Dave Winer

  • It seems like HTTP requests these days, generally, don’t come with a referer header? Links and ideas on my blog.

  • I asked ChatGPT how I used OPML to share lists of feeds. The story it came back with is amazing. I asked for the list in OPML. I opened it in Drummer.

  • Back in the 1970s when SQL was new, it was touted as an English-like database language. Now with ChatGPT you really can do database queries in actual English and it understands. Whether the info is accurate or not (I suspect it is) is beside the point. It’s doing something with language that has not been possible before. Check out this query. “Make a table of 15 oscar-winning actors and actresses ranked by number of nominations, also include a column with the names of at most three of the movies they made that won best picture.” It worked.

  • I’ve used plain old HTTP on scripting.com since 1994.

  • Someday there will be a new twitter-like service with one feature that will blow the doors off this hugely dormant product area. Just support Markdown in your posts. That’s it.

  • A WordPress plugin that adds the source:markdown element to RSS feeds from the special projects group at Automattic. I’ve wanted to see RSS and Markdown get together. We put support for it in FeedLand, and now there’s a way to add it to any WordPress site. This will, long-term, add styling and links to RSS feeds, without opening the door to all the nasty stuff.

  • Manton, I just noticed that none of my August posts have gotten through, and just traced it to the fact that the URL of the file changed in a reorg I did right around that time. I can’t seem to find the place where you change the URL of an OPML file. Can you help? Thanks in advance.

  • A few weeks ago my news product passed the home page in daily reloads. As of yesterday it’s more than double flow. It makes sense. The news changes more frequently, includes everything that’s on the home page and much more. It of course was created and managed by FeedLand.

  • I’m doing a demo for a friend of how I post from Drummer to micro.blog.

  • It’s been a while since I looked at the everything timeline in FeedLand. In the interim, a bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.

  • I’ve been writing for my micro.blog site alongside my main blog, Scripting News, and my developer notebook. It’s always the third tab. I try to put something here every few days, as you can see in this screen shot. Anyway I was just looking at the outline and thought it would be interesting to share, for those of you who have software that can read OPML files. The bridge between Drummer and micro.blog was created by Manton when Drummer was first shipping. I want to be sure he sees that I appreciate the effort. :smile:

  • An open voicemail to Manton Reece, developer of micro.blog, about creating a common API for social media apps.

  • If Facebook really loved the open web they’d hook Facebook itself up to it. Support RSS feeds in and out. Let users have rich text and links. I’ve been asking them to do that for over ten years, and sometimes it gets somewhere, there are people inside the company who believe in the open web, but somewhere near the top the idea always dies.

  • I’ve seen people use the term social web where previously they’d say social media. I like this. Going in the right direction. Let’s try to bring everything back to the web. I bet most people who use the web these days only have a vague idea of what it is.

  • New way of displaying posts without titles in FeedLand. Also a better way to See more and less.

  • I’m echoing my blog posts on a WordPress site. I recently got my connection to WordPress going again. It all looks pretty good, and I get to edit my posts in my outliner.

  • On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon and I did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence. I did a 10-minute podcast on what I remember of that moment, and how surprising it was to hear the idea I had been evangelizing come to life.

  • There’s hope for a bootstrap pairing of the open web and social nets to create a pretty good writing platform that doesn’t lock users into one platform or another.

  • All my freedom as a developer comes from the integrity of the web. More here.

  • Write specs for humans

    I like to write specs for humans.

    Imho too many specs are organized the way a computer would want them, the way software is organized. Establish basic vocabulary in layers then and assume the human reader will know how to put the pieces together to do things. Never answer questions a busy developer would have.

    Humans like it the other way around. Show me how to do X, Y and Z, the most common things people want to do with the API, and then later explain how the pieces fit together. The hello world approach.

    With the arrival of AI, computers can now read what humans read. So you should just write your specs for humans and it’ll work fine for computers too!

    Gotta change with the times. 😀

    PS: This should probably be filed under Rules for standards-makers.

  • If I would describe a human co-worker as “intelligent” then I would use the same word to describe ChatGPT if it does the same work.

  • Mastodon, Bluesky and Twitter should not be silos relative to each other. I’m starting to post links to Masto on Twitter, and links to Twitter on Bluesky. All combos. I realized I was, in my mind, assuming these were silos. I think other people do too. That’s not a good limit to impose, doesn’t work in our interests, as users and developers.

  • Bluesky People Browser: I’m playing with ideas of how to browse around a network of followers on a social media platform. Bluesky is the first that I’ve had an OPML interface to work with. So I created an outliner for walking the structure of people and who they follow on Bluesky.

  • My linkblog flows through WordPress. It’s a social networking app too. Also flows through Mastodon and Bluesky. 😀

  • Now that we have RSS feeds and OPML subscription lists for Bluesky, I can start developing apps that use that data. It’s the first social network to have this feature. Of course it already works with FeedLand. If you want to subscribe to my Bluesky list, here’s the command, and this is the URL of the list. You’re now following everyone I follow on Bluesky, in FeedLand. The future works! 😀

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