A new updated version of FeedLand via Docker. It's now possible to run FeedLand on a local machine in a private network. Thanks to John Johnston and Frank McPherson for their help.

President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up.

It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).

They all say podcasting‘s open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.

Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple.

I would like to have an OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing.

Just noted that Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continu...

I wrote a this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards.

I saw a product announcement from Jake Spurlock -- a new feed reader called Today. From the description sounds well-thought-out. He explains -- "Google killed Reader in 2013. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. So I built it." I also know someone named John Spurloc...

New account on Twitter: DWiner43240. The old one dating back to the dawn of time is disabled, so at least the new owners can't post anything there, if I understand correctly.

Update. I've been able to create an account on Twitter, but it's not @davewiner. If you're on Twitter, it would help if you'd RT the post. Thanks!

BTW, people make the same mistake with AI that we make with every new tech. We focus on the creators not the users. As users we are learning a new skill, how to specify our needs precisely. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know.

Back when I ran a software company I'd help the team understand why they should be very very nice to our customers. "They have our money in their pockets." It generally got a laugh partially because I was their boss, but I like to think also because it's the truth.

Yesterday, I had to ship an envelope to the UK and got caught in dead ends at the Fedex and DHL sites. One of them said my zip code wasn't in the town I live in. How do you get past that?? These companies are losing business because their systems are broken. Maybe they worked at one time. I used ChatGPT as I often do to get help on one of these antiquated sites. And while ChatGPT has the technology and the Fedex has the info, they just have to get together and upgrade the user experience, and eventually of course is the AI version of the UI becomes the real one.

Paywalls that require you to subscribe to an Atlanta news org when you don’t live in Atlanta prob don’t generate much revenue. Why not instead charge per article. Like a toll you pay on a road you drive on once every few years. I wouldn't even have an exception for Atlanta residents. If they start spending more money than a subscription costs, you could offer a subscription then, as a way to save money. Kind of the way Amazon lets you buy a certain amount of coffee beans without requiring you to sign up for monthly delivery. They do tell you how much you'd save if you subscribed. Everyone appreciates a chance to save money, but still might not want the commitment. And asking someone from upstate NY to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a total bullshit. An insult to both our intelligences.

Aram Zucker-Scharff writes "I don't want to read one more thinkpiece about blackbox AI code factories until you can show me what they've produced." I've made the same request, and there was very little even brilliant programmers could show, including some who have become in...

My Twitter account is owned. I can't even see what people are doing with it because you have to be signed on (apparently) to read stuff on Twitter nowadays. I wish current Twitter management would put it out of its misery. Served me well for approx 20 years. Let's clean up the mess. Thanks for your attention this matter.

Bullet items for the Fediforum conference in March. Subscribing must be easy. Some things will work better if they're slightly centralized, esp subscribing. Use DNS for naming people. Support RSS in and out, and test it once you add the feature, so many easy things to fix...

A few days ago I asked Manton Reece, the developer of micro.blog, if he could add a feature that gave me a feed of replies to all my posts on his service. I post a lot of stuff to micro.blog via my linkblog RSS feed. Every one of those items can be commented on. But unless I...

In Drummer, when I get too many tabs open from things I haven't looked at in a while, this is what I do.

1. I choose Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu
2. The menu opens with the new bookmark at the top of the list
3. If it's the first time I press Return and enter "Tabs I Closed Recently"
4. Then I drag the new bookmark under that headline.
5. Close the Bookmarks tab.
6. Remove the tab I just bookmarked.
7. Voila! Clutter Reduced.

My Twitter account has been hijacked. I can't log on, or change the password. I can't communicate with the company, so I'll try here. Please shut down my account, davewiner. To my friends who have Twitter accounts, if you see a post from davewiner on Twitter, please reply and let the people who see it know that it isn't from me.

When Manton or Doc show up in my blogroll, and they do update fairly regularly, I always click the wedge to see what they say. I can see the first 300 chars of each post in a popup. If it's interesting I click the link to read the full post and any comments. Now I want it coming back to me. My linkblog is cross-posted to Manton's site -- micro.blog, which has thousands of users. I have no way of knowing if anyone has commented on them, but if there were a feed I'd add it to my blogroll. So it would be great to have a feed of all the comments on my posts on micro.blog. Would fit into my flow perfectly. This goes all the way back to the beginnings of RSS, where we called it "automated web surfing." I don't know where people are talking about my stuff, but a well-placed feed can make up for that.

News must be better defended, decentralized, unownable, all parts replaceable. The current situation was preventable. Same problem the social web has.

Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was...

BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number.

I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button.

Speaking of the Back button, that's the problem with tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down?

To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the RSS feed that Old School generates, the software that renders my blog.

It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is.