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Scripting News -- It's Even Worse Than It Appears.

About the author

A picture named daveTiny.jpgDave Winer, 56, is a software developer 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 and NYU, 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

scriptingnews2mail at gmail dot com.

Twitter

My sites
Recent stories

Recent links

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

September 2011
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Aug   Oct

Warning!

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


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Dave Winer's

Month-to-month on Nexus S? Permalink.

1. I have a Nexus S.

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2. Fully paid for.

3. No service plan now.

So the question...

I want a month-to-month plan.

What's the best deal?

A second launch couldn't hurt Permalink.

A picture named indianGirl.gifIt's great if your product takes off with the first launch, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. That doesn't mean the product is doomed to fail, it may just mean that you have to follow-through. And a lot of people don't.

There was a fair amount of hoo-hah about Bootstrap when Twitter announced it. The usual quick pieces on TechCrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent. Maybe a few posts from bloggers like Scoble or Jeff Jarvis (I don't know if these guys specificially wrote about it). The product rolls through in a wave of publicity and that's it.

But just a half-hour after writing the review of Bootstrap here, weeks after its rollout, I'm getting emails from people who hadn't heard of it, people who could really use it.

No one promoted the product to me, and believe me, I'm not asking them to. But here's what can't possibly hurt. If you're the developer of the product, think of the people you read and whose opinions you care about. Not just who the PR people say are influential. Who influences you? In general those are good people for you to tell about your product. You don't have to write a fancy marketing piece, just an email that says hey, I read your blog and I thought you might find this intereresting. Include a link. Say thanks, and sign off.

For me, products that were made by my readers are inherently interesting. Here's a product developer I know I can influence, who I am influencing. If I see something in their product they're likely to listen. That matters a lot.

I don't think of this as a conversational medium like some people do, because I think that leads to people saying empty things just to "engage" with you, and I prefer to be treated like a human being, not a business model.

BTW, when I have a product that I think someone influential would find interesting, I don't wait for them to discover it. I send a link. No pressure. Here's something you might like. Bing.

Twitter's Bootstrap toolkit Permalink.

This morning I released a new UI for Blork on my server and to other people who are running Blork servers.

I'm already getting congratulations on such a nice-looking UI, but I don't deserve it. The credit should go to Twitter for releasing the Bootstrap toolkit, which I have been learning and building on.

A picture named cowgirl.jpgI needed a framework of solved problems that I could hook into. Trying to put all the pieces together when I'm already managing a billion pieces in my own world was going to take forever. They just put out a set of easy UI techniques that I could hook into. From there, it was mostly just programming. The complexities melted away.

This has been the problem with CSS. It was designed for laying out documents, for apps we need something akin to the Mac Toolkit (they call it Cocoa these days, I think). I'm not sure Twitter realized they were developing that, but they gave a guy like me what I needed to put it together.

They aren't the first, but I've spent a fair amount of time staring at other UI toolkits and never got to Hello World. With this one, once I realized the answers were available by doing a View Source, it was off to the races.

Now we have some glitches to clean up, no problemmo, because we have plenty of CSS gurus in our midst who can tell me what I did wrong. What I needed was a place to start. :-)

So -- thank you to the people at Twitter who had the talent to put this together, and the generosity to give it to the world.

Update: Here's a set of Bootstrap demos. They make it easier to get started. :-)



© Copyright 1997-2012 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/22/2012; 9:13:45 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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