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Scripting News: Monday, September 28, 2026

Monday, September 28, 2026 Rootfiles in Frontier , a new collection starts with docserver.root, the code and content for docserver.userland.com . Claude also wrote a Node app that extracts all the data from a root file. # I was browsing around the WordPress blogs and found a new one in German that pointed to something new in blogrolls. It's Matthias Pfefferle , of course -- this time connecting up with the world Manton and I were working on a couple of years ago in blogroll sharing and OPML. Read about it here . He works at Automattic and has done pretty much all the work to connect WordPress to everything he can find, including ActivityPub and AT Proto. I have to swing back to FeedLand and RSS.chat asap, so we can start building together. Not going to miss his window on this stuff. # Linkblog items for the day Every source in the Signal 500 as standard OPML, free to import into any RSS reader. People are starting to do what I...

Scripting News: Sunday, September 27, 2026

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Sunday, September 27, 2026 As I go through porting Frontier, there's a sad note. What if Apple had made it a goal that Frontier move along with their OS. That it was a unique advantage of the Mac and should be promoted as such. Don't laugh, because Apple did do that for ThinkTank and MORE, a few years before. We spent a lot on advertising, but they spent a lot more advertising our product. We cross-licensed our tech, so everyone in my little company had a Mac. This was a Bill Campbell idea. I was having trouble convincing my board that the Mac was a good bet and they were all PC users. So we got them Macs too, for free, from Apple. And they site-licensed MORE, and you gotta know that really helped sales. They were hungy, and this is something today's tech industry only feels in the most crude way, as in "what can we steal" or "what can we lock down." If they had put a fraction of the commitment behind Frontier that they had for Hyperca...

Scripting News: Saturday, September 26, 2026

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Saturday, September 26, 2026 The bigco's really think they own the web : "XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart from the old version frozen into browsers. This lack of advancement, coupled with the rise of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that offer more flexible and powerful DOM manipulation, has led to a significant decline in the use of client-side XSLT. Its role within the web browser has been largely superseded by JavaScript-based technologies such as JSON+React." In other words we don't need these features for our sites so fuck off. # My Frontier-created Bluesky RSS 2.0 feed is up. It will be updated every night at 11PM Eastern, murphy-willing. One thing it has that the Bluesky-managed feeds don't, titles. Makes a big difference in how it shows up in a timeline. It's an easy fix. # Screen shot of...

Scripting News: Friday, September 25, 2026

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Friday, September 25, 2026 Toni Schneider, CEO of Bluesky, responded to my advice, and a short conversation ensued responded to that. Someday I hope that thread will be browsable in either app, and could be written in either app (Bluesky or RSS.chat) or any other compatible app, which basically means supporting RSS 2.0 with some new elements to get us to the next level of discourse with just a few little standards, like podcasting, but for text. # Atlantis update . We found docserver.root and the static site builds. As you can see from the screen shot it needs moderizing, luckily we have a much more beautiful design already deployed for Drummer. # I'm contemplating a couple of additions to Frontier in the Atlantis release. Two new formats, JSON and Markdown, have come along and become popular since I last worked on Frontier. Two fantastic open formats, in wide use on the web. From many years of working in JavaScript, I miss JSON in Frontier....

Scripting News: Thursday, September 24, 2026

Thursday, September 24, 2026 New example script , shows how to build an RSS feed from a single Mastodon user's account. This is mainly to show past Frontier users how the new product is progressing, not released yet. # Linkblog items for the day The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century. nytimes.com The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms. theatlantic.com Timothy Mellon, a G.O.P. Billionaire, Pulls Back His Money From Senate Republicans. nytimes.com Copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer. This email was sent on: 9/25/2026, 12:00:05 AM Eastern. "Choose to not be offended." This blog has been running for: 31 years, 11 months, 17 days, 9 hours, 0 minutes, 5 seconds. How to subscribe . Read on the web . Click here to unsubscribe.

Scripting News: Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 Just created a new test account at mastodon.social for bullmancuso using Frontier. Claude wrote the glue scripts table. Loaded it at system.verbs.apps.mastodon. I also asked Claude to write a script that builds an RSS feed for davew, my Mastodon account. And it worked . That's a much better feed than what Masto itself produces. It won't be updated at that location so there's no point in subscribing. But wow, this is coming together. If Frontier had been around for all these years you can be sure it would do Mastodon integration pretty well. # On Monday I offered free advice for Toni Schneider, the new CEO at Bluesky. I'm sure everyone is telling him what to do, and as a blogger it's my responsibility to relay my own two cents. I want us all to come together no matter what protocol you're using. We've been waiting for a web to form in the social space. We could do it now, but Bluesky has to consoli...

Scripting News: Tuesday, September 22, 2026

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Tuesday, September 22, 2026 Love that Olbermann is back. # Yesterday I posted a list of builtin verbs in Frontier, as implemented in our current Atlantis app. Today I asked Claude to update the list, I wanted to see which verbs were implemented and not implemented . # The number one waste of time and burnt braincells is they changed the Dock images for all their apps. That's the kind of thing you shouldn't change, like the color and shape of a Stop sign. Or QWERTY on a typewriter. I guess to regular Mac people I'm like Rip Van Winkle. # A functional Frontier # I'm using Frontier on a Mac running MacOS v26.6.2, which is the current version of the OS. # Frontier running on a new Mac. And that's my computer. # It's like the moment I realized, in 2010, that I had succeeded in relocating to NYC. It had been a life ambition to live in Manhattan since I was a kid growing up there. There we...

Scripting News: Monday, September 21, 2026

Monday, September 21, 2026 I asked Claude to create a list of all the verbs in Atlantis . Some of them obviously don't do anything. We don't have the card funtionality, or the osa, rectangle, pict, rez or point verbs. What is pikeRenderer? I think we could have a use for quicktime verbs? There's a new scheduler, I wrote it in 2014 or so, but the old one is there, and we just found a reference to it. This could make a nice community project. # Reminder to self, Frontier must have websockets verbs. I love websockets , and it'll fit in perfectly with everything else Frontier it does. I don't think Websockets existed when Frontier went to sleep. # Brian Lehrer podcast has an esp good one hour episode with interviews about the end of the world as we know it with AI. He's so good at cutting through the hype and getting to reality as are his guests. # I can now publish a new part to the codecasting feed . It was one o...

Scripting News: Sunday, September 20, 2026

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Sunday, September 20, 2026 Frontier news. I have been working on a repo for Frontier pioneers, I started with a few friends, including Brent and Jake who were both on the UserLand team, and have added people very slowly. This is a good time to start showing progress in the project. Still very early for a public release of the software. And I want to do even better than we did with rss.chat a few months ago. And Frontier is a huge thing, all kinds of docs, and archives, and example stuff. It really was 15 years of work done by as many as 5 people. # New verb: string.addressToString . This is how I'm releasing examples. # Chigurgh : "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Frontier must've lived by a good rule. The Atlantis version has tons of bugs but it works. It defied death. I just spent a session updating my nightly backup code, and there were awkard moments. The debugger isn't in yet. The ...

Scripting News: Saturday, September 19, 2026

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Saturday, September 19, 2026 New podcast. Knicks in Five ! (It's not about the Knicks.) # Well I got a lot done today. We had a bit of a meltdown due to a Atlantis bug, where it couldn't handle some text that I threw at it that was a huge file of includes used in everything I do, and I was feeling pretty cheeky, and it blew up. For about an hour you couldn't read my lovely words. But by remembering "slow down to hurry up" Claude figured out what went wrong as I asked 20 questions to narrow it down. And to celebrate, I decided to do something easy -- created a podcast . And it showed up in all the right places . Might be worth listening to as well. Now let's see if this shows up on daveverse.org , that's what I'm really testing. (It worked.) # I wish there were a way to set the dock icons on a Mac. In going from the old machine to the new, the icons are all different. I am juggling so many apps right now, and tota...