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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.

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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.

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May   Jul

Warning!

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


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Dave Winer's

A nice Chrome plug-in Permalink.

Make a list of the steps you have to take from the formation of this thought: "I want to subscribe to this," to actually complete the subscription. It's depressingly long. We should do something to make it shorter. (And Google has, read on.)

This may be the single greatest thing about Twitter. It took that long sequence and shortened it to one step: Click. Unless we can teach a website to read your mind, it can't get any shorter.

A picture named elmersGlueAll.jpgWhen I switched to Chrome after years of being a Firefox user, one thing I missed right off was the white-on-orange feed icon in the address area of the browser window, indicating that the site you're looking at has a feed you can subscribe to. This disappearance made the arduous process even more difficult. Thanks! (Sarcasm.)

Then at one point in an act of desperation I guessed that there was probably a plug-in that fixed this. I don't like to install browser plug-ins for some reason, but when I found this one, I installed it right away. And the white-on-orange icon comes back. Yay! Then I discovered later it's even better. I can configure it with a URL that it will jump to when I click the icon, and it will provide the URL of the feed as a parameter to the page. Luckily, River2 has a page that can accept a quick subscription to a feed, in just that form. So I set it up, and ever since I have been happier with RSS subscription than I have ever been. A remarkable number of steps are cut off the list of steps that follows "I want to subscribe to this."

It's called The RSS Subscription Extension, and it's by Google, and it's a must-get for people who subscribe to feeds from their browser.

Thanks! (No sarcasm.)



© Copyright 1997-2012 Dave Winer. Last build: 6/23/2012; 3:53:56 AM. "It's even worse than it appears."

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