π Scripting News Turns 30
I don't remember exactly when I became aware of Dave Winer and his Scripting News blog, but I think it was during my first year working at Gonzaga University in the summer or fall of 1998. Scripting News had been around for nearly four years at that point, but Dave's daily linking blog posts had only been going on for a little more than a year based on his archives which indicate an April 1997 debut for that approach.
By January of 1999 I was ready to start my own blog at axodys.com and I was very much inspired by what I had seen Dave doing on his site with the daily post with links and asides. Of course, in my case, that meant doing it all by hand for the next several months until Blogger arrived as the first freely available blogging solution. Dave also developed some cool Frontier1-powered blogging platforms over the years including Manila and Radio Userland2. Scripting News was always ground zero for learning about all the latest stuff he was working on and to his credit he just never stopped.
Dave has worked on a ton of interesting web technology over the years much of it XML-powered in those early days. I learned about XML-RPC, SOAP, OMPL, and of course RSS through his blog. And Podcasting too which built upon RSS, democratized streaming audio communications, and came to dominate my audio consumption habits and take a prominent seat in popular culture3.
I continue to check in on Scripting News every day. Even though I subscribe to the RSS feeds, it's one of those sites that I always choose to visit directly. Maybe that's because it has a great URL and old habits die hard, it could be that he flips his header image regularly depending on his current mood and interests. Regardless, I'm always interested in what Dave has to say because he's always evangelizing cool new web technologies4 and offering his takes on what's going on in the world technically and politically.
I think I'll update this with other people's comments on the anniversary as I see more of them this week:
- John Naughton: The blogosphere in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted.
- Andrew Shell: 30 Years of Scripting News and My Blogging Journey
- John Gruber: 30 Years of Dave Winerβs Seminal Blog, Scripting News
His amazing ahead-of-its-time outliner-based scripting environment.↩
Which I even used to power my blog for a while.↩
Not only do podcasts get made into TV shows now, but TV shows are built around fictional podcasts and the characters who love the format.↩
In the last couple years it's been LLM-based AI stuff.↩