A new this.how page for RSS.chat. I’ll point to it from blog posts.

I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person. RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web’s own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter — you write short posts, […]

Morning: Today on RSS.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We’ve been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions.

In my experience in software development, it’s good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That’s the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way […]

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, but it’s the last […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 the questions in advance, and thus can’t have answers […]

A new utility that 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, so we’re going […]

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. Backed into a charging station. An act of terrorism (exaggerating) but I caused it, and paid for it, dented the well over right […]

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

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, […]

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.

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

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 like other web stuff, if you […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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. distributable is not the same as being distributed. It’s […]

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.”