Scripting News: Little-known facts

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

Little-known facts

You don't need to use Curl to get stuff from Twitter, you can use a web browser for some simple API calls to see what they return. Try clicking on this URL to see my most recent 20 status messages.

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/davewiner.xml

Yeah it's XML. Hope you didn't have a heart attack. ";->"

The docs could be much clearer about this, imho.

Another little-known fact, the RSS feeds that provide code updates for all the various components of the OPML Editor now have comments, that explain what changed in each update. I never release a part without explaining it (knock wood, praise Murphy, don't sue me if I don't). Here's an example, the feed for opml.root.

http://bits.codecasting.org/opml.root/rss.xml

Should have done this a long time ago. I'm going to push some Twitter-related updates today, they should show up in that feed. This means you might want to also subscribe to these feeds in your aggregator or feed reader, because they now include human-readable bits. Unless you're a programmer the notes will likely not make much sense, but that's one way learn programming, almost by osmosis.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:43 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.

Mar May