Facebook does some really smart stuff and, in trying to be really smart, sometimes they're really really dumb. Dumb bordering on bad taste.

Give you an example.

I've been reading David Weinberger's blog lately because he's newly interested in OPML. Turns out he's been writing a browser-based outliner. Somehow Facebook figured this out (?) and suggested I might want to befriend him. So I did. Problem is, when I saw the notice I thought it was David asking to befriend me, but they were asking me to ask him. Now that's not cool. They made a suggestion in a place where they had never made one before. It wasn't ridiculous for me to assume it was more than that. Oh well. I would have made the request anyway. But I would have liked to have meant it.

A much more bizarre one is the suggestion, that Facebook repeats every couple of weeks, that I "reach out" to Guy Kewney. Their algorithms must have noticed that he's not getting a lot of messages, and that alarmingly he isn't even posting very much! Let's wake Guy up, the 'bot at Facebook seems to be saying. Only one problem. Guy is dead. Like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, he's pushing up the daisies. He's an ex-Guy.

Now Guy had a really good sense of humor, I was once entertained for a whole evening by Guy and Erik Sandberg-Diment at a dinner in Las Vegas at some tech convention or the other. He would have had a laugh.

But Facebook, it's not funny. You need to have a way for us to reach out to you and let you know that you should chill with the poke reminders, just in this one case.

 7/11/2010; 12:52:36 PM.   .

From time to time I get a request to help promote a tech product. I almost never go for it, even though I do promote tech products on my blog and in my tweetstream. I've even been offered cash or stock to do that, but again, I won't do it. To me that's like advertising, and you don't see any ads on this site, for a reason. I don't want to dilute the connection with the people who read this site.

It's not that I'm religiously opposed to advertising other people's stuff, I'm not -- it's just that the economics have never worked for me.

But there is a good way to get me to talk about your product. It's very simple, make it work with something I already do. In other words, work with me. Give me an incentive that's meaningful to me and I'll sing your praises to anyone who will listen.

For example, in 2001 or 2002, if you ran a website and added RSS support to it, it's a pretty sure thing that I would promote it. I wanted people to see that there was wide adoption happening. The only way for them to see that is to show them.

Then, once we had the foundation of RSS, I could use it to promote something else I cared about, podcasting. It booted up much faster, because there already was a network of understanding of the base technology, this was just a new application of it.

Going back to the roots, if you had a blog in 1997 or 1998, yup -- I would point to it, usually with gushing praise. Again, I wanted to show uptake. The tradition continues to this day -- blogs beget more blogs. Everyone can point to the blogs that inspired them to start blogging.

Today it's different. A site with an RSS feed is not news. A new blog is nice, for sure -- but in itself is not interesting. Everyone has blogs, everyone has RSS, there are lots of podcast feeds, that's all good.

Now I'm going to tell you what I'm interested in today.

This is going to sound weird, but then so did blogs and RSS back in the day. And it may not work, or it may be slightly off, or it may not be the right time. You never know it's going to work until it does.

If you look at the website of Scripting News, instead of the feed, you'll see there's been a change. It's a lot simpler. All the same stuff is there, but it's laid out in a more pleasing way (I hope). There are little plus signs all over the place where you can get more info. So it's easy to skim, but it's also easy to go deeper. I believe in both ways of reading.

If you have an iPad, try looking at scripting.com over there. It looks good there too.

Now here's the big question.

Could it look better?

And another question.

Could it work better?

In this context I am a writer and a programmer. My design work is finished. My rendering of scripting.com in HTML is done. But, in addition to publishing the rendered text, I also publish the source. So anyone can write a renderer.

I think of this act of open-ness as equivalent to publishing Scripting News in XML in December 1997. That simple act led to people at Netscape building an aggregator to read it. Then more feeds were published. Then more aggregators and on and on. This is how bootstraps begin, with a single act of faith. It's like the Kevin Costner character in Field of Dreams who believes if he builds a baseball diamond on his farm the players would come.

You can be one of the first to play in this ballpark. Take the OPML source of this post and make it look and work great on some device. It could be a cell phone. It could be an iPad. It could be a 27-inch display. You'll learn a lot from that, I hope you'll share what you learn (write a blog post).

And I'm not done publishing content that can be rendered in different interesting ways. Not by a long shot.

The title of this post is my philosophy of technology. It's the only way we get somewhere.

Let's work together!

 7/11/2010; 10:38:36 AM.   .

I was pounding my head against the wall trying to come up with an idea for a panel for SXSW before the July 9 deadline, and wouldn't you know it, I had the killer idea while walking early this morning on July 10. Damn! So close.

The idea is to have a panel to discuss why panels with people racing to plug their product or pet idea, in competition with four other panelists, followed by the audience asking questions after lining up at a mike, is the wrong way to organize these things.

Everyone has figured it out but no one wants to say it directly.

It comes out like this: All the good stuff happens in the hallways.

What they really mean: Panel discussions suck!

So my panel would be a discussion about how to bring the hallways into the meeting room. Or to bring the meeting room into the hallways. Your choice.

 7/10/2010; 10:28:36 AM.   .

I did what I always do, if I can, when a movie I want to see opens on a Friday afternoon. I sneak out and catch a matinee, usually before the theaters are full on the weekend. But the theater was full for the 3:25PM show at the Regal on Union Square for Despicable Me.

In a summer without blockbusters, yet (I'm totally looking forward to Inception, coming out next Friday) Despicable is a nice reminder that movies can be easy and fun even if they follow a formula, as this one certainly does. A gruff work-obsessed middle-aged guy is shown to have a huge heart by a small swarm of lovable kids. It's a very funny, very sweet movie -- lots of great gags, hilarious characters, a little bit of (good) bathroom humor, and lots of heart-tugging.

PS: I'm looking for bloggable clipart of minions. 145 pixels across, white background. A choice of minions in funky poses. Help much appreciated, not finding anything on Google.

PPS: I liked that a neat 3D animated movie didn't come from Pixar.

PPPS: I loved that one of the minions was named Dave.

 7/9/2010; 5:43:33 PM.   .

Here's a bookmarklet written by Marc Barrot:

iJotEdit

As with all bookmarklets, you install it by dragging it from the web page into the icon bar in your browser.

Now, with the browser open to this page, click on the bookmarklet and prepare to have your socks blown off!

The source of the page opens in the browser, in an outliner, where you can browse it and edit it. The editing doesn't save back to the server, yet -- but it will. (Of course only if you have permission to edit the document.)

Marc already had a web outliner called iJot. I showed him how Scripting2 embeds a link to the OPML source in every page. From there it was relatively easy to detect the OPML and open it.

A lot of people will want to edit this way.

BTW, this is how a bootstrap works.

 7/9/2010; 10:37:22 AM.   .

I was working on some code in my apartment, was thinking about going out, and looked outside and the sky was black. At first I thought it was another thunderstorm. I got drenched this morning. But then when I got up to look I saw it was a fire. I got out my camera and took a picture, uploaded it to Flickr, and tweeted a link to the photo.

Then I noticed that other people were posting pictures of the fire from all different points of view. Within a few minutes we knew the exact location. Now about 1/2 hour later, I can see that the fire is out.

Here's the best close-up of the fire. A search for all the fire pics.

This is a new kind of reporting. Everyone has digital cameras and everyone is networked.

 7/8/2010; 6:02:29 PM.   .

I've been reading about the crazy stuff going on at scienceblogs.com, and wondering if there isn't something the tech community can do to help the bloggers.

Scientists who are also natural-born bloggers. It's a perfect example of people with information going direct to the people who want it.

I've always felt that reporters should apply the scientific method. Here are writers whose lives are devoted to the service of science.

It's not surprising that a corporation like PepsiCo would want to get in the middle of such a good thing.

What's needed, it seems to me, is a simple blogging platform, probably WordPress or Drupal, that could host all the science bloggers who wanted to be free of the corporate situation.

I am not using this as an opportunity to promote my blogging platform. It seems to me it's too delicate a situation to insert anything like personal interests into. Rather, it would be great to get a home for these people, asap, one that will make it easy for them to migrate to a new home, but still maintain the integrity of the community.

I can help in getting the feeds together into a single reading list, so that we can follow all the science bloggers where ever they go.

Update: There is a "diaspora" feed managed by Yahoo Pipes for the science bloggers who are leaving scienceblogs.com. This is great, but I wanted something different -- an OPML reading list that points to all the feeds. I don't just want the posts, I want the feeds too.

 7/8/2010; 8:38:58 AM.   .

My Scripting2 to-do list is getting small again, but there are still some big items there. One of them is to get an Amazon AMI ready for people to create their own blogging servers.

My goal is to make it as turnkey as possible to set up your own server. One of my frustrations with WordPress is that you have to understand so much about hosting before you start hosting. There's so much you have to understand before you start. It's kind of a Catch-22. You have to be highly motivated, you're making a real commitment. That's why so many people go with wordpress.com. (None of this is presented as fact, just my conjecture.)

With Scripting2 there will be, at first, a scarcity of hosting options. I want people to seriously consider setting up their own EC2 server. It costs about $90 per month, and it can host dozens of bloggers using Scripting2 (in theory, that's what we're going to find out). The economics work for me. With Radio and Manila, I had to get into the hosting business. This time, I am determined not to be the central point of failure. Eventually it made so sick that I had to drop the ball. This time I don't want it to be dependent on me. That was the mistake last time.

My role is to work on software and to be a community leader. That's what I do best.

Also, by having people host their own servers from the start, we get past the bottleneck of the typical "User Generated Content" play in the tech world. In that world, the users are like little hamsters in cages spinning around the wheels that drive ad impressions that generate revenue for the tech company and stock options of the programmers go up in value, and the little hamsters have the satisfaction of knowing they helped make other people rich. This always struck me as out of balance.

It works when the founders can find a quick exit as the YouTube guys did. But in the more common case, the company drifts and the platform suffers, and the users wait and things never get better.

The WordPress guys found a better formula, by offering people the option of hosting their own blogs on their own hardware for free. Even your wordpress.com blog is free. You only pay when you get serious about your blog. When you need features that serious people need. That ecosystem has a much better feel to it. And they get to relax, get rich, and the users have their independence.

At my point in life, I'm less concerned with making money myself, and more concerned about setting up something that works, long-term. I was looking for an answer and along came Amazon and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. With EC2, I get to create my own operating system, and offer it to you. Eventually I can even ask for some of the money to flow back to me to fund the continued development of the software. Maybe I'll even get rich from it, that wouldn't be so terrible.

Unlike the WordPress ecosystem, that had evolved to create entities like Bluehost, who have confusing startup plans, we'll have one that's a simple howto that takes at most an hour from beginning to end, and has zero commitment to anyone. You can launch the server, create your blog, and after one day decide it's not for you, and owe Amazon less than $1 for the experience. (It's all charged to your credit card the same way you pay for books or clothes.)

So now I'm swinging back to polish the AMI, get it so that the code within auto-updates properly, and then at some point I'll be looking for guinea pigs er testers to try it out.

 7/8/2010; 5:49:31 AM.   .

I'm trying to figure out where the blank space is coming from in the layout of the scripting.com home page.

People suggested using Firebug, so I installed it, and it looks great, but I have a basic question to get started.

Here's a screen shot. What does the lime-green shading signify?

That's the bit I want to nuke. I can't tell where it comes from.

Update: Thanks for all the help -- I figured out what to do not only with the extra vertical space but with the help of Firebug, I now understand why text on the index pages was indented under the headings. I didn't want it indented. So I created a new class "showForIndexPage" and use it in place of "show" on the index pages. It has much more modest horizontal padding.

Things are starting to line up the way I want them to.

 7/7/2010; 9:46:55 AM.   .

With Scripting2 I'm aiming for the high-end of web writing tools.

Visualize a horizontal line, a spectrum of blogging tools.

At the extreme left is Twitter, with its 140-character limit, and simple River of News reader. A a blogging tool, it stresses simplicity. There really isn't a camera as simple as Twitter -- but there should be.

Immediately to the right of Twitter are low-mid-range blogging tools. Tumblr and Posterous are the leaders. They don't have 140-character limits, and they can handle pictures and media objects natively. They allow comments, and/or cross-linking. They want to provide a blogging-like experience without overwhelming the user with complexity.

Smack in the middle are WordPress and Movable Type. Both are super-rich in features, and unlike the others, offer free versions you can download and install on your own server. They also try to be easy to use, but don't sacrifice power.

Like the others, I strive for simplicity with Scripting2, but go further with features, and am willing to trade-off simplicity. It's not in the same league as Twitter because there's no limit to the length of posts, or link-blog entries. The posts have structure, a feature none of the others have. It comes with an integrated writing tool, but will have an API so browser-based interfaces are possible (and at least one is in development). I believe the API will be cloned on the server side, the same way earlier blogging APIs were.

The tool will be released under the GPL, as WordPress is, so it will be possible to integrate the two at a source level, though I don't see that being very popular. Instead, we will be able to post to WordPress, and to Twitter, and to Tumblr and Posterous, and to status.net and Typepad, and on and on. We do APIs better than anyone else. (As Stan Krute says, I'm a plumber in my heart, I believe that's true. But I'm also an outliner. And I like to make easy-to-use servers.)

Scripting2 has its own River of News reader, called (of course) River2. It's not as fully developed as Scripting2. It will get another big push before too long. I think eventually all blogging tools will have companion RSS aggregators.

When you add it all up, I think we come in at the right edge of the spectrum. Our tool is for serious web writers, the same way Photoshop is for serious graphics people, or a Nikon camera is for serious photographers. It's a truck, you have to learn how to drive it. But there are loads you'll be able to haul with this tool that you can't haul with the others.

Beginning to figure it out, in other words.

 7/7/2010; 8:44:01 AM.   .

Okay it was 103 degrees today.

And as I write this, at 2AM, it's 87.

The single-word description of summer weather here is: Sucks.

But there's something that compensates.

Every apartment in NY, and there are a lot of them, has room service.

And get this -- it's cheap and the food is good! ">

At first I felt guilty for using room service at all. In the various places I've lived delivery of something as mundane as food is not only rare, it's unheard-of. In NY, you can place a $10 food order, and it will be at your door in 1/2 hour. To me, half-native and half-transplant, that's pretty amazing. No, it's very amazing.

On another note, Jeff Cheney, an old friend from SF, swears by Village Pizza on 8th Ave and 13th St. I tried it a couple of months ago and still preferred Ray's on 6th Ave and 11th St. But I stopped in there after an apointment today and got a meatball hero. It was so freakishly hot outside, the sandwich was still warm when I got home. And what a sandwich! A masterpiece. I couldn't believe how good it was. And the slice I had while I waited was pretty awesome too.

I think what's happening as my initial awe-of-NY fades, it's replaced by another level of awe. How many levels are there? I'll let you know.

 7/7/2010; 2:06:29 AM.   .

Is waterboarding torture?

Most newspapers thought so, until the US started doing it.

Then they changed the tune.

This is the result of a famous Harvard Kennedy School study that came out in April.

According to Brian Stelter in the NY Times: "The New York Times characterized waterboarding as torture in 44 of the 54 articles that mentioned the practice from 1931 to 1999. The Times called it torture or implied that it was torture in two of 143 articles from 2002 to 2008."

They studied four publications: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and USA Today, and found similar results in the others.

Stelter also has extensive quotes from Bill Keller, the executive editor of the NYT. It's embarassing in that it does not include a mea culpa. This was an obvious mistake, even understandable. They might not have been aware they were doing it. What's not understandable is that, once caught, Keller starts spinning.

One line in particular caught my eye, as well as many other people who read the piece.

Keller: "I think this Kennedy School study -- by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories -- is somewhat misleading and tendentious."

That's fairly outrageous.

Adam Serwer, writing in the American Prospect, summed it up as I see it. "It's a good rule of thumb that anyone responding to a criticism by accusing someone else of enforcing 'political correctness' is factually incorrect. That's because if the actual facts of the criticism were in dispute, they'd dispute them."

There's been much comment on the piece, as you would expect.

My own two cents. I come from a profession, software development, where we actively seek out our mistakes. We have formal processes for it. We teach our users how to report the mistakes, so we're more likely to understand what they're saying. We'd be nowhere if we tried to deny or spin them. Bugs could never be fixed, processes could never be corrected, we'd never move past the mistakes we made in the past.

The thing that troubles me is that reporting is no different.

 7/6/2010; 9:20:05 AM.   .

One of the things I looked forward to about living in NYC is the opportunity to travel places easily from one of the most connected airports in the world, JFK.

I'm about to get to a place with this development project where a week or two away from it would probably be good for the project.

We have a small group of testers here in NYC, and I'm getting ready to add some old friends to the test group, and then I want to let things settle in for a bit. Travel, take some pictures, go swimming, whatever.

I may also just get in the car and go somewhere in the northeastern US. It's been five years since I've taken an east coast road trip. Lots of interesting places to go, some close by like Boston.

That's what I'm thinking about this morning. ">

 7/6/2010; 8:11:36 AM.   .

Last night I tried something daring, it didn't work, so as it got late -- I backed off.

Then, overnight, a reader, Daniel Kurejwowski, posted a carefully written analysis. It looked promising, so now I want to give it another try. So that's what I'm doing.

I have a fresh pot of coffee brewing, and a sense that it can be done! Let's see...

Update: It worked magnificently.

 7/6/2010; 4:51:58 AM.   .

Update: First, thanks for all the help -- but it's getting too late, and I'm not converging on anything, and this is a production site, and the software now has other users. So I had to punt on making this work for now. I think Jeremy Felt's advice is the best, and I don't think I'm going to get this to work until I put a few days in front of me to do the usual wrestling with CSS stuff.

Back in May and June when I was working on the rendering code in Scripting2, I'd frequently post questions here about CSS and got phenomenal support from members of the community. I've gone quiet lately as I've been working in other areas, but now I'm swinging back to rendering, and could use some help.

I have code that renders two-level outlines, but now I want to generalize it so I can go N-levels and have a nice indented display that you can expand and collapse.

I've implemented the recursion, as you can imagine, it's pretty simple, but now I'm hung up on how to get the indenting to work. Here's an example.

Names

Everything works as it should except the indentation.

What am I doing wrong? (Heh don't you love it when users say that.)

How about this: I want to get it right! ">

When it's working it should look something like this. (Never mind the wedges, look at the indentation.)

Any help would be appreciated.

 7/5/2010; 5:11:54 PM.   .

I bought myself a new top-of-the-line iMac.

The old one was getting really old. Lots of things were breaking that would cost a lot of money to fix when you add them all up. The computer still works, but the peripherals weren't.

Anyway, I decided I deserved a computer that really worked, so I went for the best iMac they sell, and it came within 24 hours, and I've been using it for 24 hours. All I can say is WOW.

First, the display is beautiful. The colors are true. White really is white. It's white the way the headlights on my BMW are white. Like a crisp new white shirt or a brand-new T-shirt. White-white.

And man this thing is fast.

I don't remember getting this kind of performance boost since the days when the PC was going through its upgrades in the 1980s. Macs never seem to get that kind of a lift, until now.

This thing flies.

Just to prove it, running the Intel version of the OPML Editor, I wrote a script that's just a tight loop, adding N to an accumulator. It ran a million loops in two seconds. That's interpreted code!

Here's a picture of the two computers side-by-side.

Just want to say -- it's a wonderful thing to be able to use a little money to buy some happiness.

 7/5/2010; 10:27:11 AM.   .

Just did a major shakeup on the back-end.

Now when I save a post it's rebuilding the OPML source before it saves it. This puts it through a cleanup step before other apps could depend on it. It also might break any apps that have been written that depend on it being built a certain way.

I suppose this is a bit of a warning. Use a real XML parser to handle my XML, not string processing. I play by XML rules, which means order of attributes isn't important.

I probably should write a simple bookmarklet that depends on OPML "auto-discovery" so I can easily tell when I've broken something.

Anyway, if you want to see where I'm headed with all this, watch the To-Do list on the Changes page. ">

 7/5/2010; 9:31:50 AM.   .

Mashable has a list of "fathers" of the web.

Okay -- I would agree with some of the people on the list, and disagree with others.

Of course TBL is at the root of the tree. He's so central to the development of the web that you don't even have to say his name. But everyone has their inspiration, and before Tim Berners-Lee came Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. The ideas embodied in TBL's hypertext are brilliant, but they did come from somewhere. So let's say that behind every founder are honorable people who deserve a mention. ">

Some people on Twitter feel I should be on the list, but that's nonsense. These lists aren't definitive, they just represent one person's point of view. The person who authored the Mashable list obviously felt that the technical side of the web was what mattered. The deeper and more esoteric stuff that formed foundations. They're also interested in fame. But things that may have been foundational that are not so famous might be on other people's lists. But it's Mashable's list and who belongs there is up to them.

I thought of people I would put on a list of founders of the web (I wouldn't say fathers, that's sexist). And they had less to do with the technology and more to do with the practice. It's consistent with my belief that people who make the software and hardware are just making tools for the real revolutionaries, the users.

Also, I think of the web more as a publishing environment, so I tend to gravitate toward people who have enabled that use of the web.

So here are some ideas.

You wouldn't think of Craig Newmark as a technical genius, his genius is in understanding what people wanted to do with the Internet, and what they could do, and never mind if it was part of the conventional wisdom (at the time) of what the web is for (making money) -- Craig went ahead and did what he wanted. I've compared him to Aunt Jemima, and I've scolded him publicly for being such a wuss, but it's been a long time since I underestimated the deliberately understated Newmark.

Who else? Well Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is another one of those things that wasn't on the tech industry's radar when it started, but look at where it is now. It has its flaws, but it is a monster, like Craig's creation.

How could you make a list of founders of the web without Evan Williams? For crying out loud. The guy proved it wasn't anything remotely like an accident the first time around. He never gives up. He's got two juggernauts under his belt now, Blogger and Twitter. There's obviously a model in his mind, he's paying attention, and letting his intuition guide him. And he has good intuition and is driven. And has been doing it for many years, through some very tough times. He's on my list for sure.

If you're going to make a list of Web founders, it's got to include the Netscape thread. So definitely Marc Andreessen. Another guy who did it more than once, proving it wasn't an accident the first time around. Honorable mention to Brendan Eich, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross.

So obviously one thing I value are people who make long-term contributions, who didn't have one great idea. I'm not into one hit wonders. I know from experience that innovation isn't in the Aha moment, it's a lot of hard work and persistence and not-giving-up-easily that makes a true founder.

If you're going to honor Netscape, you have to honor Microsoft too. I know this might not be popular, but they saved the web's ass when Netscape was crumbling. Folklore says that Microsoft deprived them of their air supply by giving their browser away for free. But come on -- Netscape was giving theirs away too. They did more than Microsoft to undermine themselves. And without MSIE/Mac, it's hard to imagine how the web would have gotten through that rough period. True, they should lose a lot of credit for letting malware get out of control. And the people who think "web standards" are what make the web work (I'm not one of them) curse Microsoft for IE6.

Not sure who from Microsoft to name as a founder of the web, but there would be someone from Microsoft on my list.

More coming soon. I'll be thinking about this for a while...

 7/4/2010; 3:35:24 PM.   .

I happened to hear this song on the radio a few weeks ago. It's an old song by The Band. It was so good, it led me to start listening to them again. It had been a long time.

Then I realized that the title of the song that got me into them again was prophetically titled. It's as the author of the song (who I will look up shortly) knew that at some point it would be a hook for someone. Luckily that person, who is across the great divide, is still hummin his toon. ">

It's such a great line because of the next line.

When you awake, you will remember everything. You will be hanging on a string. Etc etc.

Oh man. ">

 7/4/2010; 2:51:35 PM.   .

The really big remaining question in Scripting2 is how to use hierarchy.

Sub-text just scratches the surface. I can include as much hierarchy as I want in these posts. The question is how does that get represented at read-time?

Also, since every post includes a link to the OPML source code, it's easy for other people to experiment. Just read the HTML, find the link to the OPML and render it any way you think it makes sense.

I'm going to be thinking about that a lot in the coming days.

 7/4/2010; 9:18:27 AM.   .

Michael Hastings, the reporter who wrote The Runaway General in Rolling Stone was interviewed on Thursday on Democracy Now.

The podcast is definitely worth a listen if you're interested in the relationship between the press and the people they cover.

Democracy Now is they offers a way to get video via BitTorrent. We need more non-infringing uses of BitTorrent. Good work!

 7/4/2010; 7:23:38 AM.   .

At least a couple of the first round of users have had a problem with duplicate posts.

Not sure what's happening on their end, of course this never happens on my machine.

Likely the usual thing -- I know too much to find the bug on my own. The I Know What Not To Do syndrome. That's why we like having testers who don't mind finding these early bugs.

With the new code implemented on the server, I was able to save this newly created post, and the token correctly was consumed. Now the question is -- will it prevent an invalid post from being saved. Let's see.

 7/3/2010; 9:26:20 AM.   .

This bag caught my eye while using their free, new, wifi.

 7/2/2010; 6:36:45 PM.   .

This is the beginning of a holiday weekend in the USA.

The birth of our country.

I'm getting started by doing two things:

1. I ordered a new iMac, a 27-inch honker. The old machine is getting really old. One by one things are breaking. And I deserve a new mainframe because I'm doing such good work on Scripting2. (If I say so myself.)

2. We now have a small community of users for Scripting2, having booted up a few of them at last night's meetup at NYU. So my immediate priority is implementing community features for the server. Things like a log page, a group RSS feed. Making it easy for people to set their prefs, etc.

We're enjoying some really fine weather here in NYC.

 7/2/2010; 8:22:46 AM.   .

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.

scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Facebook

Twitter

Friendfeed

Droidie

Frontier News

Great VaVaVoom

Leon Winer

OPML Editor

opml.org

Outliners.com

Protoblogger

ReallySimpleSyndication

Realtime RSS

Rebooting the News

River2

RSS spec

rssCloud

Unberkeley

XML-RPC

My 40 most-recent Twitter links, ranked by number of clicks.

The to-do and done lists are now part of the Change Notes page on scripting.com.