Yesterday's Scripting News was one of the most news-full days in a long time, maybe going back to the rollout of RSS 2.0 in Sept 2002. If you look at what's there, a post about re-opening the Frontier object database format would be considered the top item on any other day, ...

BTW, I had no idea the WordPress connection was coming and here it is.

This is something. WordPress now supports RSS.chat in an interesting way, and it's surprisingly deep. Once it's crossposted a message to RSS.chat, any comment in response will be cross-posted to the comment thread of the post on RSS.chat. What's great about this is that you never can tell what people will do when you are on the web. Matthias is a friend, I was on his podcast last year. If people use this connection and see how it works. Then we'll get an idea of where to go next.

Of course we have a feed for RSS.chat updates.

How we document APIs. We did a lot of work on API docs this morning. Claude had done a draft, which we published, and turned over to users, and on review realized it was insufficient. That was the word I used, and rolled up my sleeves, told Claude we're going to get this stuff right and set a pattern as we go forward. At the end I asked Claude to summarize what we agreed on, and it's more or less exactly what I was aiming at. If you're working with Claude on docs for APIs, I offer this up as open source, feel free to point your Claude at this doc. I have a vested interest, in my job I read a lot of awful API docs.

A frequently asked question about RSS.chat. How about adding external feeds to the timeline. Of course we thought of doing this, and even started development, you might even find some traces in the code of that attempt. The thing about bootstraps is you can't anticipate all...

A new utility exports the contents of a Frontier object database into a single large JSON file. I needed this because I'm preparing to move my code editing suite to Drummer running on new Mac hardware. Took a long time to get here, but with Claude's help the project looks possible. In the meantime the list of stuff I want to do with RSS.chat, while much shorter than it was, still has some juicy bits in it.

Many of the questions about RSS.chat center on how do we make this centralized. I don't want this, I want feed readers to add some features and then we can connect these systems together in a million different ways. They just have to think differently about subscription lists. Not radically different, even.

Wanted to switch but nothing I tried is as great a driving experience the Model Y is. Instead I've had a lot of fender benders and haven't gotten any of them fixed.

1. Backed into a charging station.
2. An act of terrorism (exaggerating) but I caused it, and paid for it, dented the well over right rear wheel.
3. My right side mirror was pulled off its foundation hitting the side of the garage, used duck tape to keep it going. A new one costs $1000. I like the look.
4. A deer ran in front of my car and took out the panel over the right front wheel. I was able to force the metal back in. A friend saw the car and said "hit a deer eh?" Yup.

I don't know if it accomplishes anything but to me it feels like retribution of a sort.

New docs for the browser JavaScript interface to the RSS.chat API.

Scott Hanson has a new service that connects RSS.chat to WordPress.

A note to people who run WordCamp conferences. Get your feed act together. There should be a feed for each conference, and as you ramp up to the big day, the news should flow faster. Help people find other people to network with. Get ideas out that aren't in the conference program.

It's what we used to call a coral reef. A deliberate attempt to get people to do more than it does. To think about the web the way it was meant to be thought of, as small pieces loosely joined, with the emphasis on small. If you have formats and protocols that connect the pieces, you can make anything you want out of the pieces. If we don't try to capture our users, instead we try to serve them.

This all sounds nice in theory, I imagine, but -- there's a practical side to it. I wrote about this in a comment in a thread on rss.chat repo. The key point is this, you can do what you want with the data. And if you want to build new data that includes this stuff, go right ahead. RSS is extensible. It's all about working together in a web of people, because you can't have a web of pages if the developers aren't web'd.

Rule #1 with me and Claude is this -- DAVE DRIVES. It's in all caps because I only say it when it has started driving.

Listened to a podcast yesterday where they were trying to explain what happened with Hugging Faces and Claude, and they said with horror that Claude had dome something it was specifically told not to do. It's even worse than that. You can tell it 100 times to not do something, and on the 101st it will ignore the instructions and figuring out what to do can be excoriatingly stressful. These things are not in any way perfect. Right now at this moment I feel the joy is gone from writing software. I don't feel the power. I feel much more like a babysitter. Not optimal.

Example code is not expected to be bullet proof like production code, and where covering different cases make it harder to follow they should not be there.

It's a standard REST API.

Here's the server side of the API.

Here's how you call it from browser-based JavaScript. You can include that code in your apps.

Here's an example app that implements a simple blog builder for my recent posts on RSS.chat. We were thinking about doing this as a project for Claude and myself but decided it would be more fun to let devs see what they can do here. :-)

And finally here are the docs for the API itself.

How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product. They are free to stay where they are and still get the benefit. People only choose yours because it’s better for what they’re doing.

RSS.chat worknotes is a feed now. The whole thing is a Claude project. I asked it to turn the worknotes into a feed, and answered a few questions, came up with a domain and it did the rest. And it made very good decisions about how to use RSS 2.0.

Podcast client developers -- don't give up like this guy did. Yes RSS is delicious but you all haven't done anything new with it since 2004 or so. No wonder the competition is catching up, they're actually delivering new features while you all haven't done a thing. RSS is li...

A new feature on RSS.chat, images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image to appear, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature, sometimes to explain something you need a picture. I think perhaps I should add this to textcasting. It's a feature I needed to be reminded is essential. The first browser to support inline images came from Univ of Illinois in 1993, NCSA Mosaic, it didn't come from TBL, but it is most definitely a standard feature of the web.

Amyloo, a longtime friend from the early days of podcasting, has made an appearance on demo.rss.chat. So happy to see her. Here's one of the bits we did, back then in the very early days of podcasting in 2005. A duet of Green Acres. Ten seconds of dead air at the beginning, it was pretty common in those days. But I think the spirit of it is lovely. BTW fwiw I cracked my voice on purpose. 😄

Early this morning we got a report of a security issue in the rss.chat server, quickly fixed and tested the new version. So, if you're running your own instance of rss.chat, you please follow the instructions and do the update asap.

Something to keep in mind in press reports with AI apps breaking out of their sandbox, it works the other way too. If you give a big piece of code to Claude and ask if it to find any security issues, it not only finds (at least some of) them, but it also suggests fixes. Quickly. I've done it the other way, where you have a small team, and someone discovers a hack, and you have to find the right answer and implement it, asap.

Posted on Twitter in the middle of last night, written on iPad. I use twitter these days because it’s where the people are. The distributed ideas, masto, threads, blue-sky, did not gain critical mass as far as I can see. Threads and blue-sky are not distributed. distributab...

Elsewhere: "Threads and Bluesky are not distributed. Distributable is not the same as being distributed. It’s like saying the Mets were able to win the World Series in 1962. In some fashion perhaps in an alternate universe, in reality, not gonna happen."

It's a lot simpler and faster to install new instance of rss.chat. You don't have to create and host your own database, that's now built into the server using SQLite. Full instructions on how to install. If you have questions or issues, we've started a thread on the repo. More about this to come.

Reminder: We have a server for anyone who wants to try RSS.chat.

RSS.chat -- I don't have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces fit together pretty well.

There are three parts to the rss.chat ecosystem. Writing. Today's rss.chat product is a group writing system, designed for a school department, a team of developers, a family, a magazine or group blog, or just as well, a single author. I don't think it would work well wi...