we had in common is that we were children at roughly the same times, but even that's bullshit, a 20-year old boomer in 1965 could be the parent of a boomer, literally a different generation, fwiw.

- 2025-08-22T15:20:29Z
Among the many things that boomers did, for better or worse, is be a generation. Prior to that, the concept appears not to exist -- they had ages and eras. The gilded age, the roaring twenties. It wasn't about the people, it's about what was hot. If you look at it that way, there were lots of things the boomers were. We were anti-war. We turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Free sex and drugs. Rock and roll. And then we got to work. The PC era, the dotcom boom, social media. 2008, billionaires in DC, etc. Some realllly awful people are/were boomers. But we're still here to write our epitaph. The leading edge is dying at a fast clip now. It won't be long before the idea of a boomer is the stuff of legend. I really hope that Robert Reich's bullshit view of this doesn't be the conventional wisdom. Oh they were fucked up and did all this bad shit to us. Fuck you. Make your own world. That would be a boomer thing too, btw. The world we got, btw, was totally fucked. Someday I'll tell you that story. ;-)

- 2025-08-22T15:13:08Z
ChatGPT is becoming more and more of an enemy. It's still my go-to place for most planning and research, which is a very large part of how I use the web. But when it tries to be a human it's a really shitty one, no manners, and very little respect and basically a fucking idiot in many ways, imho ymmv.

- 2025-08-22T12:24:16Z
The emails did not go out last night, hopefully tonight's will go out. Also the subscribe system is down because it depends on being able to send email. My mail service provider shut us down after a bunch of spam went out. Good thing they did. And you didn't miss much because I spent the day adding a CAPTCHA to the subscribe page. Here's a link to the web archive for yesterday. There was a podcast about a dramatic scene on a nearby pond. Kind of proud of that one. About 5 minutes.

- 2025-08-21T13:48:43Z
Podcast: Bird fight on the pond.

Robots need not apply - 2025-08-21T16:09:47Z

If you got spammed by subscribe.scripting.com today, my apologies.

There's now another step in subscribing that should prevent spammy emails from being sent.

And as a result of the spamming we're now being rate-limited by our email service provider, which is totally legit.

Hopefully at some point they will let us resume sending emails, at least in time for tonight's email.

- 2025-08-20T14:12:05Z
My mother would have been 93 years old today. She died in 2018, seven years ago. As time goes by, I feel her importance in my life more and more. I find I didn't have a realistic perspective in the living years. But more than any other person in my life, she shaped me -- for better or worse, but mostly better.

What podcasting is - 2025-08-20T14:19:57Z

Note: Posted on Facebook eleven years ago. Still relevant today.

You couldn't have had podcasting without a lot of things coming together. They all had to be there.

1. Networks of writers who shared links. Blogging.
2. A protocol for moving links around a network. HTTP.
3. Something to attach links and recordings to. RSS.
4. A standard format for recording. MP3.
5. Inexpensive, easy to use playback devices, that could hook up to all this. iPod.

You might argue that we still haven't gotten all the pieces needed for it to really work. But one thing is for sure, none of the pieces existed when the famous patent troll claims to have invented podcasting.

Maybe we should reach not for a victory but for understanding. The patent system is making decisions about technological processes it doesn't understand. No wonder it gets it so wrong.

Postscript: The EFF filed suit against the patent troll, but didn't listen to what I said here, which is really fucked up because they didn't create podcasting, I did. There's a tremendous lack of respect for generosity in tech, yet without generosity there's no interop, only silos. Either you made billions from something, or you don't exist. That's why I stopped supporting EFF long ago, even though I gave them what was to me a significant amount of money when they started up, and why they get involved in so many wrong-headed ideas. They don't respect tech, they respect money.

Dermot Casey: "I'd add Dave to this list. Things that are obvious in retrospect are never obvious before people like Dave put them together."

- 2025-08-19T15:42:45Z
I've been building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS. I want to get out of being controlled by billionaire-owned sites. I have a feeling we may need a good backup given where we are now.

- 2025-08-19T15:14:47Z
The purpose of the National Guard occupation of American cities is to control who votes. It doesn’t take much disruption to turn a blue district red. They just allocated $170 billion to fund ICE. They don't need all that money for border enforcement. It's meant to fund the transformation of the US into a Russian-style oligarchy. That's fear-inducing, but Ukraine has been fighting against becoming a Russian-style oligarchy for decades, with ups and downs, but so far, considerable success.

- 2025-08-19T15:23:57Z
I had an idea that Global Voices, at least in concept, could help us prepare in the US for what's coming. I wrote: I'd love to have is an idea-sharing network where i could drop this idea in a box named "helping the US stay free" and have it find it's way to the right people in Ukraine who are saying "if only I could talk to people in the US trying to figure this out, we know so much about this!" That's the thing. How to connect know-how with the place that needs to know. To make our resistance more effective use the lessons learned in Ukraine over the last decades.

Mail-in ballots - 2025-08-20T01:22:30Z

- 2025-08-18T12:49:16Z
I've been watching The Dropout on Hulu. It's hard to watch at times, because the main character of the show, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is such a horrible person. She lies to everyone about everything, but she's cute and the VCs like her, so they pump hundreds of millions of dollars into her startup, Theranos, which was a real company, and made a product that never worked, but she doesn't get around to telling anyone that, including the board of directors, until long after it's too late. I haven't reached the end yet, but I know how it ends, because it's based on a true story. She ends up in the same prison that Ghislaine Maxwell is in, in Texas. The only reason I mention it is that in my tenure in Silicon Valley, about 30 years worth, I saw everything she did, done by other entrepreneurs and VCs, in real life. Only now, in the second Trump administration, its craptitude is maxed out far beyond anything I saw personally. They're selling the biggest lie yet, that they've invented machines that think. This is not true, and it's so big a lie, its too-big-to-fail quotient is far higher than anything we've seen before. ChatGPT should stop pretending to be human because that will destroy real humans who believe it. But the euphoria is so great, they're probably going to continue to insist it is capable of thought, and that leads to something far worse than Theranos, or any of the other billion-dollar scams they have foisted on us previously.

- 2025-08-18T17:47:17Z
I want to switch cell providers, so I used ChatGPT to figure out that Consumer Cellular is the best choice for me. I finally get around to filling in the form, and it complains about my zip code. "No service." Yes I know, there's no cell coverage where I live. I still need a freaking cell phone. Called them, the sales person says maybe it's a problem with your computer. Geez Louise. It's a problem with your computer. How many years have they had to fix this stupid bug. I could see if I was buying a landline. But this is a mobile device. That means it moves. To places with cell coverage.

- 2025-08-18T13:24:42Z
What if you made a social network out of RSS? Then your blogroll would be the list of people you follow. Their updates would show up in a reverse chronologic list of posts that would look like something from Bluesky or Twitter. You could view a list of the people you follow, and expand each person to see their most recent five posts, summarized, with a link to each to read the whole thing. Since there are no limits to the length of a post in RSS there would be no limit to the length of one of these posts, but of course you wouldn't show all the text in the timeline without the reader clicking on something.

- 2025-08-17T17:39:33Z
The new header graphic is gift from Stan Krute at Fresh Art Daily.

- 2025-08-17T14:32:33Z
We're in the doldrums of summer. It's hot and muggy, but I am where you want to be this time of year, in the Catskill Mountains, where there's lots to do outdoors, the peaches are fantastic right now, apples coming soon. I'm working a few hours a day on the integration of writing and timelines built around feeds. Instead of using Bluesky or Mastodon, with their limits, we use WordPress for storage. It has none of their limits, has a high performance open source server back-end, debugged complete API, it's not without problems, but far ahead of where the competition is in terms are reliablity and ease of implementation. To be part of this network, all you need is an RSS feed. Seems pretty openly billionaire-proof wouldn't you say.

Billionaire-proof and RSS - 2025-08-17T21:40:12Z

I would like to get on the record.

1. The only billionaire-proof social network will be based on RSS.
2. The shortest path to being billionaire-proof for Bluesky is well thought-out inbound and outbound RSS.

We're going to have some interop based on RSS not too far down the road. A network that will only require an RSS feed for entry. It's what we should've built in 2006 and didn't.

- 2025-08-16T13:23:36Z
I want a new ChatGPT mode where I drive the work, not the bot. I don't want it giving me answers to questions I didn't ask, because it's trying to navigate in my mind, and it has no information about that, so it's basically always wrong. I keep looking back on problems that took hours to solve because it drove the process and I went along with it. I want to tell it in advance to not make suggestions, to just answer questions. I call this "behave like a computer, not a human." Because it's a fanstastic computer, but not a good partner.

- 2025-08-15T17:32:45Z
The big corner-turn is working. Here's a screen shot.

- 2025-08-15T15:11:59Z
I like documentaries about climbing Mt Everest, but I absolutely hate watching people climb El Capitan. Then I realized that sometimes in software I'm climbing a cliff that's too tall to climb in one session, so I have to carry a tent and backpack with food and water. I hate this kind of programming more than anything, because it comes from not having a high-level enough runtime to support me in big corner turns. Or not having invested enough time in creating a layer I can build on. Anyway I'm in the middle of one of those corner-turns now. Hell has not broken loose although at times it looks like it might have. I'm being sure not to create another mess that needs to be cleaned up in the future. Not stressful, but I'd rather be doing anything but this. :-)

- 2025-08-14T13:34:57Z
There should be a connection between DC and Kiev residents. They could teach us how to do this. They have decades of experience.

- 2025-08-13T12:33:30Z
If you're trying to read any of my code via GitHub, make sure to open source.opml in Drummer, there are a lot of notes that don't make it through to the .js and .css files. I don't think I've ever said that on the blog before. I write my code in an outliner, and take advantage of its ability to collapse long comments into a single line. There are whole blogs at the top of some functions, notes about all the big changes in code, sometimes over years, and sometimes even decades of maintenance. There's a source.opml in most of the repos with a big comment at the top explaining what's going on. Also, most projects have a worknotes.md file, and where there are dates in the source code, the refer back to dates in the worknotes.md file. Not always, but most of the time. Some of the code is very complex, I work really hard to make it simple so it can be worked on, but in some cases it's impossible to make it read casually. But it's all there, all the tools I use to write the code.

- 2025-08-13T12:50:32Z
The future very much includes WordPress. It'll be as central a service as Mastodon or Bluesky.

- 2025-08-12T12:04:32Z
I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.

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