Scripting News: Thursday, February 19, 2026

President Obama going to the NBA All-Star game made the freaking All-Star game worth something. Perfect place for him to show up. #
It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).#
They all say podcasting's open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.#
Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple. #
I wrote a this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards. #
I would like to have an OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing. #
Just noted that Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continues, I read the rest. That's the way I've always read news, going back to the kitchen table at my childhood home where we subscribed to the NY Times, print edition (this was long before the web) and we all sat around the table in the morning reading it and telling each other what we found. News isn't like email. But FeedLand does have a mailbox reader, patterned after Brent's NetNewsWire (only steal from the best). There are times when that's what you want. And mostly I wanted to thank Brent for the mention. BTW, that's not the only new idea in FeedLand. Let's get to know each others' products. That's one of the mistakes we made last time -- thinking each of our products was a self-contained universe. We are part of a community that grew from the web. So by definition we are all just part of a very big world. All our products work together, and to preserve that we as people must all work together too. #
Linkblog items for the day
Current is a new RSS reader that's more like a river than an inbox.

techcrunch.com
Baby chicks link certain sounds with shapes, just like humans do.

npr.org
Mastodon is testing easier ways to get you started in the fediverse.

theverge.com
John Spurlock is assembling a list of shows that support HLS video in Apple Podcasts.

gist.github.com
James Cridland on video in Apple Podcasts.

podnews.net
Copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.
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