Category Archives: Weblogs

Weblogger meets Weblogger

This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting David of Read This Blog! fame and his wife Diane. They are currently on a river cruise in Germany and stopped in Speyer, close to where André and I live.

I took them on a little excursion to the Palatinate Forest and along the Deutsche Weinstraße. The weather was perfect, and we had a nice view from the Kalmit:

(Photo courtesy of David Singer.)

The last time David and I met was on May 17, 2000 in Amsterdam at a Scripting News Dinner. Who would have thought that bloggers from that era would still meet each other decades later!

Return of the blog

Garret is back in the blogging-saddle over on dangerousmeta!

“Blogs have been largely relegated in the face of the instant-satisfaction social media. Those that are being linked on commercial news services regurgitate universal knowledge, inspirational quotes, and ‘best practices’ boilerplate. In addition, we are now tracked, tabulated, diced, sliced and served to corporate interests on a golden platter. I don’t need to tell you why or how – we all know we’ve signed our souls away for the terrifyingly bad user interfaces of services like Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and others. Did I say bad? I mean purposely bad, to encourage you to do what they want, while making it truly difficult to do what you want.
[…]
[W]e all need a kick in the ass to stop with the easy-to-consume poison Kool-Aid, and start caring about this. Others of my blog generation have made the move, it’s past time for me to do so.

I call “time” for the renaissance of the independent self-hosted weblog. I don’t care what you use, or how you use it, but get the hell off the commercial social services and get an independent weblog.

Own your information. Control your information. “

Welcome back Garret. We’ve missed you!

Ye olde weblogge

Ask MetaFilter: Any old-school bloggers still posting? User y6y6y6 is “looking for folks blogging pre-2002 that are still going”. Update: You can find all the weblogs in this list.

Obviously, I’m still blogging, but so are many other people. Re-found some old favorites in the comments of this thread, especially some whose feeds stopped updating in my very old version of Netnewswire (3.2.15, in case you were wondering.)

Speaking of which, Netnewswire 5.0 is now available! It’s open source and free, and it requires MacOS 10.14.4 or newer. (Which means I will have to update my operating system.) An iOS version is also on the way.

Urheberrechtsreform in der EU

Die Zeit: Europa-Abgeordnete stimmen für Reform des Urheberrechts. “Google oder YouTube sollen Künstler vergüten, wenn deren Inhalte auf ihren Plattformen angeboten werden. Kritiker fürchten Zensur durch die Urheberrechtsreform.”

Die Zeit: Urheberrechtsreform: Diese Überschrift dürfen Sie künftig nicht mehr zitieren. “Die Lobbyarbeit ist aufgegangen: Die EU-Urheberrechtsreform belohnt die Verlage. Für uns alle ist sie desaströs. Die freie Verbreitung von Informationen ist in Gefahr.” Ein Kommentar von Lisa Hegemann.

Wenn diese Urheberrechtsreform in dieser Form in Kraft tritt, kann ich – zusammen mit allen anderen Webloggern in der EU – mein Blog dichtmachen. Dann dürfte ich nämlich hier statt dem obigen Text nur schreiben:

Hier, lest mal diesen Artikel und den Kommentar dazu auf Zeit online. Es geht um die Reform des EU-Urheberrechts.

Long live my RSS reader!

Brent Simmons: Historical code: NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 and New World NetNewsWire. “I don’t know what to do about NetNewsWire 3.3.2, which was the last release of the non-Lite full version. That code is really, really old and I don’t even really want to publish it. But I might. Or I might get it building and release a 3.4 version of it.”

“My goal used to be to make NetNewsWire a great Mac app with lots of paying users. Secondary goals were to promote reading and writing on the web, the blogosphere, and RSS and open web standards.
My goal now is to make NetNewsWire a great Mac app with lots of users. Other, no-less-important, goals are to:

  • Promote healthier news-reading via the open web and RSS
  • Promote native Mac app development by providing a good example and by making the code open source

(Yes, I’m strongly considering an iOS version, but I’m concentrating on the Mac app first.)”

I’ve been a NetNewsWire user since way-back-when, and I’m still using it to this day – version 3.2.15, to be exact. I don’t use it to read news, but I subscribe to the feeds of 272 websites, weblogs etc., and I’m still a huge fan of NetNewsWire. Thanks, Brent, for putting in the effort to re-create NetNewsWire!