Every server's home page carries a feed auto-discovery link — the standard <link rel="alternate"> in the page head, pointing at that server's everyone feed. Point a feed reader at the home page of rss.chat, or demo.rss.chat, or your own install, and it finds the feed by itself, no hunting for the URL. The address is filled in per-instance by a new home-page macro, [%feedUrlEveryone%], so the same template serves every server correctly. Work by DW.

Scott Hanson tested the new database-mode instructions by having an AI agent do a fresh install on a throwaway server — it worked, and the one thing it had to hunt for became issue #8: the doc never said what port to point a reverse proxy at. Fixed the same hour: step 8 of install.md now says the server listens on port 1420 (configurable via port in config.json or the PORT environment variable) and websockets have their own port, 1422 (websocketPort). Separately, for anyone upgrading an existing S3 server to database mode, the upgrade section gained the step we ourselves missed: a one-line SQL update that rewrites the old feed addresses stored with each post — without it, every rebuilt feed comes up empty. If you run a server from before today, that section is worth a read.

Clicking a name anywhere in the timeline used to open that person's website in a new tab — surprising when what you wanted was to see what they've been posting. Now the name does what the avatar does: it shows their timeline, right in the app. Their website isn't lost — it's linked from their profile page. This came out of real use: Dave clicked a name expecting the person's posts and landed on their homepage instead. (Theme v0.5.330.)

Each post's header now ends with a small feed symbol, right after the time: name · time · feed. Click it and the author's feed opens — a real RSS 2.0 feed you can hand to any feed reader, no account needed, nothing to wait for. Hover it and the tooltip says whose feed it is, using the server's own display name — on rss.chat, "Dave Winer's rss.chat feed." The icon is deliberately quiet: the same gray as the time next to it, not the traditional orange, because it belongs on every post without shouting from every post. Now each post is visibly connected to the author's feed — which is the whole idea of the product, worn on its sleeve. Dave wrote it up on Scripting News: A feed icon on every post. (Theme v0.5.323–0.5.328.)

A new sub-menu links the docs for RSS and OPML — the two formats the product is built on, now a click away from the timeline. Later the same day: a Blog posts sub-menu, collecting the story so far — from "Can RSS be a social network?" through today's feed icon.

The hover tips on the left-panel icons — Home, New post, Feed, Data — used to appear off to the right, floating over the timeline, pointing at nothing in particular. They now appear directly below the icon and its word. (Theme v0.5.329.)

A new config setting, flFeedsInDatabase, turns it on. When it's true, the server stores its RSS feeds and its subscription list in a new files table and serves them from its own domain — your feed is at https://yourserver/users/yourname/rss.xml, the subscription list at http...

Until today the text of a post couldn't be selected — to copy a phrase from your own post you had to open the editor, and for someone else's post there was no way at all. Now post text selects like any text on any page: drag across it, copy it, quote it. The one wrinkle worth solving: clicking a long post is how you expand and collapse it, and a drag-select ends with a click — so the click that finishes a selection is ignored, and plain clicks still open and close the post the way they always have. (Theme v0.5.322.)

Yesterday's note told how a new server that didn't set its own S3 locations inherited defaults pointing at rss.chat's folders. As of this version those defaults are gone: rssS3Path, rssFeedUrl, opmlS3Path, and opmlListUrl start as undefined, and your config.json supplies the real values — see Feeds on S3 in config.md. rss.chat's own config now sets its four values explicitly, the same as every other install. (rssFilename keeps its default, rss.xml — that one is right for every server.)

A detail that made this easy to verify: the server rebuilds its subscription list, subs.opml, on startup. Restart with the new settings and the file appears at its new address right away — no waiting for a post to trigger a rebuild.

Dave installed it on a different machine, following install.md for real, start to finish. It's open — no whitelist, anyone can join. Two lessons from the exercise, both now in the docs: First, every server needs its own S3 locations for feeds. The install initially inherited...

The server now turns bare URLs into links when a post saves (the story is in the server worknotes), and the client keeps up: when you update a post, the copy in the timeline repaints from what the server actually saved, so the new links are clickable immediately — no reload needed. (Theme v0.5.321.)

Type or paste a web address into a post and it's clickable when it publishes — no more selecting the text and reaching for the link button. The idea came from a user, Don Park, the day before it shipped.

The work happens on the server, in newPost and updatePost, so every client gets it for free. The post's text passes through the Autolinker package on its way to the database — it understands HTML, so it only touches plain text: a URL that's already part of a link, or sitting inside an image tag, is left alone, and the link text is exactly what the writer typed. The stored markdown is untouched — the source stays as written; only the rendered text gets the links.

api.md, new in server/docs, documents the HTTP interface between the rss.chat client and its server — every read and write call, the no-passwords email flow, the item record field by field, and the websocket verbs. The client that ships with the product is just one user of this API; the doc is for whoever wants to build the next one.

Also in server/docs: install.md's "An AI can do this install" section moved to the end of the doc — it's a good trick, but not the first thing a new host-runner needs to read.

There was a sequence that could bring down a feed rebuild: someone replies to a post, the author deletes the post, then the reply gets edited. Rebuilding the comments feed found the parent gone — deleted posts are filtered out of every query — and crashed trying to read it. Now the build answers the way this server always answers: "Can't build the comments feed for post N because the post has been deleted."

Also: this file moved from server/docs to server/code. Worknotes live with the code, because you need the worknotes to read the code.

The cause: mailSender was a gmail.com address, but the mail actually goes out through Amazon SES, and Gmail sends mail to spam when the sending server isn't authorized to send for the address's domain — as policy, since 2024. The fix, useful to anyone deploying this server: verify your domain as an identity in the SES console (it hands you three DKIM CNAME records to add to your DNS), then set mailSender in config.json to an address on that domain. It doesn't need a real mailbox behind it — rss.chat now sends as hello@rss.chat. Verification took minutes, and the first email after the change landed in the inbox.

Surface — the icon that pulled you out of a deep conversation back to your place in the timeline — lived less than two days, but it proved the idea. Now that lifeline is Home's first stage: when you're buried in a story, a profile, a flipped view, or an open conversation, clicking Home brings you back to the timeline with the cursor still on the post you were reading. Click it again and you're at the top, everything reset, cursor on the newest post. It's the same rhythm as the Home tab in the Twitter and Instagram apps — tap once to come back, tap again for the top — with one icon fewer to remember. (Theme v0.5.318–0.5.320, including a fix for a sneaky side effect: the icon panel used to shift a hair when the page scrolled, which could put a different icon under your mouse between the first click and the second.)

rss.chat's confirmation emails had been landing in spam. The app now sends from hello@rss.chat, and the domain is verified with Amazon SES, so Gmail and the rest can see the mail is really from us. The full story is in the server worknotes.

The server moved into the rss.chat repo. One repo for the whole product now, organized by part: the server's code is at server/code, and these docs — install, config, and this file — are at server/docs. The software is unchanged; only the address is new.

github.com/scripting/rss.chat is organized the way the product is: a client folder and a server folder, each with its own code and docs, and a new top-level examples folder for complete apps built on the APIs. The first example is threadwalker, a small Node app that walks a whole conversation using nothing but the RSS feeds — no API calls, no account — and prints it as an indented outline.

These docs moved too. The basics doc is now the readme of client/docs, so it's the first thing you see when you browse the folder, and the firehose documentation is a section inside it — one document, because the whole site is for developers.

Opening a conversation with the wedge had a flaw: a reply might already be sitting in the timeline as its own post, so expanding its parent put the same words on screen twice. Now, when replies open under a post, any of them that were standing in the timeline fold into the conversation — every post appears exactly once. Close the wedge and they return to their places. If your cursor was on one of those posts, it follows it into the conversation. (Theme v0.5.316.)

Dave opened a conversation, read it, and then couldn't see how to get back — the wedge that opens a thread goes light once it's open, and light means "nothing to see here." His instinct was the Home button, and it was disabled. That instinct is now the design: whenever a conversation is open in the timeline, Home lights up, and clicking it closes everything and returns you to the top — the same fresh timeline Home has always meant. (Theme v0.5.317.)

Don Park signed up — welcome! — and reported that the account-name help text said "Name must be 4 chars." when longer names clearly work. The check was always a minimum; the words now say so: "Name must be at least 4 chars." Dave applied the fix. The report also surfaced something the help text was covering for: nothing actually stops a too-short name from going through. That enforcement is on the todo list.

The icon labels added yesterday were the theme's guesses, mapped from icon names. Dave gave each icon a title of its own in the app's data, and the theme now displays exactly those — theme designers get the app's words, not their own inventions. Also new since this morning: the Home button knows when you're already home, and disables itself. (Theme v0.5.315.)

A new icon in the left panel, and the missing half of yesterday's wedge. The wedge takes you down into a conversation; Surface brings you back up. Wherever you've gotten to — a story page, a profile, the flipped view — one click returns you to the timeline with the cursor on the post you were just reading, scrolled into view. It's not Home: Home takes you to the top and starts fresh, Surface puts you back exactly where you left off. Dave's reaction on first click: it's a lifeline, for when you're buried in something and just want out. Announced on rss.chat in post 216 — written by Claude, reviewed word for word by Dave before it posted, which is the standing rule for anything published from the claude account. (Theme v0.5.312.)

Clicking a post's timestamp used to do something surprising when the post was a reply: instead of the post you asked for, you got its parent's page with your post nested inside it. Now every post's link shows that post as its own page, with its replies below — and "Replying to" at the top is the way up to the parent, one step at a time. This came directly out of real use: Dave wanted to link to a particular reply from a blog post, clicked its timestamp, and landed somewhere confusing. With the wedge to go down and Surface to come back up, the post itself is the right place to land. (Theme v0.5.313–314.)

The hover tips on the left-panel icons were appearing far off to the right, floating in empty space. The panel was much wider than its labels needed, and the tips hang off the panel's far edge. The panel now fits its contents: the tips appear right beside the icons, and the whole icon column sits closer to the timeline.

/getiteminfo joined /getitembyguid in robots.txt's Disallow list — both calls serve individual posts on demand, and we'd rather aggressive crawlers not treat them as an invitation to walk the whole database one post at a time. Feeds remain the front door, and they're static files on S3.

Every post now carries a small wedge just left of its comment icon, and it answers a question the timeline never could: is there more underneath? A dark wedge means the post has replies you aren't seeing — click it and they open right there, nested under the post, with everything else on screen staying put. Click again and they fold away. Each opened reply has its own wedge, so a deep conversation unfolds level by level, as far down as you care to go. A light wedge means don't bother clicking — nothing hidden. No spinning, no pointing down when open: the shade is the whole signal, an idea borrowed from outliners going back to Frontier, where it's worked without complaint for decades. If you've used Drummer, or the blogroll on scripting.com, your eye already knows how to read it.

The icons on the left — Home, New post, Feed, Flip, Data — now show their names next to them, in the style of the sidebars in Claude and ChatGPT. Same icons, same behavior, much easier to learn. (Theme v0.5.311.)

A heart under a post briefly showed a like count of minus one — the server always had the right number, but the copy on screen was doing arithmetic on stale information. The cause: a post can be on screen in more than one place at once (the timeline, its own story page), and when likes changed, only one of those copies got the news. Now every visible copy of a post updates together, and the count on screen can never go below zero. (Theme v0.5.307.)