Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-09-05T14:57:20Z

- 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.

- 2025-09-03T15:32:01Z
I want to start reading a bunch of WordPress community blogs.

- 2025-09-02T14:54:58Z
CSS Grid where have you been all my life? Very rational, simple.

- 2025-09-02T21:56:27Z
General note: When I say RSS, I recognize that there are other feed formats, but I don't want to confuse things. The software makes all that transparent, so let's make it transparent for the users too, ok?

WordLand + FeedLand will ask... - 2025-09-02T21:55:17Z

If all the people who love RSS and make software for it, feed readers, editors, blogging software, put our heads together, we could make a great network for people to write on, that would be so exciting, it would pull a lot of interest from the silos. If momentum builds, they will eventually add RSS as an inbound and outbound format because they will want to be on this network.

We, as writers, shouldn't have to live with the compromises that come from having to make 5 versions of everything, and still you don't have a way to share a lot of the interesting stuff people write.

If we choose to work together, even just a few of us, we could make big change.

My life has a musical track - 2025-09-02T20:41:24Z

How you know you’re reallllly old. You tell Alexa to play songs by Elton John and you find yourself singing along with Crocodile Rock with tears streaming down your face. Then they play Philadelphia Freedom. Mama mia.

The thing about Crocodile Rock is that it's twice-nostalgic. He's singing about a generation-older than mine. Yet it planted in my memory connected to a period in my own life. I was a freshman at Lehman College in the Bronx, recovering from a raucous high school experience where I dropped out and moved into an apartment in the Bronx at 16 and came pretty close to losing my middle-class education-valuing upbringing. At Lehman, I was investing in myself and found out I was good at the things I thought I was no good at because the teachers were so awful. I got a good math teacher, Dr Isaacs, who treated me special because I had a good mind for math, it turns out. And thus I became a programmer when I thought I would likely go into politics before that. I still had the taste for politics, and as it turns out, writing, so I combined all of them into one, and out comes blogging and podcasting, and complicated algorithms that do simple easy to understand things.

And now Scott Knaster who has had an exciting Adjacent to Greatness career says that Philadelphia Freedom is about Billie Jean King. I did not know that!

- 2025-09-01T14:18:06Z
AI chatbots should drop the pretense of being human.

- 2025-09-01T13:09:16Z
I want my blog on the same network as my social media.

- 2025-09-01T16:29:41Z
A new kind of spam or phishing email. Appears to be a challenge by Twitter of one of my posts there as a copyright infringement, which it most definitely is not. You have to look closely at the URL it takes you to, which is on this domain. assents-x.com. Hmm at first looks legit, but look more closely.

- 2025-09-01T15:57:20Z
I've been watching a lot of baseball recently. Over the years I've developed as a programmer, and they've radically changed the way baseball is played. Pitchers used to try to pitch a complete game, but now that never happens. Sometimes they take a pitcher out in the first inning if he's pitched over say 70 pitches, because there's no point, what he's doing obviously isn't working, and he's getting close to the maximum pitches they'd let him do, esp if he's young and a hot prospect, they don't want to burn him out. I find that no matter what, after four hours of development work I start getting sloppy, and I can't think big picture as I could in the beginning of the session. I'm trying to finish things up for the day, and leave myself in a good place to pick up in the next session. And like a pitcher you have to stay focused. The phone doesn't ring for the pitcher when he's on the mound, that's why programmers, good ones, who are performing at or near their limit of ability to focus, so totally don't welcome interruptions.

- 2025-09-01T22:24:00Z
A motto for WordLand. "All the tools you need right where you write."

#rss