30 Years of Dave Winer’s Seminal Blog, Scripting News
Dave Winer:
Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog. Hola!
I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I
stand by what I wrote then, but I’d add this. My blog started
because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent
emails on my Mac using Eudora, which was an early
scriptable app and I had a nice scripting system that
worked with it. I looked around for something to send (30
years ago today), and shot out an email to the people whose
business cards I had collected at various tech conferences. It
was a thrill, so I did it again, and again and
three more times, before I realized hey I
could use this thing to get my own ideas out
there. And thus began this thing that I still
do to this day. Look at the two posts I wrote
about WordPress in the last few days. There may be hope to find a
blogosphere buried somewhere in there. And it may be possible to
give them some sweet new writing tools so they can get excited
about writing on the web the way we did all those years ago. I
actually am kind of optimistic about that. Maybe we can stand up
something in the midst of the noise. When we booted up
podcasting, approx 20 years ago, we had a slogan — “Users and
developers party together.” It worked! That is still the way I
want to build stuff, it’s the only way I know how to do it.
Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually
became a form of literature. How about that. I’m up for doing
more of that if you all are. But please expect to make
contributions, don’t expect it all to come to you for free,
because as we know nothing really is free.
Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant.
Thanks for it all, Dave.
★
Dave Winer:
Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog. Hola!
I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I
stand by what I wrote then, but I’d add this. My blog started
because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent
emails on my Mac using Eudora, which was an early
scriptable app and I had a nice scripting system that
worked with it. I looked around for something to send (30
years ago today), and shot out an email to the people whose
business cards I had collected at various tech conferences. It
was a thrill, so I did it again, and again and
three more times, before I realized hey I
could use this thing to get my own ideas out
there. And thus began this thing that I still
do to this day. Look at the two posts I wrote
about WordPress in the last few days. There may be hope to find a
blogosphere buried somewhere in there. And it may be possible to
give them some sweet new writing tools so they can get excited
about writing on the web the way we did all those years ago. I
actually am kind of optimistic about that. Maybe we can stand up
something in the midst of the noise. When we booted up
podcasting, approx 20 years ago, we had a slogan — “Users and
developers party together.” It worked! That is still the way I
want to build stuff, it’s the only way I know how to do it.
Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually
became a form of literature. How about that. I’m up for doing
more of that if you all are. But please expect to make
contributions, don’t expect it all to come to you for free,
because as we know nothing really is free.
Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant.
Thanks for it all, Dave.