This is the page that you get to from the Support button in the Buddies window of the Instant Outliner built into the OPML Editor.

If you have a question about using the tool, please post a comment here. But first, read the docs linked to here. It's bad form to ask a question that's answered in the docs.

A few notes...

1. Current status. I'm running a server for a very small number of people while I work on the software and protocols behind it. If I sent you a username and password then you have access, otherwise, please be patient.

2. The server software is included in the release. If you know how to work with Frontier as a programming environment it certainly is possible to set up your own server, so you don't have to wait for me. In fact, I would appreciate it very much if you didn't. I'm not particularly interested in operating your server. I am interested in a having a tool I can use with others to collaborate on interesting project.s

3. If you want to see what's going on on my server, there is a log.

4. Be sure to update your OPML Editor frequently. To do so choose Update opml.root from the File menu and click on OK to the prompts.

5. There is a universal binary of the Mac app, but it has display glitches. If you want to use an app without glitches then stick with the PowerPC app, but it requires Rosetta to run. Or use the binary app if you don't mind fumbling around a bit. I hope we have the display glitches solved soon.

 9/7/2010; 9:41:00 AM.   .

11.13 mi, 56 minutes.

Took a ride early today, beat the traffic, and the wind. Gorgeous clear day.

I am reminded that I have been spacing out posting to dailymile.com. I will try not to forget in the future. It would be really cool if they could bridge cyclemeter.com and dailymile.com. I would be more than happy to help work out the tech, which would be very simple. Come on guys, perfect opportunity for integration. It'd take at most a day on each end to get it working. And dailymile wouldn't even need any help from cyclemeter.

 9/6/2010; 9:51:19 AM.   .

I managed to sneak in a ride at the end of the day yesterday.

The highlight of the ride, if you can call it that, was my first collision with another bike. It wasn't my first collision, when I was in junior high school I was hit by a car riding to school. No serious injuries, just some scrapes. Yesterday's accident was even less bruising.

Here's what happened.

First, the lanes were hugely crowded. Lots of walkers and people crossing the path. Some not realizing that it's a road, and stopping to have conversations in the middle of it, with little kids running into the path of oncoming traffic. One has to ride extremely cautiously in these circumstances.

Near the end of the ride, I'm pulling up to an intersection where a stopped bike is just starting up, shakily. I give him wide berth and hope for the best. As I'm approaching, he lurks to the left, into my path. I say On Your Left, but he shifts further to the left. I hit the brakes and come to a stop next to him. He tips over onto me and we both go down. I ask "Are you hurt?" he says no and asks if I am. I say no. I get up and put the chain back on, getting my hands real greasy. That was the extent of the discomfort. It took five minutes to get back on the road, and as you can see from the map, only slowed me down to an average of 7 MPH during that mile.

I ended the trip at dusk feeling really good and ready for a nice Italian dinner with a friend visiting from California.

Map. 9.95 miles. 54 minutes.

 9/6/2010; 8:16:45 AM.   .

See yesterday's Instant Outlining update.

Here's how you get on the Instant Outliner.

1. If you haven't already done so, install the OPML Editor.

2. When it asks if you want to update to get the latest parts, say you do.

3. From the Outliner menu, Instant Outliner sub-menu, choose Open My Outline. Your browser should come to the front asking for your username and password. Enter them and click Submit.

4. Repeat step 3, this time the outline will open.

5. To create a new entry, click the New Entry button in the window. Type the text. Then hit the Save button.

6. You will see in my outline a section with people you can follow. It's still very quiet, and probably will stay that way for a while. The best thing to do is to use the outliner to narrate your work, and eventually we'll add some discovery tools.

From there, if you have questions, post them here.

 9/4/2010; 2:41:52 PM.   .

 9/3/2010; 9:20:47 PM.   .

The launch of Ping, following the mis-handling of Antennagate, show that Apple isn't ready for the success they've already achieved.

The problems with the iPhone 4 antenna were easily handled, with an apology and a little grace. Show some concern for customers and the investment they make in these products (very substantial if you add up the monthly fee over the life of the contract). Most other companies Apple's size would have handled it without skipping a beat. Some companies even look for situations like this to demonstrate very visibly an alliance with their customers (thinking of Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol scares).

Now Ping, which, if it were what it appeared to be at rollout would be a total game-changer. Because Apple failed completely to create a social network, and then made the mistake of calling it a social network. The inability to like a song as you listen to it, the assymetry of features for stars and users (they get all the Facebook-like features, we basically get to admire them). And today, it becomes clear that they didn't even anticipate spam.

It's not that they're ill-intentioned, they're just ill-prepared. More than their users, they live in a Reality Distortion Field, and the people who make the Computer For the Rest of Us have no clue who the rest of us are and what we're doing. But that's okay, there's a solution. Do some research, ask some questions, and listen. Apple desperately needs to do that. The world has moved on, they have a lot of catching up to do.

 9/3/2010; 2:50:36 PM.   .

Whatever Earl turns into as it brushes by the east coast, it's starting to be here in NYC. A few drizzles. A bit of wind. And a general semi-stormy atmosphere. Then the power went out in my apartment, unrelated to the weather (construction in the building) so that was my cue to get the fuck out of the house and onto the best bike in the world and go for my daily ride.

As I headed north the intermittent drops turned into a steady rain, so I turned around at the Intrepid, but by the time I got back to the Village the rain had stopped, so I headed to the Battery where I stopped for a rest and checked in at Facebook.

Got a cool video of a water taxi!

Stopped to take a picture of a ghost bike that comemorates a biker killed riding in NY.

The map. 53 minutes. 9.4 miles.

 9/3/2010; 12:50:15 PM.   .

I'm going to put a couple of hours into trying to resurrect FriendsOfDave. I miss it too much. I want to know what Om and Matt and Bijan and Fred and Sylvia et al are posting to their blogs. So here's the deal. Are there any services that watch an RSS feed and post to a Twitter account when a new item is available? I'm going to turn FOD into a feed, and when that's done, I'd like to hook it up that way. And if none of them are still running, at least you can hook in via your RSS reader app.

The dwcodeupdates feed is already available in RSS, here:

http://bits.codecasting.org/rss.xml

Back in a bit with some links. And in the meantime if you know of an RSS-to-Twitter web app, please post a pointer in a comment. Thanks!

rsstotwitter.com is no longer running.

Looks like TwitterFeed is still running.

Update: Here's the feed for FriendsOfDave.

Update: I set up TwitterFeed to publish updates from the feed to the Twitter account. It works. Nice!

However, it's slower than the original way. It only catches 5 updates at a time, and only checks once every half-hour. But it's better than nothing.

Update: I also set up TwitterFeed to handle dwcodeupdates.

Update: I added rssCloud support to the FriendsOfDave feed, in case TwitterFeed supports it, or would care to support it. I would like things to update faster. This is how you can do that.

 9/3/2010; 10:53:25 AM.   .

If you want an idea of what the Instant Outliner is, check out this excellent survey by Hutch Carpenter.

Very quietly, and I mean very quietly I've been working on rounding out the features of the latest OPML Editor-based implementation of Instant Outlining. This one is a keeper, I think -- more so than the previous releases.

The realtime updating code is pretty good. Based on long-polling and mailboxes. It works even if you're logged on at more than one location. Even if they both have the same IP address.

There's now a follow-unfollow paradigm, so not everyone is hooked in by default with everyone else. It works like RSS. The person being followed is not aware who is following, and does not have to give permission. However the updates are restricted to a single server.

The server is also part of the implementation. You can't get the client software without getting a server. However the server is disabled by default. The point is that is should be very easy to set up another instance.

Federation isn't implemented, but it is being thought about.

And the protocol is open. To prove that it's open, I've been working step-by-step with Marc Barrot, who is implementing an instant outliner that works with mine in his Javascript outline editor, iJot. It's important for a lot of reasons. For me, selfishly, it means I will be able to edit my instant outline on my iPhone or iPad, which doesn't have an implementation of the OPML Editor.

And I hear that might not be totally impossible.

Next week I'm going to Seattle to hang out with my old programming partner, Brent Simmons, and his lovely wife Sheila. We're going to get me booted up on kernel development. It's been way too long since I've gotten in there and been able to fix bugs and add new features. Funny how time flies when you're having fun.

If you want to try the Instant Outliner, let me know, send an email. All I have to do is create a username and password on my server. All the software is released.

 9/3/2010; 10:06:58 AM.   .

A fascinating post on Ars Technica on the Twtiter implementation of OAuth.

It confirms a concern I had. Since the OPML Editor is open source, and it supports Twitter's implementation of OAuth, I didn't see what good it did to pass around "secrets" in the source code. But I did what I was asked to do. I wasn't watching the developer mail list closely so I didn't see the discussions Ryan Paul mentions.

The more I read about what Twitter is doing these days, the more I see the shift away from developers and toward internal development. When people "argue" with me or have a "difference of opinion" about OAuth, they seem to only look at the technical issues. As if every developer could pour infinite resources down every hole. In practice, you only have so many hours in a day, and worse, you have fewer and fewer remaining hours in your life. So you have to choose carefully where you spend your time.

There are lots of ways for platforms to fail, and it can be hard to parse when the platform is failing, but the platform vendor is prospering. Sometimes that growth comes from eating the developers, which seems to me very much like what Twitter is doing now.

So the OAuth transition will be the first of many hurdles for developers. I choose not to jump over hurdles for platform vendors. I learned a long time ago that the only platform that actually works is one with no vendor. The more the vendor controls the developers, the less I want to be part of the community.

At the same time, I was running out of clever ideas for projects to do with Twitter. They haven't added any functionality that I'm interested in in a long time. I was at the point last year where I felt that everything interesting that could be done with Twitter had already been done. That every nook and cranny of their API had been explored. It seems they agree, more or less, because their approach is to try to capture the developer growth from two or three years ago. At the same time, no new territory is opening up. That, and the new controls, say the Twitter coral reef is no longer attracting much new life. With the caveat that that's how it seems to me, and I've been wrong many times before.

 9/3/2010; 8:59:06 AM.   .

Another in an endless series of test posts.

 9/3/2010; 2:27:34 AM.   .

Yesterday I reported that the apps that I thought would drown in the Oauthpocalypse were still alive.

I don't usually like the death metaphor when it comes to software, but -- these guys are now really, officially, seriously and permanently dead.

 9/2/2010; 10:12:13 PM.   .

You know it's not so bad riding mid-day in the middle of a heat wave.

For one thing, most people stay indoors, so the path isn't crowded.

The first half of the trip is great cause there's a powerful tail wind. I fly!

The return ride is a great workout cause there's a huge head wind. I crawl. My legs burn.

But always, the breeze actually keeps me cool. I think it would be worse if there was no motion in the air.

In any case, after a morning of dealing with stupid uncooperative servers, there's nothing like pounding the pavement with my bike, which I absolutely adore. Great ride.

The map. I hour three minutes. 11.86 miles.

 9/2/2010; 2:17:37 PM.   .

We lost two-plus hours this morning as I scrambled to rebuild the scripting.com server.

A mysterious outage. I tried to reboot the server over and over, and it wouldn't come back. So I created another instance, but kept making mistakes with AWS. Then after fretting and thinking of a million other ways to do it, I sat down with pen and paper and wrote down, step by step, what I thought would work. Then I did it. It worked.

Moral of the story, there are no shortcuts possible. You must pay the piper. And as Jerry once sang, so wisely:

I know the rent is in arrears.

The dog has not been fed in years.

It's even worse than it appears!

See, Jerry was a musician, but he understood programming.

Namaste y'all!

Still diggin.

 9/2/2010; 11:10:58 AM.   .

Further examination of Apple's new social network reveals more problems.

To review from last night's post:

1. It's awkward, at least, that it runs in iTunes and not a web browser. There's no Back button, no way to copy the address of a page and share it outside of iTunes. Also if it were just a website we'd be able to access it from an iPad now, not some time in the future.

2. There's no way to Like the song you're listening to. In other words there doesn't seem to be any integration with the music-listening app, even though the social network is embedded in it.

3. It's a ghost town. Obviously they're recommending all the musicians they have, because they have nothing to do with my musical interests. Same with users.

Now, onto this morning's revelation.

Chuck Shotton writes: "It seems that the only way for mere mortals to post something to the timeline is to buy a song, review an album, or commit some other act of commerce on the iTunes Store, which I certainly have never done.

"It's unfortunate, because the capability is there to do much more. I followed Cold Play as an experiment and they can post pics, songs, status updates, and all the stuff you'd expect to do with a Facebook-like social media tool.

"I'm baffled why Apple has this locked down for normal users. Someone there has to have seen the potential for this to totally upset the social media balance. But if they cripple it at the outset, that critical mass of users will never happen, IMO."

So Ping is not a social network, by any realistic definition of the term.

Update #1: My guess as to why we can't post to the timeline is that Apple is afraid we might say something harsh about them or Ping.

Update #2: Doc Searls nailed it on Steve Jobs's art, in 1997.

 9/2/2010; 8:15:04 AM.   .

I've got iTunes 10 installed, and have signed up on Ping.

My handle is "scriptingnews." You're welcome to follow me.

To be clear, they didn't give me a choice of name. That's the name I chose when I got my first iPod or whatever got me logged into their store the first time. (I don't remember.) I never would have chosen to be scriptingnews on a social network. Not at all obvious how to change it, if I can.

Here are their first recommendations. They bear absolutely no resemblance to any music I listen to or people I know. Obviously this is very very early days for Ping.

One thing I don't like about Ping is that it isn't in my web browser. I keep looking for the Back button. I keep wanting to find a URL so I can publish a link somewhere else. I think this is a big lose. It's the only social network I've ever tried that isn't in the web. Right now I think that's a deal-stopper.

So I played one of my current favorites thinking there would be an easy gesture in the iTunes interface to tell my Ping followers that I like it. After all why bother integrating it with iTunes if there is no integration? Well, there's nothing in the right-click menu for pinging the song. No menus, nothing anywhere in the user interface. What the heck were they thinking?? Hello, anyone home at Apple??

Conclusion: There's nothing, at this time, to do in Ping.

 9/1/2010; 10:32:42 PM.   .

This is really puzzling.

The OAuthcalypse came and went, and the apps that it should have killed, the ones that use basic authentication, are still running.

Two examples: dwcodeupdates and friendsofdave.

The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that they made exceptions for these two accounts for some reason.

I felt I had to document this.

So, it is documented. Any theories welcome. (That aren't paranoid or paranormal.)

 9/1/2010; 6:42:13 PM.   .

Ping is Apple's big announcement today. The one that they'll be adding new stuff onto for years and years. The other announcements are just continuations of threads they started long ago. This is a new thread.

They call it a social network "for music."

But it won't be "for music" for very long, if it even is just that at startup.

It'll be Apple's social network for PR.

It'll be Apple's social network for TV.

It'll be Apple's social network for developers.

It'll be Apple's social network for Steve Jobs.

All of Apple's stores will be on the network, so there will be a location angle. How long before Steve announces a new feature for the stores called (what else) "check in."

He said it's like Facebook or Twitter but for music, but that's just the opening-day positioning. It won't last.

Now the big question for the Scripting News community -- is there an API? Will developers get a hook into Ping? Will I be able to ping everyone when I advance a level in Angry Birds? (for example)

One more thing, great name, but they'll never register it as a trademark. Ping is a big word in this space. Long long before any of Apple's competitors were in the space.

 9/1/2010; 2:29:37 PM.   .

I can't imagine there are many people who read this blog who are not tuned in, with Safari running on a Mac or iPhone or iPad, wondering what Uncle Steve is going to pull out of his hat.

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event

 9/1/2010; 12:51:52 PM.   .

I've never participated in a hackathon, so I can't tell whether they produce anything or not. I'm assuming that at least some of the readers of this blog have been to one or more.

What's it like?

What kind of software is produced?

Is any of it useful?

Were any commercial products hatched at hackathons? Were any of them successful?

My intuition says that they're pointless exercises. I have at times gone on retreats with the idea of emerging with something useful or marketable, but I have to say the big leaps in software that I've seen or taken part of, come with steady daily work, when you've built up a head of steam over weeks or months.

It seems to me that the hackathon idea is more a dream of investors or marketers, that they can get a bunch of programmers in a room to invent something they can make money with. But that's just my impression.

If you have a story of a hackathon, please tell it.

 9/1/2010; 12:14:42 PM.   .

Scorcha is NY-ese for "hot!"

Yeah it's the hottest summer in history.

A climate-change denier adds "that we know of."

Yes, there is a conspiracy. Back in the late 1800s some liberal limp-wristed Obama-lovers wiped a whole decade off the record. Why? Because it was much hotter than this summer was going to be. They just knew it. And they did it to piss off the idiots of the 21st century. Glad we got to the bottom of that one.

Anyway....

10.84 miles. 56 minutes.

When it's this hot, even if it isn't a record, you slow down and take it easy.

 9/1/2010; 9:48:29 AM.   .

First a caveat, as far as I know DailyMile might take a CycleMeter KML file as input.

However, if it doesn't...

It should!

That's basically all I have to say.

A little detail.

When I go for a ride, when I reach the starting point, I get out my iPhone and reset CycleMeter. When I stop to rest, I hit the Stop button. When I resume the ride I hit continue. When I'm done, I hit Done. At that point it sends me an email with a link to Google Maps that opens a KML file it generates that contains all the info about my ride.

I just signed up for DailyMile, which seems to be a Twitter-like service for people who work out. People can follow you and you can follow others. And they post information about their workouts. Like me, people who exercise systematically love these gadgets and community systems, so why not work on the connection! I mean CycleMeter already goes to the trouble to output a standard format. DailyMile should accept that as input. And off we go!

BTW, here's what the XML inside a KML file looks like

KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language.

 8/31/2010; 11:16:43 AM.   .

Got out real early today cause it's going to be another scorcher.

Even at 7:30AM it was in the 80s. But it was a great ride. 50 minutes rolling, 10.33 miles.

6-minute break at turnaround at 99th St. Little or no breeze.

The river was glassy.

PS: I joined dailymile.com. Wonder if they accept KML files as posts?

 8/31/2010; 8:36:52 AM.   .

Gruber commented on my very brief post on Apple's boycott and how even a user can see it's not working. There's no dispute. You come across lots of stuff, movie trailers, corporate fact sheets, bike route maps, even press releases -- in Flash. You or I may not like it, but the theory that Apple's lack of support for Flash would force them to convert, well that isn't working. That's all I said.

Gruber, however, reduced it to the same old boring battle-to-the-death between two titans, in which us little guys are mere spectators. Sorry but that just isn't how I view it. My perspective is that of an iPad user. I like the damned thing. But I feel like a pawn, and I don't like that.

Of course I'll get more of the usual boilerplate moral bullshit from Flash haters saying whose fault this really is. I don't care.

Maybe if (hint hint) Gruber had comments on his blog, his minions wouldn't feel the need to vent on the sites he points to? Just a thought.

 8/31/2010; 7:02:50 AM.   .

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Here's a picture.

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FYI: You're soaking in it. :-)