Tag: Dave Winer

Posted on

Dave Winer’s Scripting.com Rewrite Looking To Remake Blogging, Again

Scripting2 is a rewrite of my blogging software. Its roots go back to the NewsPage suite developed in 1995. With this rewrite it no longer has code from before May 2010. I’ve learned a lot about web programming, esp in the Frontier environment, in the last 15 years. It’s great to have an up-to-date codebase.

via Scripting News: My Scripting2 to-do.

Dave Winer is rewriting the code behind scripting.com, bringing it into the 21st century.  He is planning on bringing back some the great features like “Edit This Page” that set Frontier, Manilla, and Radio apart as early blogging platforms. Most certainly something to keep an eye on.

Posted on

Writing For A WordPress Blog Using OPML Editor

Ok, the theory is that I can use this tool in Oppie (the OPML Editor does need a cute nickname!) to write posts for my WordPress blog, www.symphora.com. If this works, I’ve got a bunch of interesting ideas for Classcaster.

I assume that each section of the outline will translate into a new paragraph. If so, this is the second paragraph. I suppose it may turn up as a bullet point too.

How about some links:

OPML Editor
WordPress
Classcaster
Using OPML Editor and WordPress together.
Posted on

Another good use for the iPad: one-to-one presentations

Anyway, that’s a unique thing the iPad can do, one-on-one presentations. And it’s a business application too. If you’re in a tech role at a corporation that has a sales function, get busy. You’re going to be using a lot of tablet computers, whether they’re from Apple, HP, Google or whoever. One person telling a story to another person, that’s going to be a big use of tablets.

iPad as a one-to-one presenter. Scripting News.

The iPad is great for “Let me show you something…” interactions. Of course it would be even better if the browser wasn’t crippled. The next tablet that comes along with a full OS, an easy to use interface, and an app store is probably going to be more appealing to business and education. Until then, this will do.

Posted on

Using EC2 to (re)Distribute “Repurposed Virtualities”

They give everyone the power to create their own version of Windows and share it with others. Granted, that’s not the kind of thing too many non-techies, or even techies, wake up in the morning with an overwhelming desire to do. But why not? I’m still getting used to the idea of creating my own versions of Windows, haven’t even released anything yet. But since everything I’m building is open source, there’s no reason someone couldn’t take my package, make some changes, and then redistribute it with their customizations. Trust obviously becomes a pretty important issue here.

via Scripting News: Caprica and repurposed virtualities.

This sounds a lot like what already goes on in the EC2 community around public AMIs. If you take a look at the list of public AMIs (over 4,000 at this point) you’ll see that many are bundles of the OS with one or more application packages. For examlple Drupal and Asterisk AMIs are easy to find. Most the public AMIs are Linux-based, but nearly 300 use Windows as the core OS.
I’ve done this sort of thing building a Linux AMI that started with a base image from RightScale to which I added Apache, MySQL, PHP, Drupal, and more configured to work together. Once I saved the AMI, I had a proto-type server that I could use to quickly scale up our web cluster. I’ve also shared the AMI with colleagues interested in getting started with Drupal.
So, having an AMI that contains Dave’s work is certainly doable and an excellent idea. I, for one, would certainly try it out.

Posted on

Are You Being Captured by the Tech Industry?

The moral of the story of the Facebook patent and all the recent news fromApple and Google: Tech companies are no better or worse than big companies in other industries.

They are all about keeping the stock price high, growing at the expense of their competitors, and the role of users is the same as customers in other industries, you’re a source of revenue.

via Scripting News: Big change in the tech world.

Dave has a number of good points in this article. He points out that the tech industry is becoming no different from the airline, insurance, and health care industries: large and motivated strictly by preserving profit and stock price. Users are merely a source of revenue, customer service falls away to a bare minimum, and you are locked in to their services.

Is there anything you can do? Sure. Get control of your data and services. Find providers that don’t lock you in and capture your data, pay them for their services. Keep local back ups on media you own. Remember, all those digital photo, videos, blog posts, emails, assorted documents, are your personal property. Treat them like you would physical artifacts.

Posted on

Dave Winer Wonders If We Should Trust the iPad

The problem is this — if Facebook goes away — and it could, so does everything everyone created with it. Facebook investors and developers like Joe (who I respect enormously) probably aren’t worrying about this, because necessarily everything they do is tied up in the success of Facebook. Now if Joe can show me, in his architecture based on the iPad, where all my work is mirrored in a service I pay for, like Amazon S3, in a simple format I and others can write software against, then I can relax and look forward to the future he, Brent and Miguel want to create. But if my work is tied up in their success, then the price is too high. I’ll take the lower fidelity but open playing field of the netbook, and keep my own data on my own hard drives, and back it up as I see fit. And continue to exercise my First Amendment rights.

via Scripting News.

Dave really wants to keep control over his data, and that is a Good Idea. His fear is that the iPad is just an extension of the Apple Silo that lulls us into storing our in proprietary spaces were it exists at the mercy of large corporations. In a nutshell Dave wants to be able to use HTTP to get data on and off the iPad. That capability provides us with the ability to easily move our data around. And we need that sort of portability for our data.

Posted on

RSS Isn’t Dead, People Just Don’t Get It

I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader.

via Speeding Up RSS .

The problem with this whole article is that it totally misses what RSS is and how it works. RSS is a data format, a very simple XML file. It isn’t slow or fast, it’s just a chunk of well-formated data. RSS feeds are produced by many systems at the very moment of publication. The feed for this very site will be updated as soon as I click the publish button. But the RSS feed is just an XML file. No speed is involved, just a file. Got it yet?

The lag the writer above seems to see is just a function of the systems that consume the RSS feeds and really has nothing to do with the RSS itself. As commonly implemented RSS is used as part of a ‘pull’ system. A remote client pulls the XML file periodically from the server. Servers and clients usually limit how often the files are pulled in order to conserve bandwidth. The idea behind RSS pull systems is that the client decides how often to poll servers for new updates. If you want faster updates, just crank up how often your client hits the server. Of course many servers will ban you if you try to update too often.

Now, I can easily imagine a system where the RSS feed is pushed out to known clients. Because the RSS specification is open and under a Creative Commons license and extensible through XML namespaces, it would just take a bit of design and programming to get RSS into shape and come up with a scheme that pushes out the updated RSS to a client that parses the XML into those stories we love. The client should be something lightweight and widgety. Once installed it needs to register with the server, giving its IP, and declare what feeds it wants pushed out. Then something new gets published and it gets sent right out to the client, queuing the update if the client is not available. As a bonus, the server can still dish out the very same RSS feed to any pull clients that want to consume it.

See nothing to it. RSS isn’t slow, it just isn’t doing what you want it to do, so go ahead and fix it.