FeedCity

It's interesting to see the ATProto solution to a problem we solved in RSS-land a few years ago, how to include Markdown along with other source formats (HTML, OPML).

Happy Birthday, ArtLungBlog. Here’s the contents of my first post, which did not have a title. The integer value for the post is a rather short 2448604. It’s archived here, and it says: It occurs to me that this Blogger stuff may be dull. Still, the prospect of keeping a journal is kind of a...

Hannah Aubry writes on the Mastodon blog about community initiatives including experiments to change how new users sign up:

At first, we’re planning to recommend the closest geographic server in the correct language based on data surfaced by the app store, so it will only be available initially on the Android and iOS apps. We may also experiment with other logic for recommending a server, including random distribution.

I don’t believe this will help. In fact, it might make users more confused. My proposal remains to move away from email-like user handles.

Hearing from multiple people now (including my son!) who have gone back to buying music. Spotify burnout. I still have a huge collection of iTunes purchases and ripped CDs, just sitting there.

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

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Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

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When I found out Current was going to ship this week, I postponed making a video preview of my own RSS reader because it would feel like I was interfering with Current’s release. Now the tables have turned. Current is so popular that I just need to stay out of its way or I’ll get overshadowed. 🤪

Last year I was often expecting unexpected calls, from doctors and nurses, so I turned off “silence unknown callers”. I’ve now officially had enough of the spam interruptions. Enabled it again. ☎️

"The problem is, if you’re optimizing a product that fundamentally isn’t working for how people get news in 2026, all you’re really doing is riding that buggy off of a cliff with style."

“Do I want this thought to exist publicly beyond my own notebook?” If the answer is yes, publish it on your site. Everything else is distribution. #indienews #indieweb

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not...

They all say podcasting‘s open period is over and one or another huge billionaire-owned platform is the new owner of podcasting. This time it's YouTube. How many times has this happened? Many. But not enough for journalism to respect the power of the people. So here we go again.

Paul Brainerd, the founder of Aldus, publisher of Pagemaker, died. At least that's what I'm seeing on various social networks. No mention of his passing in the News tab on Google, or on Wikipedia. Pagemaker was a milestone product, it was the first popular desktop publishing app on the Mac, the first to really make use of the graphic OS and laser printing. We worked with Aldus on scripting via Frontier. The ability to automate Pagemaker and then Quark XPress (its main competitor) was very important in the prepress market. I once said no one wants that (referring to Pagemaker) just shows how little I know. There are good reasons to believe that one product saved the Mac and Apple.

I would like to have an OPML subscription list containing the feeds of all RSS-based products. So when they update everyone can see what they did. I'd also like to encourage people to post screen shots so we can get an idea of what the product does before installing it. Maybe it's for a platform we don't use? Let's have a new practice where we all know what everyone is doing.

Just noted that Brent mentioned FeedLand (my own product) that does things differently. Thank you. I don't read most of the pieces that come in via RSS. I scroll through the updates, and if something catches my eye, I stop, read the first part, and then if my interest continu...

I wrote a this.how doc a few years about with some of the lessons I've learned doing work on web standards.

There’s so much fun stuff happening, first the new assistant launched on .com, covered by TechCrunch and in this video. Also some cool Claude stuff launched. James has a nice write-up of the other dozen things that are going on, it’s fun to see the AI parts of WordPress moving at AI-speed. We just need … Continue reading WP & AI Updates →