Richard MacManus
@ricmac@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

I look back at the dawn of blogging and RSS in 1999. At the start of that year, a small community of "loggers" were designing and writing weblogs, but it wasn't until the launch of Blogger in August '99 that it became easy for non-techies to publish a blog. Alongside this, Netscape and ​Dave Winer had early versions of RSS — Netscape's was the official RSS format at this time, but it was very limited. cybercultural.com/p/blogs-rss-

Wouter@nukleos
@nukleos@mendeddrum.org replied  ·  activity timestamp yesterday
@ricmac @davew

My blog started at the end of 1999, on Dave Winer´s EditThisPage.com. I still recall that feeling of wonder when I saw my first posts, after just typing a bit of text into a box on a webpage!

Still blogging today, but now on WordPress (I migrated all the content from my EditThisPage.com site manually, post by post)...
Richard MacManus
@ricmac@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

It's easy to forget now, but the Netscape versions of #RSS in 1991 were not first-class citizens of the web — in 0.90 you could only include post headlines, and in 0.91 the 'description' tag was limited to 500 characters. At this time, Dave Winer had his own 'scriptingnews' XML format, and he was pushing Netscape to expand the allowable content. In retrospect, he was totally right — and eventually RSS 2.0 did that of course.

(p.s. unfortunately Dave seems to be blocking me, so I can't tag him)