Two Dave Winer grumbles

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This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on May 9, 2003). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

I don’t have as many issues with Dave Winer as many other people seem to, but he does occasionally come up with something that I’m tempted to comment on. Today, I gave into the temptation…

Today, Dave is looking back at announcing RSS:

“RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a ‘weblog’….” The funny thing is that it wasn’t grandiose. At that time all weblogs were done in Frontier.

Not really. Frontier may well have been the first commercially available software built for creating and updating weblogs, but I was keeping my weblog up in 1999 (and even prior to that, I think I started using my site to keep my family updated on my life sometime in ’98), using the ‘old fashioned’ method of manually updating my website. I just didn’t know it was a weblog back then.

Unfortunately, at some point during my many site redesigns/updates, I was a fool and trashed all the old static HTML pages of my site from before I started using software to automate my site updates, but I can at least point to my first post using software to automate the process, and the post where I realized I was a ‘blogger’.

So Frontier may have been the first software for weblogs, but weblogs themselves were around pre-99. We just didn’t necessarily know that they were “weblogs”! ;)

Secondly, something I’ve whined about in the past: Dave’s RSS feed drives me up the wall.

Every other RSS feed I subscribe to links each post to its corresponding post on the source website, so when I find something interesting in my newsreader and click on it, I’m taken to the website. Dave’s feed, unfortunately, doesn’t. It seems to have one of three possibilities:

  1. The newsfeed post will link back to the post on Dave’s website. The preferred behaviour, but unfortunately rare.
  2. The newsfeed post will link to whatever the first link in Dave’s post is. For instance, if Dave is commenting on a post on someone else’s site, when I open his post in my newsreader to follow up on it, I’m taken to the link that he’s commenting on, rather than his comments. Incredibly annoying.
  3. The newsfeed post won’t link to anything at all. This seems to be the least common of the occurrences, but common enough that I run into it from time to time.

Seems to me that since Dave is such an RSS evangelist, and one of the co-creators of the format, he could at least create an RSS feed that doesn’t make his readers want to thwack him upside the head every time they try to follow up on something he says!

But maybe that’s just me.