Scripting News: An experiment begins

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

An experiment begins

I've spent the last few days working on the archive of the DaveNet site, addressing a lot of old issues, and learning about S3, and refreshing my knowledge of the CMS that's under all the stuff I've been doing for the last umpteen years. There were a bunch of broken pages, the content was unnecessarily dynamic. Now all that's fixed and hopefully it's situated in a place where it will not break in the future and I won't have to worry about it, and it won't cost much to host, etc. (I have an idea of making a proposal to Amazon to pay it a onetime fee for hosting the content for perpetuity, that way I can remove a concern for my heirs, and feel that my writing may survive me, something I'd like to assure.)

That led me to something I've always wanted to try, to put each story that appears on Scripting News on its own page, and now that's done. If you click on the blue arrow next to a headline, it will take you to a static page where just that story appears. It's still a bit rough, and the page is spartan (which I like) and it has a couple of advantages.

1. It should make the stories stand out more in search engines.

2. Techmeme will be able to access these pages, since there is nothing blocking it. The stories site has no robots.txt, at least for now.

I kind of like having my own Techmeme-free space here. But I'm curious to see what will happen now.

I have not yet updated the RSS feed to point to the individual story pages, but I think, if the experiment proves a success, that I will.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:29 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. 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.

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.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jan Mar