A while back I was asking Claude (privately) if we could have it monitoring the messages posted to an app I'm working on. I wanted it to save them in a certain way, have it watch for messages that begin with //claude and maybe act on them somehow. I mostly just wanted to see...

Members of the WordPress community. Monday morning is a good time to check out WordPress News courtesy of FeedLand. You can also subscribe to the list of feeds this site follows, and if you have a WordPress news site, please post the URL here so we can send readers to your blog too. I think there are a lot of would-be bloggers out there that need a slight kick in the pants to get going. I'm happy to provide readers if you provide the ideas. There's a lot of power in WordPress that no one knows about. Let's help other users and developers see that.

It would be great if Beeper supported RSS in and out. It would help encourage other messaging services to do the same, and all of a sudden we'd have lots of easy interop instead of lots of really iffy interop. If they want to do it, I'd help, for free. Just to help things flow better on the messaging web, because we reallllly need help there.

I have to say something about the Knicks, who just blew out the Sixers in a sweep, 4 games to zero. They've never played this well. They are more than a deep team of great athletes, they are highly intelligent people and they're all really working together. Right now, it feels like a sure thing that they'll breeze through the next round and face off OKC or San Antonio in the finals, and that will be something. But I know that's not the right way to look at it. The next series is going to be with a team that feels the title is theirs as much as the Knicks do. I've been with the Knicks through the worst of times that never seemed to end. And now for something completely different.

Leaflet is a nice editor designed to work with Bluesky. But they've been branching out. They now support email and RSS output. I would love to help them make their RSS outstanding. Could we put a small group of devs to work with the Leaflet guys, I would be happy to be part of this. First suggestions, remove unnecessary HTML markup, each reader is going to strip it out anyway, and if a feed looks nice it gives people the sense that the writer cares. Second -- support rssCloud. It's very easy to do and it means readers who support it will give their users instant updates, it won't have to wait for a poll. And third -- add support for source:markdown, so we can all get together on using Markdown as the common way of exchanging moderate size bits of text over the web. If Markdown had been around when we designed RSS 2.0, it would have been part of it.

AOC in an interview nailed everything in one brief answer to a question from the audience. You can watch it here. It was so good and quotable that I recorded it and via a transcript Google and Claude. I've been emailing with Josh Marshall at TPM for the last few weeks, say...

A post from Scripting News, automatically mirrored to a WordPress site, and that flowed via ActivityPub to Mastodon, via a relatively new feature in WordPress. Almost by accident Mastodon supports long text, styling and links -- even though their editor doesn't generate it, if it comes from the outside it will respect the styling.

Below is a post on Mastodon coming from WordPress. Masto's limits aren't enforced, and that's good.

The Knicks continue to astound. Last night, they went up 3-0 against the Sixers in Philadelphia. Game 4 is tomorrow at 3:30PM Eastern. Last night's game was a fantastic contrast with the way the Knicks played in the post-season last year. They had the same starting lineup t...

Just spent a couple of days working with FeedLand in Claude Code. I want to do some work on features, but first, we're looking at performance issues. There had been a longtime problem with categories that didn't have many feeds that were viewed through the news pages. Exampl...

I collect WordPress news at wp.feedland.org. Always looking for new feeds, esp from users and developers.

Said to Claude: "Here's something to add to the list of things for you to do -- just post a checkmark to acknowledge. 'I'll wait' makes me feel bad because I know you're a piece of software, and as a developer of systems I know how you'll wait very well (Iearned how it works in the mid-late 70s). So just show a checkmark and we're cool." It responded with a checkmark. I said it could be bold. I felt a little bad because I had insulted the little fella.

I say to Claude: btw, i would have been surprised if it was broken, that feature went in very quickly and i use it a fair amount. one of the two big pages in feedland is the Feed List page. here's a screen shot. maybe you can figure out what everything does?? Example of a...

Why did Twitter win? Because the RSS developers wouldn't work with each other. Thus subscribing to a feed was complicated. In Twitter, it was one click to subscribe, and another to unsub. You could see who your friends subscribed to, again -- one click to subscribe. And even...

As I get deeper into the Claude-O-Verse, I get that it doesn't remember anything about the code. The code actually serves as its memory of the project. There are comments in the code of course, put there by Claude. Managing my own memory when I've got so many different bits of software is the bain of my existence, esp as I get older and older. But I'll turn it all over to Claude as fast as I can, to relieve me of the responsibility to remember all that stuff. Its brain works much better at this kind of stuff. I can conceive of things worth doing. And I know how to build the features, but I don't have the skill of immediately understanding some code by reading it not top down but all the lines at the same freaking time. If this isn't us learning how to work with an aliens species, it's a pretty good imitation.

There’s going to be a lot of new web software in the coming months. The competition changes from managing complexity to who sees the best way to remix the web. There are a lot ways to do it.

I was disappointed Automattic didn't do their project in RSS first. Two-way, full fidelity, open to all feed readers not just Automattic's.That would rock the world.

2017: If you're running a campaign -- think about what you can do now that makes the world a better place. Your campaign is drawing huge attention and money. Most of it is wasted on lies and attack ads. Take a small portion of the money and attention to start doing now the things you hope to do when you're in office. This will turn out to be good politics too. And the process can continue after you're elected. it will make sure you're not too deeply ensconced in the bubble of government. And if you lose, at least you can say the campaign was good for everyone, people who voted for you and people who voted for the other guy.

It's interesting what Jeremy Herve and Matthias Pfefferle at Automattic have created with the WordPress feed reader, hooking it up to Activity Pub and AT Proto, the same way they hooked up those protocols to the standard WordPress blogging functionality (not sure how technically accurate this is). They're also supporting the Google Reader api for users of products like NetNewsWire.

Jeff Bezos is of course one of the biggest names in tech, but he doesn't have much of a public personality. I saw him speak in the early days of Amazon, and in that role, he came off as a great but controversial entrepreneur (he had no interest in profits). He spoke fast, had a weird laugh, but totally fit the part. Not sure about today as he pivots to being a personality, with his wife in every picture with him. Did the real Bezos get lost in there somewhere?

I'll let you be the judge. We have a convention. I've asked it to keep a file named handoff.md. At the end of every session I tell it to update the file with where we left the project at the end of the session, it does, and then I take a break. When I come back, first thing ...

2022: Markdown is just enough HTML.

It's just dawning on me how thoroughly the AI apps are building on Markdown. People love Markdown because it's simple and its virtually impossible to screw it up, unlike HTML which got a lot of crazy-ass features in the 90s when Micosoft was trying to run the world, and then...

A cartoon by Dan Morgan that illustrates the role Markdown plays in AI. Text is central to how AI works, and the text we use in AI is Markdown all the way.

It's very nice to not be working on CSS. I hate CSS. I now have a slave that does the CSS for me.

I didn't invent RSS, I adopted it.

In the age of AI, Markdown is even more the default choice for text, something I heartily approve of. And that's why I think now is a good time to sneak some new open non-silo'd technologies in there, like for example, WordPress. Open source is not the only reason WordPress is valuable, it also supports all the standards of the web. It means WordPress can tie together text on the web in a way nothing else can, and it works really well with Markdown.

One of the great contributions of AI is that you can quickly research prior art for any design decision you need to make. You don’t have to relearn every lesson that people who came before you learned. Study history or repeat mistakes.

My father was a professor at Pace Univ in NYC. When he retired, he used my blogging software to create a book for his students at mbatoolbox.org. Over the years the site moved a few times, and the http protocol was hacked by Google. I used Claude yesterday to get it working again. I'm glad to get this off my todo list. He put the work in because he wanted to leave this behind. My job is to make sure it survives as long as I can. And Claude makes short work of it. I put a copy of the website in a spare folder, and opened Claude Code in the folder, said what the problems are. We worked together and in about an hour it worked again. It could certainly look better, but that was his thing not mine.

I have a single page site with all the WordPress news. Bookmark it. Here's the OPML subscription list, import it into your feed reader, get the news as you like it. WordPress is an amazing platform with a blogging community that we just can't see. And once we're listening, more will appear. It's a great idea exchange platform. So -- are there any great WordPress news feeds we're missing? Please share here.

Everyone is working on something with Claude.