RssCloud, WordPress. FeedLand, and Dave Winer

Dave was really a pioneer. In the early days of the Mac, he created an outliner called MORE which was a very innovative product for the time, which I immediately loved and used as the center of all my information-keeping. He sold it to Symantec for, as I understand it, a couple million dollars (probably twice that in today's money), but then it disappeared. (OmniOutliner, made by people with no relationship to Winer that I know of, carries on MORE's tradition.) Then he made a product called Frontier, which was a programming environment that never really took off. Then when the internet got critical mass he came up with RSS and that was obviously very useful and influential.

His claim to have had the first blog is probably true. I remember reading it way back then.

He's a bit of a prickly character, always has been.

This seems a little unfair, maybe unintentionally on your part. If you’ve been reading his blog long enough (and I don’t know the value of “long enough” since I’ve been reading so long) it becomes clear he situates new proposals and tools in into a ton of context - how he came to think this new thing would be useful. This involves discussing history. By necessity this disproportionately is his own professional / independent developer history. I find this approach generally refreshing and honest - most software emerges from a path dependent individual context but people tend to suggest they just developed the objectively best solution to a widespread problem. Dave tends to be more honest about scratching his own itch and the influence of his own history on how he approaches problems.

This approach can read as ego / bragging maybe, if you’re not familiar with it. “Why is he talking about his past projects so much,” etc. Well because it led into why he thinks the new project is a good idea.

Not to say he doesn’t have some ego like all people. He does want people to know for example that podcasts were a natural outgrowth of RSS, so natural he hand a hand in adding it himself despite not having an audio background. But his point is almost always that podcasting should stay open, not that he is some genius. If anythint he tends to encourage non developers (eg journalists) to be more involved in developing new standards.

(Also the “fixation” on blogs without titles is about the fact that RSS the standard is perfectly capable of carrying Twitter type items without titles, since it only specifies either a title or description as required - but feed readers mostly assume titles which has encouraged a heavyweight high effort concept of what a post is, to the advantage of closed platforms like Twitter and to the disadvantage of the RSS ecosystem. I think he has a very good point on this. These details matters. That they are “background noise” to many users - well so are most important technical details. Try getting most users to understand the difference between transport and end to end encryption for example. )

The RSS 2.0.1 spec at https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html is essentially dead, or “frozen” / “settled” as it says there.

2.0.1 was published in 2003 and I don't expect to see a 2.0.2 or 2.0.3.

The ambiguities you mention are real, though. “The url must be an http url” is one that feed validators would adhere to very strictly, for example, rejecting HTTPS URLs as invalid[1], which even caused Apple's Podcast submissions process to reject feeds with HTTPS URLs in them at one point (I was employed at the time by a company that hosted podcasts, and we had to work around it by rewriting URLs to use HTTP).

I received a reply from the spec's author to my email suggesting they update the spec to clarify this (“of course you can use HTTPS”) but the spec itself was never updated and I would consider it unmaintained at this point.

Atom and JSON Feed are good alternatives. Atom because it has fewer ambiguities and JSON Feed because it has an open GitHub repo[2] and was updated in 2020.

[1]: https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/12

[2]: https://github.com/manton/JSONFeed

I've met Dave in person.

I've talked to Dave on the phone.

I've written an entire web server in Frontier.

I've been an absolute dick software engineer!

Dave is a dick.

Now, we can debate all day long about how/why/what, but it really doesn't matter. He is who he is and nobody is going to change that. The guy must be in his 70-80's at this point. After all these years, he's still treating people weirdly, it must be a personality tick of his.

We can decide if we want to work with him and his stuff, or not.

  "I've made a point of reaching out to old friends in the last few weeks to see if we can work together on any projects. So far most people are still wary of working with others, it seems." -Dave Winer

We can think of him like we do Steve Jobs (and based on his ego, that's my guess of what he wants). He built something that got people's attention, but treated people poorly in doing so.

We can also decide how we want to act towards others. Don't be like Dave.

And before MORE, he created Think Tank for PC and Apple 2.

I remember reading him say his first outliner was on a timeshare system in the 1970s, and he took inspiration from that Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos