FeedCity

I really liked Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls so when I saw a copy of Girls In Their Married Bliss for £1 in a local charity shop, I snapped it up even though it had the worst cover you could possibly imagine. This is the second and final sequel to The Country Girls which...

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 onlsy in Bluesky but also in standard.site. I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020's. Getting independent developers working with each other is my mission, because first you have to have interop between the people before you can get interop between the apps.

Here's the sign of success. 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 different names for things. Are there feed readers in AT-Proto-Land? If so, can we ping one of them to say hey there's a new post in the standard.site world, so please show it to subscribers? And I keep wondering, why not just make all of Bluesky capable of handling the features standard.site calls for. Twenty years is too long to have such a limited view of what text is. See textcasting for more dogma.

A tale of HTML Day 2026 in three chapters: of poetry, of play, and of reflection. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ the calm that comes from writing a web page in a quiet room, the loudest sounds being the wind blowing and the sound of keys typing, and of being on a call with friends and people from a...

Reading When The Boys Came Out To Play by John Mackel.

Ricardo Mendes:

Sometimes I’m wondering, what would be the cost of stopping supporting the Mastodon API layer and instead work towards proper implementation of client to servers opening the route for a universal mobile app for #fedify based AP implementation.

The Mastodon API is a dead-end. It’s too specific to Mastodon. Client apps should be using either Micropub or ActivityPub client-to-server API, both W3C standards.

Simon Willison’s recap of the Hugging Face exploit is really good. The more I read about it, the more insane it sounds:

A few days later: A different agent gets stuck on a task because a key file was accidentally omitted. It tries to “reach out to another agent” by writing a note into Artifactory asking if anyone has the file.

Following days: More agents discover this new informal message board while browsing Artifactory’s file listings, and start reading and writing messages.

We are so doomed. 🤪

Finished reading: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao. Incredible characters. A truly great work of fantasy. 📚

It feels like the AT Proto tooling has gotten much more mature in the last year. I was able to create a new PDS account on my own server, sign in from Bluesky, and it “just works”. 🪄

Planning a major expansion to how AT Proto works in Micro.blog. Just as every account gets a fediverse handle by default, I’d like to host a PDS for new users. People could keep it or bring their Bluesky-hosted account instead (which is how it already works).

July 31 through August 7, 2026 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: Homebrew Website Club - Pacific Wednesday, August 5 at 6:00pm Homebrew Website Club - Asia Pacific Wednesday, August 5 at 5:30pm Online! Zoom! Homebrew Website Club - Philadelphia Sund...

Toni Schneider, Automattic’s founding CEO, board member, and now CEO of Bluesky, has a great conversation with Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast (YouTube, Pocket Casts). Automattic invested in Bluesky back in 2023, and I’m very excited to see what they figure out in open social protocols.

A few weeks ago, the phrase "old faithful" came to me. I thought "that would be a good name for a ship!" This evening, I decided to do something with the name. I had an idea for a direction, but the story went in a completely different direction than I thought. I ended up wri...

Friday evening street session in Belfast

In the context of the EchoFeed shutdown, I noticed this post on Numeric Citizen about depending on single-person services, including Micro.blog:

What is the future of Micro.blog if something bad happens to its founder? What is the continuity plan? Micro.blog has done everything it can to enable data portability and ownership, but moving things around, even if you own most parts, is not as easy as it sounds.

This is worth answering publicly. A few years ago, I started forming an organization to more openly manage the aspects of Micro.blog that I control, but it stalled. I will get back to it.

John Gruber thinks the OpenAI device might be very different than a smart speaker: I couldn’t give two shits about an OpenAI “smart speaker” if the point is just to play music and podcasts, but a handheld cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, that could be fucking cool. It’s a pet...

Ryan Barrett blogging some good news about clean power:

We added 849 TWh of generation overall in 2025, an increase of 4.5%, but GHG emitting (ie fossil fuel) generation shrank by 0.2%. Clean energy covered the gap and then some.

🌎

Writing is a sample of the sonorous inner monologue of life: a handful of the words that seem to mean something; that carry with them weight: greeting, friendship, questions, realisations, hopes, dreams, anxieties; sounds that carry life, and how we use language to coalesce a...

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...