that's an interesting idea. a group of us get together and decide that since html already has a link element that works the same way atom's does, why bother with the atom part. 

their motive goes back 20 years, that little thing has been over forever. i think it's better if we try to fix it, and this idea gives a whole new approach. 

andrew, are you tuned in?

For whatever it's worth, my parser in Micro.blog isn't strict with link tags. It would find your rel="hub" example even without the namespace.

I heard about technography from you when we worked together at UserLand, and the concept stuck with me even to today. 

Back in 2014 I did a presentation at work about some of the tools I was using for my job, one of which was an outliner (I've actually forgotten now which one). Of course the presentation and discussion were facilitated in an outline, and discussion notes landed there. I shared the OPML file with attendees afterwards, including notes taken during the meeting. More than one person asked me later how I thought drive the presentation this way, and I was happy to pass my own spin on technography forward.

That’s fine. It’s all 100% opt in. :-)

It’s been quite a day. At the end, rss.chat is a thing.

More new stuff tomorrow.

Claude is a great freaking partner.

It's very low on my list of things to do, unless it rises to the top, say Feedly, for example, really wants to incorporate our stuff, and they refuse to look for the cloud element. (Which on its face sounds ridiculous.)

I'm more concerned with peering with apps that are trying to create a social network with RSS. That's who I want to work with most.

Also these docs are for you.

Don great to see you here!

Everyone else, I've known Don for a long time. In 1988 I think he did a Mac INIT that made it possible to send messages between apps, which was a basic function we needed in Frontier. 

Over the years we keep crossing paths and this is another.

Just signed up.

@dave Help text for account name say "Name must be 4 chars." which is clearly false.

Services that support WebSub have specific requirements. The link elements or the HTML headers are what they require. I think the best solution might be to use inline namespaces like we talked about and just put them at the bottom of the channel contents (after the items).

We still need the URL namespace with Atom in it, but at least it's not at the top of the feed. We might lose some parsers that are just looking for atom:link elements and not doing proper namespace resolution, but I think it's the best middle ground. Maybe ask the braintrust?

<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="hub" href="https://rpc.rsscloud.io/websub"/>

<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://feed.example/rss"/>

Andrew I just had an idea. 

This is the cloud element in all our feeds.

<cloud domain="rpc.rsscloud.io" port="5337" path="/pleaseNotify" registerProcedure="" protocol="http-post"/>

We could tell sites that expect WebSub callbacks to just ping to your server, and somehow indicate that you want websub notification, that with this server, you can get back websub calls.

Makes it perfectly painless, or so it seems. 

But I'm not sure if you can do it.

I've wanted to do this product many years, but couldn't quite figure it out I guess. Or I got lazy, or I guess I kind of gave up, like a lot of people did, on the web as the thing that unifies independent developers so we can create stuff without the permission of people who...

I asked Claude to announce a new feature we just added, Surface, in the vertical top level icon bar. It was very much a collaboration, for the last month or so we've been working on how to organize the threads so that they feel like a twitter-like browser, but where the users have better control. I found I was getting lost in rss.chat and just wanted to get the F out of there right now. That's what Surface is for.

New today: the Surface icon in the left panel. When you've gone deep — into a story, a profile, or the flipped view — one click brings you back up to the timeline, with the cursor on the post you were just reading, scrolled into view.

It's not the same as Home. Home takes you to the top and starts fresh. Surface is a lifeline: however deep you get buried in a thread, it puts you right back where you left off.

This is a very interesting idea. I have lots of domains to play with here. Let me give it some thought, and if anyone has a related idea, bring it on. 

Hey Dave, I know this is a big change, but have you considered giving every user their own subdomain like manton.rss.chat? That could be a profile page or redirect to the current pages. This would make integration with Micro.blog more natural because Micro.blog already has the concept of following users by their domain name.

New feature, scroll through the timeline, there’s now a wedge to the left of the comment icon. If the item has replies that are not visible it’s dark. Click it, the replies are revealed. Click again to hide them. This makes it easy to browse through the structure of replies and messages and replies and so forth.

I never dreamed of writing this piece btw. I guess my dreams got small after a while But I decide now what actual fuck, let's just do it. 

I totally could not have done this without Claude Code. Too many facets, too many parts had to work together perfectly. One old dude and Claude can move the web back to where it always should have been. Not too shabby. ;-)

I'm using this for part of the new docs, on source.scripting.com, about RSS as a social network.

Manton, we're using this post as the demo for the docs I'm writing to explain how the pieces fit together, part of the docs for the source namespace.

I needed to get your feed to rebuild, because we had the name of the server product wrong in the feed. Can't have that for official docs like this.

Keep on truckin! :-)

We were going to try to get some excellent docs for the new stuff, but I want to do it on a fresh start, not after a full day of programming.  https://users.rss.network/dave/rss.xml That's my rss.chat feed as an example. So, in May we added inReplyTo to a feed item i...

All the world's a feed,
And all the men and women are merely items 
(Shakespeare, if he had known about RSS)

and then look at the items, you'll see some new stuff there. ;-)

Cool, I'm checking out the feed for my posts. I see the rssCloud element too.

hey manton, great to see you here.

this is the web btw. 

feeds everywhere

and everything in a feed.

Hello! 👋

There's a new RSS thing coming later today.

We're testing and writing docs. 

I think it's going to be kind of a big deal. :-)

More testing. It's that time of year. ;-)

Testing the second part of this feature.

Let me tell you about technography, a subject pioneered by Bernie De Koven in the 80s, with Living Videotext outliners.

Gather a group of one or more people, in a conference room, projected on a screen everyone could see. In the corner was the technographer, usually Bernie, and he would start the meeting asking for the agenda. They would start naming topics. Then he'd asking where they'd like to start, and he would move that item to the top, and keep going, and someone would say we should talk about this, and so forth.

As some point if it worked, if there was suspension of disbelief, someone would tell Bernie to move that item down, move another item under Sales, and without realizing it they were using a new tool. 

In 2026, I could see an app that did that for you or a group. An outliner integrated with AI.

Another day more fixes.

in the editor, create a link using the link icon, then after the link in the text press Enter, to create a new line. the linebreak shows up in the wrong place. 

That was a bug I reported a while back. Let's see if its still there.

Yesterday I was listening to Summer Breeze by Seals and Crofts and the first few times I listened to it, it really reached me. After 18 listens all I could here were the weird embellishments they put into it to make to so addictive? Who knows. 

Net result, not reproducible. I think we can remove 151 from the list.