Tag: Dave Winer

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I’ve been testing and using FeedLand for a while now. Today Dave posted the roadmap

1. FeedLand is a feed management system for individuals and groups. So far it’s only been offered as a free service on the web.

and

4. Here’s the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It’s a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.

As someone who has been pretty excited about RSS for years this sounds great.

Wayback when ScotEduBlogs was a ruby app1, I had this wild idea that a visitor could create a subset of the feeds on the site, save that and view the subset in some way. I think an instance of FeedLand could do just that.

Apart from the unknown of how running FeedLand would work2 I think there are a couple of barriers:

  1. The lack of blogs about Scottish education, maybe twitter problems will help that).
  2. The lack of knowledge about RSS. Andrew McLaughlin’s post Education needs free, safe spaces for creation, collaboration and discussion. and TES Article How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes gives hope there.

Most online discussion of education and even news from schools has been on twitter. I’ve always felt uneasy about that. More than ever now 3. Maybe 2023 will see a RSSurgance;-)

  1. Created by Robert Jones with the help of Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself.↩
  2. I am hoping to be able to test than soon. ↩
  3. For example: Twitter team responsible for removing child exploitation on site cut in half since Musk takeover, report claims and No more Tweetbot or Twitterrific on Twitter | Mashable ↩

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Feedland went public today. I’ve been lucky enough to have been testing it and following its development for the last few weeks.

Feedland is a lot of things, all to do with RSS feeds. First it is a place to gather and organise feeds. Second it can be a place to read these feeds. Third it allows you to publish a ‘news product’ which you can share so that others can read the news from sets of these gathered feeds. Fourthly it is a place were you can see what feeds other users have gathered.

Feedland was built by Dave Winer who

pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software;
So it has an interesting pedigree and is opinionated software. Dave has had as long a relationship with RSS and OPML as anyone on the web and in an excellent position to have opinions.

Feedland is developed with an eye to interop. Feeds to get information out abound. For example the widget on my sidebar uses the Sync OPML to Blogroll plugin to sync my blog role from the opml list of feeds I’ve subscribed to in Feedland. I could also use this to control the feeds I view in an rss reader like inoreader which supports external opml.

Dave says:

FeedLand is all about people, feeds and news.

One of the most attractive, to me features, is the possibility of communities being loosely organised around the sharing of feeds. It is easy to see the feeds another user has gathered and to add them to your own list with a handy checkbox.

Feedland is still developing. I’d recommend a look at the docs and there are some interesting views starting to appear for the early adopters.

I’ve only touched on a few to the things about Feedland I’ve found interesting so far. There is a lot more to this app already and lots more to come.

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Of all the digital tools I’ve used the one that has stuck with me longest is RSS. I’ve been excited & delighted to get a peek at Feedland. Feedland is Dave Winer’s latest foray into the technologies he has spent many years working on, RSS, opml & news.

As part of my peeking I’ve had the chance to produce a personal news reader. Any messiness is down to me rather than Feedland.

Over the years I’ve made a few similar things. This has been one of the easiest ways. The linked page is running on an old Raspberry Pi 2. Most of the work is done on Dave’s servers but the end result was easily produced on my own.

Dave hints this is a partial sneak peek. I am looking forward to exploring and finding out more.

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Screenshot Drummer and Blog

Scripting News: Sunday, October 10, 2021

Today is the 27th anniversary of this blog. To celebrate, I’m opening up Drummer to the world. I hope you love it as much as I do. ❤️

Dave Winer

Drummer is, as you would imagine a really interesting project. A quite different approach to blogging.

I’ve been lightly beta testing Drummer since 4th September. This is my Drummer blog: John’s tambourine.

I would not like to presume I can understand Drummer well enough to give anything like a complete description. These are some of the features that have interested me so far.

  • Drummer is an outliner, like Dave’s Little Outliner 2 and the Fargo system. You could use it for outlining in all sorts of ways.
  • Drummer can created a blog from an outline at post at the push of a button.
  • Drummer is a scripting system in an outliner.

Each of these elements give you a lot to think about. It has made me think about how I blog, and how I’d like to blog. It is an opinionated system. Coming from one of the internet elders you would expect no less.

If you are interested in blogging, microblogging and the like I’d recommend you have a look at Drummer. Certainly read: About Drummer

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Replied to Drummer has a feature called the glossary … by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I love the idea of a glossary for my site. For example, when I say Ben Collins, it would be cool if it would automatically link to his website, similar to how Google+ worked. I sometimes do this at the moment by linking to my own posts. For example, when talking about care as the first principle, I ...

Hi Aaron,

Drummer has a lot of interesting features, I am kicking the tyres a little. When I started this blog I used pivot, a flat file php blogging system. It also had  this sort of feature, although they didn’t call it a glossary. I would think someone could write a WordPress plugin to do the same sort of thing.
A previous outline & blog system from Dave Winer, Fargo, had a post to WordPress feature. I am wondering if this might be possible for Drummer too.

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Listened David Winer from guykawasaki.com
I’m Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode’s remarkable guest is David Winer. Dave is a programmer, entrepreneur, writer, and to some, a gadfly. The word ‘gadfly,’ by the way, means “An annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.” That’s Dave, all right.

Listened: David Winer – Guy Kawasaki

Really good chat. Covering the birth of blogs, rss, podcasting and outliners.

Talking about the idea that apple networking, if better, could have made the web unnecessary:

David Winer: We had to give up the GUI. We went from having all this great user interface standards to the web, which had no user interface standards.

When I started using computers, a mac 475 and system 7 point something I really found the standardised UI a huge benefit.

Guy Kawasaki: …. but it seems like Apple and Spotify and Amazon, they’re now trying to gate-keep podcasting.

I’ve been podcasting since 2005 and really worry that the medium is being commercialised. Dave Winer was more pragmatic.

Interesting too to compare Dave’s podcasting routine with Guy Kawasaki’s extensive editing:

David Winer: I open up my iPhone, I turn on the Voice Memo app, talk for a while, I email that to myself, I upload it to a server, I put it on my blog. Goodbye.

The wee bit of audio was grabbed by Castro.

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Liked Scripting News: Friday, April 30, 2021 (Scripting News)
I've said this a million times. One more time won't hurt. Podcasting was created so everyone can make media. It was designed, deliberately, without gatekeepers. To have a podcast, you have to have a public RSS feed with enclosures. That's why you hear at the end of podcasts, "You can get this where ever you get podcasts."

The suggested punishment is a bit harsh. Everything else rings true.