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About the author

A picture named daveTiny.jpgDave Winer, 56, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

"Dave was in a hurry. He had big ideas." -- Harvard.

"Dave Winer is one of the most important figures in the evolution of online media." -- Nieman Journalism Lab.

10 inventors of Internet technologies you may not have heard of. -- Royal Pingdom.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

8/2/11: Who I Am.

Contact me

scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

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My 40 most-recent links, ranked by number of clicks.

My bike

People are always asking about my bike.

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Here's a picture.

Calendar

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Nov   Jan

Warning!

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FYI: You're soaking in it. :-)


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Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Moon missions Permalink.

A picture named moon.jpgI missed an opportunity to explain something today at the PDF Forum.

When people come together and feel a need to communicate is a time when new tools for communicating have a chance to bootstrap. For a simple reason, we have the users' attention. They're interested in doing new things. Normally they're doing something else, living their lives, being busy -- their attention is elsewhere. But when they are confronting a political problem, which is often mostly a communication problem, that's when bootrappers get their boots on! Cause we can do some good now.

I've had this feeling before. In 1996 Congress had passed and the President signed the Communication Decency Act, which gave the government broad powers to control what the Internet was used for. An outcry came on the Internet from people who loved the Internet enough to be broken-hearted at this turn.

So we started a moon mission. Our goal was to have free hosting for people's stories and pictures, what we called 24 Hours of Democracy. It really worked. It wasn't easy but it was huge fun (most of the time). Here's the key point -- this single exercise probably pushed up the adoption of blogging by a few years. Because we had to try a lot of ideas out in a fixed space in time, what came out at the end had to work.

It's time to create again what we created in 1995. A place for people's thoughts and pictures, but this time, with an eye toward permanence. Create something that's independent and as protected as possible from governments and corporations. As safe a harbor as we can create.

The Worldwide Web User's Manual Permalink.

I was just making a small pot of coffee, just two cups. So I measured out two full cups of water, and guessed how much coffee to put in the basket. The coffee came out great, but could just have easily come out awful. :-)

So if Wikipedia is the web's encyclopedia, where is the web's user's manual? It would be infinitely expandable, aspire to cover everything, and take a practical 1-2-3 approach to doing things we humans do on this planet in the times we live in.

How to set up Apache on Windows Permalink.

Here's how I set up an Apache server...

1. Find apache_2.2.9-win-x86-no_ssl-r2.msi, download install.

2. Create aliases of these files on the desktop:

3. Change the root directory from htdocs in the Apache folder to something much shorter. I like to use C:\www. If you don't shorten this, all your file names are going to be very long and waste a lot of typing and visual space.

4. Uncomment the inclusion of the vhosts.conf file in httpd.conf.

5. Uncomment the inclusion of the proxy module

6. Add default.html to the list of index files

7. Make your .htaccess files work by setting AllowOverride to All

8. Uncomment the include for modrewrite. This allows your .htaccess files to do reasonable kinds of redirects, like sending references to www.somedomain.com to somedomain.com

9. Uncomment the include for proxy_http_module

Change in my JSONP approach Permalink.

My server isn't designed to do the kind of task that JSONP requires it to do, esp in service of apps that make lots of calls to the server each minute (for each user). I just spent a few weeks cleaning up all kinds of things like this, so I'm not willing to keep hosting it.

To give you an idea of what it's doing to the server it's running on, here's what its performance monitor graph looks like now. Obviously that's not workable.

So, I've modified my app to produce a static file that I can serve without this cost that calls a routine in your page called onGetRiverStream. You don't get the flexibility to say what routine you want me to call, but you can have that routine call the routine you want.

Here's the new location you should include. It's a script.

http://daveriver.scripting.com/river.js

The static file it's generated from is still available, and you can have your own JSONP handler work with it if you like. Or if you really want to be community-minded, you could let other developers access it as well.

Update: Here's what the performance monitor graph looks like after I switched to this new policy.



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:36:39 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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