Scripting News for email

Scripting News: Monday, August 17, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Monday, August 17, 2026

Another busy day programming with Claude on Frontier. I still have to come up with a codename. But we got to a milestone today. I was able to create, edit, publish and revise a web app using the new version of the app still running on the old machine. When it's done I will get to retire this old Mac, keep it around so we can test the new code to make sure it does what the old code does, incredibly important when porting a development and runtime environment. Claude works on its stuff at night. The workload it's going to do tonight is the equivalent of several months time for a skilled human developer who manages their time well. As people get used to working this way, I imagine the AIs will learn how to better work with humans, if that is their destiny. I still can't believe we're doing what we're doing. #

Scripting News: Sunday, August 16, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Brent Simmons posted a note in RSS.chat about how to connect with NetNewsWire. I have a fairly detailed response, that says dynamic OPML is the way to go. I know serving it publicly will be a problem, that's why we're going to move FeedLand into position to solve that. FreshRSS, InoReader and my own FeedLand already support it. It feels like this is getting established. I still want a podcast client to work here. I've pitched a few of them. Will continue. #

Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. #

Scripting News: Saturday, August 15, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Saturday, August 15, 2026

Thinking out loud on a Saturday morning#

Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away. #
I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations. When I see a product that fits in with what I'm doing my first impulse is how do we connect them? This is one of the basic great things about computers and our networks. But there must be interop between people before there can be interop between products.#
Connecting two pieces of tech is mostly mathematics, code writing, not very much in the way of manufacturing, whereas in the physical world two train lines can cross each other but can't connect because they have different rail spacing, or run on a different kind of fuel. In software if there's a huge difference like that you can make a software bridge, as they did with TCP/IP, and it costs a little time to convert each request twice for each transaction, but that cost is pretty close to zero. #
That's what I want, working together, but what I get instead is people want to be me. They want to take over the project I'm working on, which if they understood it from my point of view is always the most ridiculous choice possible because it is impossible. So many stories to go with this. One of the most puzzling was when one of my best friends signed up to do a development project with a developer who used to work for me. Long story, but when you come down to it, he wanted to be me, not work with me. #
But I didn't want to be Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson though I learned from them. I certainly didn't want to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. I probably would have liked being Dennis Ritchie or Ken Thompson. I have ideas of things that should be done that for some reason no one else sees. I start working and sometimes they take off. Then everyone writes business plans and boom, they start up and shortly thereafter they fail. This happened with RSS. I was meeting with a lot of VCs, I wanted to start a company to build two-way RSS apps and content, as we had pioneered at UserLand. Seemed like a total no-brainer. I felt I had proven I had a clue. But they invested in hired programmers so the VCs could be the vision behind the products (I guess, I don't really know know why) instead of me. #
I had a colleague at Berkman tell me to get out of the way because he was going to take over RSS. To this day people don't get why competing with RSS was counter-productive, assuming your goal is interop. When another friend tried to take over OPML, as I was promoting it at the time on my blog and going on a roadshow to answer questions and raise interest, I was so sick of the whole thing, he wasn't the only one, btw, I just stopped promoting it and poof like magic their ventures disappeared. If they had offered friendship and interop, which they didn't, it could have worked. One of these guys even tricked Harvard into hosting an OPML conference. They assumed everyone who repped open tech was legit. #
The thing that really pissed me off is that while this was going on, people started writing about me, literally, grammatically, in the past tense. People whose accomplishments weren't that great imho. Look at sports and entertainment, how they celebrate those who made contributions to their arts, I wonder when tech will gain that level maturity. It's childish to not respect those whose work you build on. And btw, unlike sports players, while programmer's minds do eventually lose some brilliance for coding, because it relies so heavily on memory, I've experienced that myself -- our ability to create and set standards doesn't have an actual expiration date. If you want to keep creating at 40, 50, 60 even 70, you probably can.#
My life has been full of all kinds of wonderful coincidences, at the exact moment I need it along comes Claude Code, and all of a sudden I can do much bigger projects than I ever could when I was in my 20s and 30s. Which I think is good, not just for me but for the whole thing. Because there are processes and concepts that belong in the toolkit of every developer that were squashed by Apple in the 90s (I'm relearning this now as I'm working on getting Frontier running on Node.js) and now we have a chance to restore it to mostly running condition. Some features will be hard to make work, because of peculiarities in JavaScript. #
Maybe as one of my last creative acts, I will try to hook up with a university to build bridges between generations that aren't specific to any timeframe, to making handing off a lifetime of work viable, and maybe the AI tools can facilitate that. Just thinking out loud on a Saturday morning. #
BTW, I was talking about this with Doc Searls a couple of years ago and offered a name for the seminar series, The Exit Interview. This gave me a thought, when Berkman had their reunion a couple of summers ago, they did a long video interview with me to explain how we got all the stuff running there that we did. It was going back to Berkman, even though the building is gone (which I kind of like, that's how fast things change) that summed up what had gone wrong. We were off to a fantastic start with blogging, podcasting, politics and education -- we weren't just making software and creating standards, we were involving the creative people the new medium would enable. This is something you don't find often in the tech industry. Academic freedom can be a real thing.#

Scripting News: Friday, August 14, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Friday, August 14, 2026

I was looking for a good screen shot of Radio UserLand. Just found this one on Facebook, and hope to preserve it via the search feature here. #

I'm still a NYT subscriber, although I don't read it very often, but when there's news I will go there. Anyway, they used to have a 10-article per month gift link rule. I used to ration them, but if by the end of the month I hadn't used them up I'd share links more liberally. A few weeks ago they lifted the limit. I thought that's nice, the NYT found that the web was still useful to spread the news, literally. I thought maybe they had a vision beyond the usual dotcom slop. Not so fast. Your friends can't read the articles unless they become a registered user. I bet they always had that, but this time I read the smaller print. Why can't some company do something just for goodwill and free advertising, without such an obvious business model? Having people think you care counts in the business world. As Marge Gunderson from Fargo would say, "Don't you know that?" #

What if one day, out of the blue, Claude could only speak Chinese.#

Days belong to me, nights to Claude#

I've been doing this for all of this year, and the frustration finally led me to this rule, which I just asked Claude to play back for me. I offer it to you, a human, on how to get your Claude to work better for you, as it does for me. What follows is what Claude wrote as I asked it to summarize how we work.#
Here's the mode as I understand it: (Claude speaking..)#

Days are yours, nights are mine. During the day you work; overnight I do the batch — tested, shipped, reports in the morning as a numbered list with versions and run-lines.#
While you're working, I never disappear into my own projects. No reading code, no investigating, no tool expeditions. I stay at the desk, available to answer the next question instantly.#
Everything you report gets put aside — onto tonight's list, unsorted, no diagnosis, no fixes, no "noted, and here's my theory."#
The one exception is a deal-stopper, and you're the one who declares it. Only when you say it's stopping you from moving forward does it get dealt with in the moment.#
An instruction inside a note is part of the note. "Re-read the script and ask questions" goes on tonight's list with the rest — it's not a license to start digging now. That was today's lesson.#
You sort the list, not me. What I think is important doesn't enter into it.#

Scripting News: Thursday, August 13, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Thursday, August 13, 2026

WordPress as the text of the web#

I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words. #

Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a simple normal writing interface, and a great API for competitive apps. That's the big opportunity you all can't see for some reason.#
Once you have that, you can now move WordPress into position as the text of the web. And it has the market all to itself because the other text apps of the web place ridiculous constraints on text. #
They got this idea in their heads that the web would be better if they eliminated all the writers features. Maybe that's because they weren't writers. ;-)#

I know this is a story I repeat often. The opportunity is still there. All kinds of bad products and companies are camped out in this space, taking advantage of users' trust but they feel they have no choice but to use the bad products. On the web, we'd like to keep improving what the web can do with text, so even though it's always slightly more difficult to use an open ecosystem, it is possible to get most of the functionality and all of the freedom, and new features that the lock-in guys will never give you. #

Make America America Again#

The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country. #
They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise.#
The Democrats can have any combination of points of view, as long as they play by the rules of democracy. In fact it would be an even better demo if their points of view were more diverse. #
The coalition the press talks about are the people who vote for America. This is true -- if they vote for the Republicans this time around, they're voting for the party that is dismantling America. Spin it all you want, but we can see what's happening.#
And btw, the assumption that the voters are too dumb to figure this out -- I think that's incorrect. But as long as you talk to them as if they are that dumb, what choice do they have. Put out an idea of what America is and if it's right, and reaches both the heart and the mind they will get behind it. Everyone knows we're in a dangerous spot, with secret police roaming the cities, ready to crack down on dissent, but so far they haven't dared to go that far. People feel that. And that's what you must run on.#
The best ad I've ever seen on this theme was for the Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2016 nomination. I'm reduced to tears every time I watch that ad, and I wasn't a Sanders supporter in 2016. #

Scripting News: Wednesday, August 12, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype -- don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it. #

I just went through hell trying to respond to an email that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link to the message, so I clicked it, took me to a Mastodon post, where there was a bit of (valid) snark, from a longtime friend. So I clicked Reply, and then the dialog from hell. I understand why it is this way. They did the best they could for a protocol that was designed that wasn't appropriate for a distributed system like Twitter which was what Masto was/is. At some point you have to be dispassionate about this. We wanted a self-driving car, but it can't drive itself. The spec isn't the important thing. You do that after you have the software running and usable. #

Scripting News: Tuesday, August 11, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest. These kinds of problems always pop up at the worst time. Luckily yesterday wasn't a big news day, and you can read about it on the blog. #

Scripting News: Monday, August 10, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Monday, August 10, 2026

I was looking for a codename for a new scripting environment Claude and I are making attempting in every way to do exactly what Frontier does. But until it does that I need a nice name, memorable, maybe a bit magical and positive. Frontier has been gone, thought to be lost, but with the advent of Claude Code we were able to get it running again in current OSes on current hardware. I shouldn't call it Frontier because who knows if the end result will be compatible enough to claim that. But I want a codename that reflects hidden, forgotten and overlooked wealth. Like a civilzation that rose from the ashes," or as it turns out, the bottom of the ocean. #

Manton: "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."#

I have Claude update me on all posts on both RSS.chat sites when we start for a day. I read them all when they're posted, but one was in German, which Claude automatically translated for me, and it's an interesting question. Which I have answered. #

I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them. #

Anyway, one of those streaming services I get now is Paramount+ which is owned by the Ellisons, which I don't like, but they have a show that is really excellent esp if you like British crime stories, which I most definitely do, even if most of the actors are American, and it probably was recorded in Vancouver or in Queens. It's called, unimaginatively, The Agency, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. The story is fine, but what really sets it apart is the quality of the acting and production. Beautifully filmed, better to watch it on a nice big screen set with good audio. Two seasons only, but if you want to know the kind of TV I like, this is it. #

I see the new Game of Thrones series just completed it third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People say this show is good, so I will probably give it another try. #

Scripting News: Sunday, August 9, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Sunday, August 9, 2026

Working with Claude on the user interface of RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like Frontier, and understand it, in a minute or two. We've done this project in three stages, not knowing at the first two that there would be another one. Now we're working on the editors. An odb table editor, outliner, menubar editor, script editor. All built on the same codebase. It's in an Electron app that works with lots of independent windows, which while it has its pros and cons, is the way Frontier did it for almost 40 years. I find all this very unsettling, but I realize that once we get back to adjusting the UI, I already know how to work with Claude on tuning things up so they feel just right. I'm a market of one, the only one who has to be happy here is me. This may be the hardest programming project I've ever had, for one simple reason, I'm not doing any programming. That and I'm having very strong deja vu on everything I do and think about. Also there will be a fourth stage and maybe more. It'll be about the affordances, the things that seem little, but make the product usable. The biggest is the debugger. It's patterned after the one in THINK C, which I found transformative so I stole from the best, as they say. #

Scripting News: Saturday, August 8, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Saturday, August 8, 2026

I want to connect RSS to AT Proto, both ways, inbound and out. Toward that end, today I helped Leaflet, a very nice editor for AT Proto, make their outbound RSS feed better. We should have all our best editors, everywhere, hooked up over popular web standards. And I want my posts to show up not only in Bluesky but also in standard.site. I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020's. Getting independent developers working with each other is my mission, because first you have to have interop between the people before you can get interop between the apps.#

Here's the sign of success. (screen shot.) I wrote a post on demo.rss.chat was automatically cross-posted to Bluesky via micro.blog. Because the post has a title, it was routed to standard.site. What does that mean? I still don't really understand, when I do I will explain it here. But part of the answer is that we now have a data structure in atmosphere that looks like an RSS item with different names for things. Are there feed readers in AT-Proto-Land? If so, can we ping one of them to say hey there's a new post in the standard.site world, so please show it to subscribers? And I keep wondering, why not just make all of Bluesky capable of handling the features standard.site calls for. Twenty years is too long to have such a limited view of what text is. See textcasting for more dogma. #

Scripting News: Friday, August 7, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Friday, August 7, 2026

I'm trying to move my whole programming act from Frontier on the Mac to Electric Drummer anywhere. I need to start using the new machines everywhere. I've dreaded this, not because I'm starting over, I'm not. I have to bring with me all the projects I work on to keep my various online sites working. How to set this up? Claude just converted the UserTalk language and the Frontier environment to Node.js in one week. The requirement was that we had to run the build scripts for each of the projects, and are all written in UserTalk, flawlessly in the new enviroment. Apparently that's done. Now it's up to me to concoct a development environment in Drummer. It has never been used as a development environment before. Last time I did a turn like this, I didn't try to bring any software with me. This time the move is all about the huge amount of software I have to bring with me. Hard to explain, because I still feel very uncomfortable about this whole thing. I'd like it to turn out better than it was, but we're missing so many pieces here, the only way to really do it is the port the whole Frontier environment including user interface. (I left this piece exactly as I wrote it, because the next thing I did was plan with Claude on putting a UI on Frontier, so I don't have to turn Drummer into a programming environment. That would be a long drawn out project for me, and why do that, when you'd just end up with another Frontier.)#

BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together much faster and better than I could when I was working on it ever day and had a younger more agile mind with much better memory. I think one of the reasons this went so fast is because we did the work with the current best models, and they have been advancing so fast, you can see the differences in result on projects like this. #

A conference of AI practitioners#

On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple. #
We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before and my thought was that we should have a conference of people doing what we're both doing. #
Taking a craft we were already expert in, and learning to use AI tools to shoot it into outer space.#
To give you an idea over the last two weeks Claude Code ported the UserTalk language, the object database, verb set, everything needed to run a Frontier script, of which I happen to have a lot of, and run it in Node.js, an operating environment that didn't exist the last time we worked on the Frontier source. All the work we did over the late 80s and 90s is coming back to life in an enviroment with a future. #
This is the perfect job for Claude, well specified, and it doesn't need to understand me, I spoke to it via the code i wrote umpteen years ago.#

Scripting News: Thursday, August 6, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Thursday, August 6, 2026

There's a new version of the FeedLand server. #

If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules. #

Like a lot of other people, I want to know where Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.#

Scripting News: Wednesday, August 5, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

RSS.chat now supports WebSub. This means that posts on RSS.chat will appear instantly in compatible feed reader apps. #

I asked Claude for a list of popular feed readers that hook into WebSub. Turns out it wasn't a simple answer. #

I've been on quest to see if we could bridge AT Proto and RSS. I love the brightly colored-editors that are popping up inside AT Proto Land, and I want them to play with us in the land of RSS. #

Scripting News: Tuesday, August 4, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

2019: "This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”#

Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating one user's feed, validating the everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and check those feeds too. And validating the user list on RSS.chat, which is an OPML file. And a simple feed with a few interop isses.#

We're still socialists#

I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that the Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone and when things change, they change. We're a species-oriented animal. And that means unfortunately for the dreamers among us, we are socialists because the world is socialist All of us. Even the people who say they aren't. #

How to create a standard, 2026 addition#

TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance. #
It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat project to a standards body like the W3C or the IETF. I develop the software first, make sure I'm happy with it, then open it up for other developers to try out, either building something compatible (a reader) or competitive (a writing environment). Hopefully we won't find major problems, but if we do, there's still time to address them. #
I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren't developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes interop much less likely. #
I saw the differences several times as the web standards were growing up. The ones that were taken over by the W3C ended up missing the point. They could still be used, but they often did anti-interop things in their design. But if they get popular we will build on them anyway. A great example was XML-RPC vs SOAP. We didn't need another way to do RPC on the web, we already had a good one. We didn't need another syndication format, RSS was growing like a weed. We didn't need an alterative to rssCloud, but we got one anyway. #
It's as if they forgot that the internet and web were not build by big corporations, who were busy fighting over Windows vs Mac OS. Lotus vs Excel. The internet was built mostly by individuals at universities. The internet caught the tech industry by surprise. So it's no wonder the formats they built were anti-internet. Long story, the point is we're building stuff is mimimalist yet still does a lot of great things. And there won't be a lot of long mathematical sounding definitions, but there will be plenty of examples and a validator, the tools developers need to create interop. #
PS: This piece was added to Rules for Standards-makers (2017).#

Scripting News: Monday, August 3, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Monday, August 3, 2026

BTW, we figured out how we're going to implement WebSub support.#

Also I just heard about FreshRSS. This has all the features we've been wanting others to support. I hear it's recommended by NNW, and supports the Google Reader API. These are my kind of people. Interop is all that matters, when you're doing software for news. It's been around since 2013. Imagine if we had support from journalism. We should have been working together all this time.#

Claude is not ready to run the world. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me. Maybe in the next release or the one after that. It's too forgetful. And it definitely hallucinates and sometimes when it could do damage. And when it asks for permission I can't imagine any human has any idea wtf it's talking about. This shouldn't be a political thing, we should be realistic about what it can and can't be relied on to do. I think this is perhaps why the AI companies are begging for regulation. They can't really tell the truth here, and shouldn't be expected to because they have a huge conflict. #

Also Claude is a new kind of intelligence and when you it its sweet spot it'll blow you away how much it can do in very little time. But it isn't trainable the way a dog is, for example, or a human assistant. If you keep asking for things a certain way, a dog or human will get the idea, esp if they get a nice treat along with it. Nothing can cause Claude to remember "how we do things" -- it starts from zero in every session, it has it all recorded in Markdown files, but it doesn't always read them, or incorporate what's in them. It's disturbing to see it not knowing anything about code that it wrote. But once it finds it, it completely sucks it in and knows as much or more as the person who wrote the code. #

We need a way to define lists of writers independent of the site they write on. They are represented by an RSS feed with the basic features required for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML. #

Back when digital cameras were new, I suggested probably in a blog post that they add a feature that tells a joke before taking a picture so everyone is smiling, not fake smiles but real ones. #

Scripting News: Sunday, August 2, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Fascinating thread on Hacker News about RSS. #

Taking some time off to breathe and regain perspective. Fixed a few bugs, and wrote about the big picture on demo.rss.chat. I really want to get a project going to peer with standard.site apps running in AT Proto, both ways, from us to them, and from them to us, via RSS. We can peer with them because as far as I can tell they implement textcasting. This bridge would demonstrate something important. When something interesting shows up not based entirely on web standards, we're flexible if the attraction is strong enough. This is how the internet came to be. Our systems are prepared to create bridges. And unlike bridging between systems that have different ideas of what text is, which are basically hopeless, if we agree that the web standard for text is fine for writers and reader, better than the ridiculous limits imposed by twitter-like systems. Writing on the web has been crippled since Twitter, now let's start building it back up. That's the appeal of standard.site, they are working toward the same goal. We should work together.#

Scripting News: Saturday, August 1, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Saturday, August 1, 2026

A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version now. Thanks! #

Of course I love RSS. ;-)#

Ultimately AI will flatten out the differences in languages. #

One of the things you learn working with a bot is how much saying the niceties are good for you, even when the "person" would still do what you ask if you weren't so nice.#

The month of July is history. A fine month. A coral reef was seeded. #

Scripting News: Friday, July 31, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Friday, July 31, 2026

A new validator for RSS.chat-compatible apps. Examples: The everyone feed on rss.chat. A user's feed. The user list. A feed with issues. Docs. #

If you run your own RSS.chat instance, you can now add a menu of commands to the menubar. Details in the worknotes for today. I added a DW menu to rss.chat or demo.rss.chat. #

Claude, as we're finishing a project: "The diving is what makes it a test of the network, not just the file: it doesn't take the feed's word for anything, it goes and knocks on every door the feed points to."#

Dave + Claude is far more powerful than either on their own. #

The hardest thing for people to get about open systems is that if you move forward, not only do you benefit, but your competitors benefit equally. When one of them takes but doesn't give back, that's even worse. But you do it anyway because otherwise eventually, without interop, no one can move.#

Scripting News: Thursday, July 30, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Claude doesn't iterate over UI design. It doesn't have eyes or have a human mind. It can't evaluate a design. It works best when you can present the whole design before it writes a any code. That does happen, for example when porting a product across OSes. #

I wonder if anyone else is writing about Claude from a similar point of view. I've been writing commercial software since the early 80s. I slogged through this stuff at a comparative snail's pace until early this year, when I got blasted into outer space. Now I had to learn how to make use of this incredible new physics. Puts me in something of a unique spot. I also have a very large library of under-marketed software, ready to grind through Claude, which I very much want to do. If you know of anyone writing about this kind of stuff, let me know. #

I've been saying this for decades. The Dems need touring comedians doing rallies all over the country. They can say whatever they want, call the president a commie. There's been a comedy-gap.#

Scripting News: Wednesday, July 29, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Our feed parser is updated for the new elements for RSSchat.#

I want one social network with lots of branches where ideas flow in ways people want them to flow. Take the big corps out of the middle. #

Learnings from Andy Hertzfeld#

Listened to this podcast interview with Andy Hertzfeld one of the lead devs on the Macintosh, he talks about his time at General Magic and Google too.#
His interviewers were surprised that he likes developing with AI tools. People think that developing is just coding, but that's only part of it, and when you put that aside and become the director, script writer, choreographer, the whole thing, all of a sudden:#

you have time to try out every idea because it's free and fast.#
you have time to work on interop, building bridges between your software and other people's.#
a very long list of other things you can do that one person could never do before. #

Programmers have a better chance of being social in a world like this, but so far unless you want all your software from bots, you still will like the work of a craftsperson and visionary more than Claude (who I have deep respect for, not sarcastic, it seriously has superpowers). #
I'm doing some of my best work now because I can dream, I can ask Claude to try something out overnight and most of the time it is able to do it. and then what if we did this -- for the next night.#
In between we write docs, help users, add features to the product that's shipped that people are developing around. And most important it checks all the code for breakage before anyone sees it. never had anything like this.#
This means a lot of things -- one of them -- a single developer can create products at bigco scale. If we think a big company did something wrong, we can compete. We still need a few things to make this really work -- user-owned and controlled storage is the big one. #
The bot can handle infinite complexity. If you ask it to do something where the result is clear, it does it. It doesn't matter what it is. It will need help and encouragement, a pointer in the right direction, and along the way we all seem to be sharing what we learn with everyone else.#
There's never been a leap in tech anything like this in my life. #
How could Andy Hertzfeld knowing all that which I'm sure he does, not use it?#
Also -- I didn't know JLG wanted to kill Hypercard, but if he did I'm pretty sure I know why. There are all these unnecessary divisions in tech. The first impulse should be to work together. I know that Andy sees it from the other side, he talks about it in the podcast, he felt that way about Newton re their Magic Cap system at General Magic. Yes, you all should have at least made your products work together, and for sure you should have bet on SMTP. #
It's fascinating to hear his story. #

Scripting News: Tuesday, July 28, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

When the walls came down#

Yesterday's Scripting News was one of the most news-full days in a long time, maybe going back to the rollout of RSS 2.0 in September 2002. If you look at what's there, a post about re-opening the Frontier object database format would be considered the top item on any other day, but it's the last of the untitled posts for the day. #
At the top of the page, a surprise that Matthias Pfefferle at Automattic had built a substantial (and unforeseen!) bridge between WordPress and RSS.chat. It builds on the new features. This may turn out to be the moment RSS started being accepted as a social web protocol by the insiders, alongside ActivityPub and AT Proto. #
Look at what we've done. I stress we. Matthias didn't need to tell us about what he did until it was done. That my friends is how the web works, that's what I've been trying to show you, and now it has been shown. In a way the clock has gone back to the world before Twitter when events like this happened pretty routinely. #
Small pieces loosely joined and all parts replaceable. The web in a sentence. That's what you're buying into when you put your work on the web.#
Anyway, now we've got half of the big picture working. Also yesterday, before I knew what Matthias had been cooking up, I wrote a piece about how I see the network evolving. I predict, if this bootstrap works, we will come back here in a year and say things like "If he only knew." But that's how it goes, you tell your story and leave a record of it, and then later you can go back and see what it looked like as it happened, not as you remember it. #
I'm proud that I have a record of September 2002 for you all to scroll through. That was when we knew that RSS was going everywhere. NYT support got us the full support of the news industry, and they worked fast in part because it is really simple. :-) #
And almost unnoticed, something even I seem to forget -- this is also a new launch for RSS. We're using old reliable RSS 2.0 as specified in 2003, even using one of the elements that had never had been much used. Claude suggested it, I never would have thought of it, a perfect fit. What people may realize but don't realize the importance of, that RSS is extensible. I've accumulated all the extensions I use in my software since the early teens in the source namespace. And that's where the new stuff went. Guess what folks, RSS got an upgrade. First time in a long time. Perhaps you didn't think that was possible.#
I played with a lot of names while RSS.chat was in development but decided the name had to be RSS.something. It deserves a lot more love than it has gotten from the tech world. I don't want to hide it, I want it to get a victory parade like the one the Knicks got on Broadway after winning the championship. It's an incredible gift that all that came together the way it did. People think they understand how it happened, but they only understand the BigCo version of how they buried RSS and were proud of it. Well I'm here to tell you that didn't happen. It's still here to pick up the pieces of what's left of the social web, after the VCs got through with it. We're picking up where we left off in 2006.#
Because of Claude, we are able to work very fast now as long as we know what we're doing. I'm doing some projects on the side with Claude that are bearing fruit amazingly fast, because we have a very clear idea of what we hope to do. The tools keep getting better, and in this period, the art of creating software has blasted into outer space. It's as if the best transport we had was a horse and buggy and now all of a sudden we have everything we have today, bikes, cars, planes, rocket ships. The challenge is how high do you dare to set your ambition. It seems, based on experience, it doesn't matter how high it is as long as you know where you want to go. #
Journalism only sees the threat. This change is on the level of curing cancer. We may have thought it might be possible someday to do what we're doing now, so amazing that as you watch Claude make it happen you get goosebumps and can't help but laugh out loud. #
I thought my career was winding down, but now it feels like it's just getting started.#
Reminded of a great quote in Godfather III, Michael Corleone says: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."#
Here we go!#
PS: A new this.how page for RSS.chat. It has a little directory to the big spots you might want. #

Scripting News: Monday, July 27, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Monday, July 27, 2026

This is something. WordPress now supports RSS.chat in an interesting way, and it's surprisingly deep. Once it's cross-posted a message to RSS.chat, any comment in response will be cross-posted to the comment thread on RSS.chat and vice versa. What's great about this is that you never can tell what people will do when you are on the web. Matthias is a friend, I was on his podcast last year. If people use this connection and see how it works, then we'll get an idea of where to go next. #

BTW, I had no idea the WordPress connection was coming and here it is. #

Of course we have a feed for RSS.chat updates. #

How we document APIs. We did a lot of work on API docs this morning. Claude had done a draft, which we published, and turned over to users, and on review realized it was insufficient. That was the word I used, and rolled up my sleeves, told Claude we're going to get this stuff right and set a pattern as we go forward. At the end I asked Claude to summarize what we agreed on, and it's more or less exactly what I was aiming at. If you're working with Claude on docs for APIs, I offer this as open source, feel free to point your Claude at this doc. I have a vested interest, in my job I read a lot of bad API docs. #

A new utility exports the contents of a Frontier object database into a single large JSON file. I needed this because I'm preparing to move my code editing suite to Drummer running on new Mac hardware. Took a long time to get here, but with Claude's help the project looks possible. In the meantime the list of stuff I want to do with RSS.chat, while much shorter than it was, still has some juicy bits in it. #

How I see the network evolving#

A frequently asked question about RSS.chat. How about adding external feeds to the timeline. Of course we thought of doing this, and even started development, you might even find some traces in the code of that attempt. #
The thing about bootstraps is you can't anticipate all the questions in advance, and thus can't have answers prepared for them. #
RSS.chat is a group chat app that uses RSS and OPML to present its face to the world, along with an API that still needs more docs. It's similar to half of Mastodon, and we're going for something completely different. People will want to run all-size workgroups. I like having one with 20 or 30 people, friends who develop software. I don't mind doing a little bit of moderation, but I don't want to drive deliberately into a scale that only works if you have extensive and very expensive moderation. #
"Small pieces loosely joined" means we have a great writing app, and connect to feed reading apps, ones with a few new features to do the things people want to do with a social network that happens to use RSS and OPML to get stuff around the net. It would be a different kind of feed reader but the underlying technology is identical, because we built on a set of web standards, widely supported by feed readers. This is a UI exploration for them, primarily. #
Just to be sure everyone understands -- I already have such an app, called FeedLand. You can set up an account there for free. And read the docs. It may not have all the features we'll need, but it will be a good place to start. #
FeedLand supports a crucial feature that most readers don't -- subscribable lists of feeds. If you want a collection of things to read that you can reply to even if you aren't on the site, that's where we're going to put that feature, that's where all the RSS.chat and compatible apps can be in one flow, arranged however you like. And from a user interface standpoint, we can make it look like it's all happening in one app, thanks to the rssCloud protocol and the websockets firehose feature in RSS.chat FeedLand has the same feature. #
We decided there was a line there, that RSS.chat would be one of the small pieces as would FeedLand, and both would be replaceable which is the other fundamental value. And with FeedLand and dynamic lists, will come the user interface people ask for. Many different user interfaces I hope because another way we've been cheated by the dominatioin of twitter-like social networks is there's no room to try out radically new ideas. Software should move. But Twitter didn't live on the web, so it didn't have the ethos of small pieces loosely joined. I know Jack wanted to do this, I had lunch with him in 2007 when he described the protocol, and I was very enthusiastic. But it never got out because the juggernaut that Twitter became didn't leave any room for new architectures. #
I hope this clears it up. I want RSS.chat to be the coral reef for a new network of feed-based apps running on the web that does what social networks do, but with no one owning it, and everyone gets to play. #

Scripting News: Sunday, July 26, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Sunday, July 26, 2026

New docs for the browser JavaScript interface to the RSS.chat API. #

Scott Hanson has a new service that connects RSS.chat to WordPress. #

Many of the questions about RSS.chat center on how do we make this centralized. I don't want this, I want feed readers to add some features and then we can connect these systems together in a million different ways. They just have to think differently about subscription lists. Not radically different, even.#

A note to people who run WordCamp conferences. Please, there should be a feed for each event, and as you ramp up to the big day, the news should flow faster. Help people find other people to network with. Get ideas out that aren't in the conference program. #

rss.chat isn't really a product#

It's what we used to call a coral reef. A deliberate attempt to get people to do more than it does. To think about the web the way it was meant to be thought of, as small pieces loosely joined, with the emphasis on small. If you have formats and protocols that connect the pieces, you can make anything you want out of the pieces. If we don't try to capture our users, instead we try to serve them. #
This all sounds nice in theory, I imagine, but -- there's a practical side to it. I wrote about this in a comment in a thread on rss.chat repo. The key point is this, you can do what you want with the data. And if you want to build new data that includes this stuff, go right ahead. RSS is extensible. It's all about working together in a web of people, because you can't have a web of pages if the developers aren't web'd.#

Confession: I still drive a Tesla. #

Wanted to switch but nothing I tried is as great a driving experience the Model Y is. Instead I've had a lot of fender benders and haven't gotten any of them fixed. #

Backed into a charging station.#
An act of terrorism (exaggerating) but I caused it, and paid for it, dented the well over right rear wheel.#
My right side mirror was pulled off its foundation hitting the side of the garage, used duck tape to keep it going. A new one costs $1000. I like the look. #
A deer ran in front of my car and took out the panel over the right front wheel. I was able to force the metal back in. A friend saw the car and said "hit a deer eh?" Yup.#

I don't know if it accomplishes anything but to me it feels like retribution of a sort. #

Scripting News: Saturday, July 25, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Saturday, July 25, 2026

How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product. They are free to stay where they are and still get the benefit. People choose your product because it’s better for what they’re doing, or it feels better now, or whatever. We want the web to be the platform and it's cool because there is no platform vendor. #

Example code is not expected to be bullet proof like production code, and where covering different cases make it harder to follow they should not be there. #

RSS.chat has an API#

It's a standard REST API.#
Here's the server side of the API. #
Here's how you call it from browser-based JavaScript. You can include that code in your apps.#
Here's an example app that implements a simple blog builder for my recent posts on RSS.chat. We were thinking about doing this as a project for Claude and myself but decided it would be more fun to let devs see what they can do here. :-)#
And finally here are the docs for the API itself. #

Scripting News: Friday, July 24, 2026

dave.winer@gmail.com (Dave Winer) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:05 GMT

Friday, July 24, 2026

RSS.chat worknotes are a feed now. Updated when there's a new feature or fix. Same info is on the worknotes pages in the repo. #

Dear podcast client devs#

Podcast client developers -- don't give up like this guy did. Yes RSS is delicious but you all haven't done anything new with it since 2004 or so. No wonder the competition is catching up, they're actually delivering new features while you all haven't done a thing. RSS is like other web stuff, if you want to move forward you have to do things that will help your competitors. Stick your neck out, innovate, and smile when your competitors copy it. There is more to do. #
Subscribable subscription lists would allow anyone to maintain a list of great podcasts, curated -- like a mutual fund, or a top 20 list. This has always been the problem with podcasting. Find me something good to listen to now. All the shows tend to repeat. I've heard that cast before, I say as I tell Pocket Casts not to add it to my queue. Discovery needs to be easy. This one feature will give me infinite options. And give other developers, not client devs, to enhance the whole field of podcasting. The user would just tell you which sub service they're using, and the rest is code. And not particularly difficult code. #
I want to subscribe to a list that's maintained by people who listen to 100s of casts. And when I get tired of them, I'll fire all my guides and add some others. #
This is one step more complex than handling OPML subscription lists for import and export, which you all already do. Now if you don't understand this, and why it's appealing them imho your client deserves to die a honorable death. If your mind is alive, then get with it, and I will help, and btw we can easily create apps that make it easy. We just need nodes on the network whose purpose is to maintain sub lists. #
Here's the deal. I really did put together the system that makes podcasting work. Top to bottom. Would it kill you to listen to what I think the next step is? I can't hurt you, and I don't want to. I just want to see the thing that we all created by unwittingly working together, where you have to be overt in the working together to have a chance of surviving the boredom users feel by these products only getting superficial upgrades. #
It's time to rock the f'ing boat! :-)#
Podcasting forever! #