FeedCity

RSS readers mostly 1 work by "polling" web feeds to retrieve posts. At a specified interval, the server will try to download every feed to which a user is subscribed, and add any new posts to the database. These posts are then displayed in a user's reader. Building a web rea...

Me and Julio down by Shaka when the walls fell.

I’m at a dinner tonight and they have these old magazines on the table, including some old copies of WIRED, which, if you can imagine, as a kid in Houston in the 90s, was a portal to the amazing world of the internet and technology. I flipped through, and there is an entire web hosting … Continue reading Every 6 Minutes →

I had a great talk/podcast interview yesterday with Matthias Pfefferle about everything I'm interested in re WordPress and networking, and our interests overlap almost 100 percent. I was telling him about WordLand and explaining how I wanted to see a whole market of editors....

Listening to This Week in Startups interviewing Medium’s Tony Stubblebine. He makes the wild claim that ChatGPT’s obsession with the em dash is because it’s so commonly used in Medium posts! I’m having trouble accepting this theory, but it would be amazing if true.

This town, at the end of the Metro North line, looks like an ideal place to park yourself for easy access to the city, yet a fairly country experience.

Wednesday session

I've heard some reports of people having trouble using WordLand. I was just able to do a test post, and I can see from the logs that other people are successfully posting. It would be helpful if people with accounts could do a short test post. And if you have something to report, here's a good place to do it.

A bunch of new people are trying out FeedLand news products. I haven't looked at them in a long time. I'm glad they're looking, but most of my demo news products were broken. Oy. It was hard to untangle. It should be a lot easier, and next time I can dig in and do it over I think it will be. Anyway as I convert my demos, I'll list them here: mblriver.com, politics.newsriver.org, bloggers.scripting.com, dave.podcatch.com.

I will mourn those who I feel grief over. You can’t demand I mourn. You may request basic respect for the dead. You can’t demand I respect a legacy I find invidious. You can’t demand I ignore the words of the dead. If you can demand my feelings and thoughts be “correct,” you are authoritarian.

Love this story and illustrations on animator James Baker’s blog, from a trip to China in the late 1980s.

I was going to save this announcement for later, but I’m just too excited: Harry Roberts will be speaking at Web Day Out! Goddamn, that’s one fine line-up, and it isn’t even complete yet! Get your ticket if you haven’t already. There’s a bit of a story behind the talk that...

In a piece I wrote yesterday on my WordPress blog, I offered to do a virtual handshake with the people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. I never considered their point of view, but in fairness, they never would talk to us except to dictate and dominate. In the piece I try to explain how it all looked from my point of view, that of a developer who had adopted RSS in favor of my own earlier format. Most of the stories miss the real innovator here, and when you find out who it is you will be surprised. (It's not me, most of my job re RSS has been fairly thankless and not creative. I wish other people would share the load. And definitely not profitable, but still worth doing because the web is the only place independent developers can work without the interference of big tech companies.)

I’m on my first United flight with Starlink, and wow! I ran a fast.com test and got 110 mbps down and 38 mbps up, which is insane. 28ms ping times. While flying! When you think of all of the engineering and technology coming together to let me blog this it’s really incredible.

Says something about Vimeo’s decline that I heard about them being acquired not from the tech news websites that I read all the time, but from Cartoon Brew in my RSS reader:

Vimeo, once the internet’s most prestigious stage for independent filmmakers and animators, is being acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal.

There is a narrow space for an indie-focused, YouTube alternative. Hosting video is difficult.

Last weekend, I joined forces with my buddy Hunter to make a game for PlayJam 8, a game jam for the adorable yellow Playdate game console. Introducing: Stellar Scrapm'n! Descend into debt as you ascend to the stars in a clunky little hauling ship. Crank to steer through rock...

It's really simpler than really simple.

It’s funny to me that Apple made the new battery pack exclusive to the iPhone Air. If I really wanted the thinnest possible phone, no way I’m putting a case or extra battery on it. Even the bumper seems like too much.