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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

October 2011
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Sep   Nov

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.

occupyweb.org programming note Permalink.

I think the photos page on occupyweb.org is the more compelling of the two pages (the other is the news page).

But the news page came first, so it was on the home page. As a result, when people write about it, they look at the home page, and in a couple of cases missed the photos page altogether.

So I swapped them. The home page now has the photos. Both are linked to from the menu bar.

Hopefully this will help things sort out better. :-)

Angry Birds on TV Permalink.

On the season finale of Breaking Bad last night there was a commercial for Angry Birds on Chrome, if you can believe it.

In case you don't already know:

1. Angry Birds runs in the browser in Chrome.

2. It's integrated with Google-Plus for teamwork features.

I'm pretty sure this is the only place on the web you can run this wonderfully addictive game without downloading or installing anything.

If you're playing Angry Birds on Chrome, let's be friends so we can access more levels! :-)

One more thing: Breaking Bad was also great. Nothing like last year's finale (why was I expecting it to be). Outstanding special effects. And (mild spoiler ahead) all we'll be talking about till next summer is what about Mike. :-)

PS: I came across a cheat sheet for extra Chrome levels in Angry Birds.

More format tweaks on scripting.com Permalink.

I'm doing some more tinkering with the blog.

1. On the home page, let's make it so that all the top level items are expanded by default. I don't see any benefit in having the previous days' posts collapsed. It doesn't matter which day they were posted on. This way you can just use the scrollbar to scroll through the recent pieces. You don't have to stop scrolling, and expand something, then resume scrolling. I'm sure no one was actually doing that.

A picture named elephant.gif2. Right now I have the right sidebar implemented as a float:right, which is perfect -- except for one thing. When you reach the end of it, the left part, the story text, wraps underneath it. Now the lines of the story text are too long. So somehow I have to make a column out of the left side. I did a lot of fussing with a lot of different approaches, and sorry folks, the one I like the best is a two-column table. I think the people who say tables shouldn't be used for layout are wrong. If you look at how you ahve to stand on your head to get a reasonable two-column layout any other way, well, I wish they would have just changed the names of table elements and let us have such a simple approach to layout. Or I could just use a table. Which is what I am going to do, now. Because I care more about pleasing readers than anyone else. (Though I don't like to admit it.)

On the other hand, what if I put a div around the group of stories, and just say it's a fixed width. How about that? Maybe that would work. Would be even simpler than going to a two-column table. (Actually there already is a div around them, it's called scriptingHomePageBody.)

Bing! That worked. So hopefully that solves the text-width problem. I'm sure some people hate the new font. I'm still playing with that. Have a look at Google Web Fonts to see if you can come up with a nicer serif font. Right now I'm using Cardo.

3. A small change for people using the Scripting2 software. When we upload a picture, in the generated HTML, include a class="storyImage" on the img element. This allows us to style it from the stylesheet. If you don't have the style defined, it does no harm to have it there. (Actually I spoke too soon, I can't add the feature, you have to add it to your own template, at this location: scripting2Data.editor.prefs.watchedFolder.clipboardTemplate. I will change it for new users though.)



© Copyright 1997-2011 Dave Winer. Last build: 12/12/2011; 1:26:01 PM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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