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FeedCity

People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.

A public list by feedcity.

Scripting News

I wish ChatGPT would listen when I say "Just answer the question." I've tried, but when it can't figure it out it ignores the request and dumps a lot of bullshit at you. Maybe Trump can address that in his keynote to the AI conference in DC. Just kidding.

Scripting News

Dress like ICE

We should all wear masks like the ICE cops wear. They deserve recognition for blazing new fashion trails.

The new office dress standard.

Scripting News

Someday Manton and I will make a very nice Markdown editor for Mastodon, and it'll work very nicely, and then I'll pitch Rich Siegel to do the same for BBEdit. That will nail it once and for all that Mastodon is a blogging platform. He's the right guy to do it, he has all the protocols implemented on micro.blog. All I want is a REST version of what the MetaWeblog API has been doing since 1998 or so. We're turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

Scripting News

This comment makes my day. Some features you develop and never use. I poured a month or so into the blogroll software last year, and it turned out to be a total win. All the new stuff floats to the top. I can quickly find out what they posted. It's a portable version of my fe...

James' Coffee Blog
James' Coffee Blog

Mashups

I have had the question “what is the blog equivalent of a mashup?” in the back of my head for a while. Joe’s most recent blog post, “Return to Mashups”, further has me thinking about this question. What does it mean for a blog post – or an entire blog – to be a mashup? My thi...

Manuel Moreale
• Manuel Moreale

RSS feeds

If there’s one phenomenon I can’t wrap my head around is the proliferation of people who are tech-savvy and nerdy enough to know what RSS is but are also unable to discover my RSS feeds. A non-trivial percentage of the people subscribed to both my blog-to-email newsletter a...

Manton Reece

In related client API news, Dave Winer has also been hammering on this recently from his perspective working on WordLand and the long history of the MetaWeblog API:

But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it’s only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon.

Lear year, I really wanted to see Mastodon adopt an open posting API. I even wrote a FEP to fix some limitations in how APIs were too hard-coded to Mastodon’s capabilities. It went nowhere.

Manton Reece

Steve Bate has a long blog post about why ActivityPub’s client-to-server protocol has not been implemented:

Yet despite its promise, ActivityPub C2S has seen minimal real-world adoption. Most Fediverse platforms — including Mastodon, the dominant implementation — have actively avoided supporting it. Instead, they expose custom APIs that tightly couple client behavior to server internals.

More clients should use Micropub. It is also a W3C recommendation, but unlike C2S, Micropub is already widely implemented and has evolved through extensions to accommodate most real-world use cases.

ArtLung
• Joe Crawford

Return to Mashups

I emailed James about his post Brainstorming a tool to follow new album releases with Wikipedia. He mentions my mirrored IndieWeb Profile page. I mentioned in the email that the more interesting page from the IndieWeb wiki I mirror is the Front End Study Hall page. That page pulls in the content of the page,...

Scripting News

Part of the reason I don't like it is that I pay for the NYT and read very little of it, and most of what I read I think is bullshit. But there still is a bit of credibility in it. So even though I'm over-paying for this, they still want more money. Every fucking time I go to the site they stop me to be sure now isn't the time I'm going to go for the "full package." Even if I did, I'm sure there would be an even bigger package that I could pay more money for and not read like the rest of their bullshit. I hate them more than I usually would because I used to trust them, when I was a kid, I trusted them blindly. Being betrayed like that, ugh. BTW the NYT is my hometown paper, but you know what they don't even cover the Mets and Knicks. Fuck that shit. (Said in the NY fucking dialect of English.)

Scripting News

I was going to recommend an episode of The Daily podcast, but when I found the show page on Apple podcasts, it said it was subscribers only. They interviewed the person who runs KFSK, an Alaska public radio station. Very revealing. I listened to it in a standard commercial podcast client. How did it know that I am a NYT subscriber, so I could listen? I heard from a few people who don't subscribe to the NYT, they can't get through. There was a lot of cooperation going on there, and I don't really like listening to episodes that I can't pass on to friends. That's cheap, I also don't read Krugman any longer for the same reason I guess. I'm going to start recommending specific episodes of podcasts, but only ones that everyone can listen to. Not even sure why I want to do that, but it feels right. If the money went to KFSK I would definitely feel better.

Scripting News

I'm going to add a command to WordLand that lets you quickly edit the text of the current post in Markdown. So if you you can quickly change the URL on a link. Or just see what you got when you pasted some text into the document. The thing I don't want to do is a full-blown Markdown editor. I want to do that too at some point, or leave the door open for other developers to do it. I'm not trying to own the market for nice editors for WordPress, I just want to open the market. And along the way I'm going to do a bunch of marketing for WordPress that it really needs. I hope Matt and company appreciate this. WordPress needs, imho, a kind of love and support that honestly it hasn't been getting.

Scripting News

I should do this more often, spelunking around an old server that's just sitting there. I was wondering why my posts to my linkblog feed were going to Mastodon, since I only post them to Bluesky in my new software. I just found out. I have an app running on this server called FeedToMasto, which apparently is watching that feed. It's been chugging away like an abandoned science fiction robot, seeing if I posted anything to my linkblog, and forwarding it to Mastodon if I have. Hello my robot friend, you were forgotten but still appreciated. It's open source, of course, and appears to be well-documented. If you're looking for example code that reads feeds and pushed the result to interesting places, this is for you.