Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
Brent Simmons posted a note in RSS.chat about how to connect with NNW. I have a fairly detailed response, that says dynamic OPML is the way to go, in both directions. I know serving it publicly will be a problem, that's why we're going to move FeedLand into position to solve that. FreshRSS , InoReader and my own FeedLand already support it. It feels like this is getting established. I still want a…
Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an…
Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away. I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations . When I see a product that fits in with what I'm doing my first impulse is how do we connect them? This is one of the basic great things about computers and our…
I was looking for a good screen shot of Radio UserLand. Just found this one on Facebook , and hope to preserve it via the search feature here.
I'm still a NYT subscriber, although I don't read it very often, but when there's news I will go there. Anyway, they used to have a 10-article per month gift link rule. I used to ration them, but if by the end of the month I hadn't used them up I'd share links more liberally. A few weeks ago they lifted the limit. I thought that's nice, the NYT found that the web was still useful to spread the…
What if one day, out of the blue, Claude could only speak Chinese.
I've been doing this for all of this year, and the frustration finally led me to this rule, which I just asked Claude to play back for me. I offer it to you, a human, on how to get your Claude to work better for you, as it does for me. What follows is what Claude wrote as I asked it to summarize how we work. Here's the mode as I understand it: (Claude speaking..) Days are yours, nights are mine.…
I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words. Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a simple normal writing interface, and a great API for competitive apps. That's the big opportunity you all can't see for some…
The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country. They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise. The Democrats can have any combination of points of view, as long as they play by the rules of democracy. In fact it would be an even better demo if their points of view were…
I just went through hell trying to respond to an email that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link to the message, so I clicked it, took me to a Mastodon post, where there was a bit of (valid) snark, from a longtime friend. So I clicked Reply, and then the dialog from hell . I…
If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype -- don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps…
Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest. These kinds of problems always pop up at the worst time.…
I was looking for a codename for a new scripting environment Claude and I are making attempting in every way to do exactly what Frontier does. But until it does that I need a nice name, memorable, maybe a bit magical and positive. Frontier has been gone, thought to be lost, but with the advent of Claude Code we were able to get it running again in current OSes on current hardware. I shouldn't call…
Manton : "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."
I have Claude update me on all posts on both RSS.chat sites when we start for a day. I read them all when they're posted, but one was in German, which Claude automatically translated for me, and it's an interesting question . Which I have answered .
I see the new Game of Thrones series just completed it third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People say this show is good, so I will probably give it another try.
Anyway, one of those streaming services I get now is Paramount+ which is owned by the Ellisons, which I don't like, but they have a show that is really excellent esp if you like British crime stories, which I most definitely do, even if most of the actors are American, and it probably was recorded in Vancouver or in Queens. It's called, unimaginatively, The Agency , as in the Central Intelligence…
I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them.
Working with Claude on the user interface of RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like Frontier , and understand it, in a minute or two. We've done this project in three stages, not knowing at the first two that there would be another one. Now we're working on the…
Here's the sign of success . ( screen shot .) I wrote a post on demo.rss.chat was automatically cross-posted to Bluesky via micro.blog. Because the post has a title, it was routed to standard.site . What does that mean? I still don't really understand, when I do I will explain it here. But part of the answer is that we now have a data structure in atmosphere that looks like an RSS item with…
I want to connect RSS to AT Proto , both ways, inbound and out. Toward that end, today I helped Leaflet , a very nice editor for AT Proto, make their outbound RSS feed better. We should have all our best editors, everywhere, hooked up over popular web standards. And I want my posts to show up not only in Bluesky but also in standard.site . I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the swiss…
On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington , a former Quicktime developer at Apple. We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before and my thought was that we should have a conference of people doing what we're both doing. Taking a craft we were already…
BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together…
I'm trying to move my whole programming act from Frontier on the Mac to Electric Drummer anywhere. I need to start using the new machines everywhere. I've dreaded this, not because I'm starting over, I'm not. I have to bring with me all the projects I work on to keep my various online sites working. How to set this up? Claude just converted the UserTalk language and the Frontier environment to…
There's a new version of the FeedLand server.
If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance…
Like a lot of other people, I want to know where Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider . We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users…
I've been on quest to see if we could bridge AT Proto and RSS. I love the brightly colored-editors that are popping up inside AT Proto Land, and I want them to play with us in the land of RSS.
I asked Claude for a list of popular feed readers that hook into WebSub. Turns out it wasn't a simple answer.
RSS.chat now supports WebSub . This means that posts on RSS.chat will appear instantly in compatible feed reader apps.
I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that the Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone…
2019 : "This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”
TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance. It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat project to a standards body like the W3C or the IETF. I develop the software first, make sure I'm happy with it, then open it up…
Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating one user's feed , validating the everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and…
Also I just heard about FreshRSS . This has all the features we've been wanting others to support. I hear it's recommended by NNW, and supports the Google Reader API. These are my kind of people. Interop is all that matters, when you're doing software for news. It's been around since 2013 . Imagine if we had support from journalism. We should have been working together all this time.
BTW, we figured out how we're going to implement WebSub support.
Also Claude is a new kind of intelligence and when you it its sweet spot it'll blow you away how much it can do in very little time. But it isn't trainable the way a dog is, for example, or a human assistant. If you keep asking for things a certain way, a dog or human will get the idea, esp if they get a nice treat along with it. Nothing can cause Claude to remember "how we do things" -- it starts…
Claude is not ready to run the world. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me. Maybe in the next release or the one after that. It's too forgetful. And it definitely hallucinates and sometimes when it could do damage. And when it asks for permission I can't imagine any human has any idea wtf it's talking about. This shouldn't be a political thing, we should be…
We need a way to define lists of writers independent of the site they write on. They are represented by an RSS feed with the basic features required for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML.
Back when digital cameras were new, I suggested probably in a blog post that they add a feature that tells a joke before taking a picture so everyone is smiling, not fake smiles but real ones.
Fascinating thread on Hacker News about RSS.
Taking some time off to breathe and regain perspective. Fixed a few bugs, and wrote about the big picture on demo.rss.chat . I really want to get a project going to peer with standard.site apps running in AT Proto, both ways, from us to them, and from them to us, via RSS. We can peer with them because as far as I can tell they implement textcasting . This bridge would demonstrate something…
A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version now. Thanks!
One of the things you learn working with a bot is how much saying the niceties are good for you, even when the "person" would still do what you ask if you weren't so nice.
Of course I love RSS . ;-)
Ultimately AI will flatten out the differences in languages.
The month of July is history . A fine month. A coral reef was seeded.