I have a new Chromebook, I keep it on the kitchen table so I can get online quickly from downstairs. I've been able to log on to every service I need except X. It insists that to log in I have to use their app, but if they have a Chromebook app, the Google store doesn't know about it. Why they can't just let me enter the email address and password? They could send a code to my phone. What else. I think this has something to do with having encrypted direct messages.
These are the big features that remain to be done in Atlantis, the new version of Frontier in development with myself and Claude. The one that's bold is what we're working on now. I want to get it into shipping shape. And a couple of the things on the list came from Claude and I don't know what they mean.
I got rid of all the claude verbiage. everyone knows what the menu editor is, and all the rest of it.
the menu editor is working now.
we're moving toward getting a shipping disk put together, ready to be installed on a user's machine. that's my next step, installing the virgin frontier.root and then bringing in nodeEditor.root as a guest database, and shake that out.
my aim is to have the desktop app running everywhere Electron runs, i want to get this thing going, tired of being the only user.
it is starting to feel reliable, but not all the way there yet, the outliner is the core, and it's very much debugged, having been part of my JS outliners since 2013.
Thinking out loud about blogging from this space.
It's pretty close to being able to do what I do in Electric Drummer in an outline, just need a few more options, they would fit in the context menu on each post as you edit. Lots of room there.
The blog rendering would run off the RSS feed. I probably would write something new and very simple, almost like an RSS feed browser.
The reason I would start with a pilot project here is because there are other people here, already. And if I said something provocative that you knew other people would see, would you be drawn to that? I trust the people I've invited here not to be spammers.
We might be ready for that. We put a lot of effort into the comment system here. We plan to use the new features to create a very new kind of web.
No one tries out new ideas in the blogging world. That could change.
Obama should have seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. assume they consent.
And the governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive.
Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI's who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory.
Claude Code is like Victor Wembanyama, assuming you follow the NBA and are interested in first hand experience with CC as a programming partner for the last 8 months or so.
I read Bill Gates' memo, and there's one thing almost no one has mentioned about AI systems, is how dependent we're getting on them. What if one day they stop working. What's the backup plan?
When we started up with PCs and then the web, it took a long time for us to build mission-critical systems around them. But this is happening very quickly.
That was fast! ;-)
I'll link to this on Scripting News shortly.
Thanks for doing this work Scott.
BTW we all know there isn't an RSS 2.0 feed, it isn't a podcast, but rather than getting all preachy, which no one likes, mention a "podcast feed" as a real thing that's expected. Always add "feed" when you say podcast.
The feed gives you and podcast producers the thing that makes podcasting so different -- freedom. For listeners it means if you don't like something the software does, you can switch without losing anything. And for producers there's no one who can stop you from speaking. There is always a way around a blockage. But only if there's an RSS feed.
Frontier work going much better today we’ve got all the built in verbs in the product reviewed tested and I’m not finding any problems as I create software for deploying this stuff.
The first thing we had to get working was being able to move objects from the 2011 frontier to the 2026 frontier and we got there today. The next thing that’s coming is being able to do updates for users with new parts and changes to existing ODB elements.
So once that’s working, we can start fixing bugs and looking for problems and things didn’t get ported correctly. We have a new gate. Every change must be vetted by reviewing the 2011 code, and doing exactly what we did then.
John Kerry asked who wants to be the last casualty in Vietnam, a lost cause like the war we are bogged down in Iran for no good reason, like Vietnam.
What happens when humans run out of things they want to do with AIs. When everything has been done and it takes ten tokens to do what used to cost ten million. What will we do with all the data centers? Will they be empty shells like the old shopping malls that were so popular before the web and Covid?
Added a chapter to the story.
https://github.com/scripting/helloFrontier/issues/1
Turns out Claude didn’t understand how Frontier calls scripts. It’s much simpler than what it concocted.
Started a new repo today.
https://github.com/scripting/helloFrontier
We have to make a fair number of decisions about all aspects of the product, esp the surprisingly huge verb set.
For the tough decisions I'll document the issue, and seek feedback from friendly people with real Frontier expertise.
Right now it's just an intro page and nothing more. Eventually, hopefully, fingers crossed, something wonderful will show up here.
In response to his post about the squeak of sphincters.
1. I was getting an exam at a urologist's office where one of the nurses actually used the word sphincter, and I, fully conscious, said something funny that got them all laughing, basically that you never hear the word sphincter used as a real thing. Thought i should mention that.
2. Why do you care about what words the AI bot chooses? I actually like it. This is what I don't like -- people getting a long bit of writing from the bot, and then pasting it into a comment thread in a GitHub repo I run (a recent trend). Geez I don't even read the long bullshit posts my AI bot thinks I need to read, how humiliating to be asked to care what THEIR bot said. When a person puts their name on something, I assume it's them writing it.
Doc, if you "wrote" something and I discovered it was written by a bot, I would be disgusted and think less of you, a lot less. I want the watermarking if only to prove that my writing, which I hope doesn't get a false positive, are my actual words.
I'm sure plenty of teachers think the watermarking is a great idea.
And sphincters everywhere just want a little respect, and a little love wouldn't hurt either? As an adult do you know where your sphincter is? Or even what it's for?? And btw, did you know they don't actually squeak since they're made of meat, and meat don't squeak. ;-)
That's okay -- I like that you're experimenting. I want to help you do more. ;-)
Scott the confusion was you said WordLand and I think you meant FeedLand. ;-)
Also wpIdentity does more than username and password, it's how WordLand connects to everything.
Brent, great to see you here.
The OPML subscription lists is the right way to go for a popular feed reader, to get people thinking about creating subscription lists for others to subscribe to. And by then we should have a streamlined release of FeedLand for editing and combining the lists we generate here and elsewhere.
Later, once other sites are supporting the discourse features in RSS.chat format, or as others are supporting it, you might want to be in on the conversation. I think Manton is working on that. But discourse is an important function in his world, not so much in NNW but it could be.
Resources:
Example code for subscription lists.
The discourse features walkthrough.
For testing, I recommend my blogroll list.
Glad to help any way we can. ;-)
SQLite is progress. When you're ready tell us how you did it. I assume it's being done at the wpidentity level?
I love stuff like this. Small pieces loosely joined. ;-)
Andrew thanks for the reminder, I sent an email to you and Jon Desrosiers introducing you guys. I met Jon at WC Canada last year, he's one of the people who manage the final release of each version of WordPress. And unfortunately (for him) he is a Celtics fan. :-)
I used to use Bluesky to write my early morning posts when I'm using an iPad or a computer that can't access my editor for my main blog.
Before that I used Twitter.
But I should be using RSS.chat.
Esp when I hit the character limit on Bluesky, which happens every time. It's not very likely I'll write something that can be expressed fully in 300 chars.
This morning I reminded myself that my new casual writing platform is right here.
This, btw, is 459 chars.
The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country.
They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise.
The Democrats can have any combination of points of view, as long as they play by the rules of democracy.
In fact nothing could be more reaffirming of democracy than having a wide range of new reps in Congress from different political viewpoints.
They can all work together and in doing so, give us another shot at the form of government we all believe in.
John -- it's not a matter of time, it's how many items there are. Each feed can have a maximum of 100 items. That's a config setting on the server, config.rssMaxFeedItems.
I have spent a few days scattered over three weeks supervising a new version of frontier which took almost a decade to develop originally for Mac in 80s and 90s for node.js and electron. Without Claude I’m pretty sure that was never going to happen. I’m paying $100 a month for that.
The Agency was quite good.
It's linkblogging. Not niche, imho.
I have this feed.
https://demo.rss.chat/users/dave/rss.xml
Hooked up to micro.blog which in turn hooks it up to Bluesky.
If I write a post there that has a title or is longer than 300 chars, it will use standard.site.
Which I think means it will show up in my timeline as a card, and clicking on a link will take me to the full post inside the "atmosphere" -- they come up with great names in that world! :-)
I think there's a feed reader over there, we will find out.
Once again Manton kicks ass. This is a big door to open.
I used the demo.rss.chat so other people could contribute without being part of my circle of friends. ;-)
i think breaking the wall betw at proto and the world outside is good for everyone. there is significant work being done there, and people who think like we do, so connecting the two worlds will make a lot more of a difference than say connectiong with threads or even mastodon. they just aren't listening and don't care at the companies, but us individual developers have lots of reasons to work with each other, we just tend not to do it. breaking through here will be huge.
note: this was going to be part of a comment on micro.blog but there's a character limit...
We're going to make this happen.
I think it's really important for us to connect with developers who make writing tools for AT Proto. We should be part of the same community, I feel that very strongly, so I am seeking new ways to make that happen via RSS.
I noticed they had a feed in Leaflet, one of the editors, so I created an account entered a few posts, and then looked to see what was there. I then wrote the developer privately, to ask if he would welcome a review, and he did. I made the time this morning to put together the review.
https://github.com/scripting/Scripting-News/issues/359
In the other direction, I've been asking everyone I know who could possibly help, how to go in the other direction, have my RSS feed show up in AT Proto as whatever it is that makes new posts from people in that world.
People keep telling me it's not like RSS, and I can't imagine how it could be anything other than RSS. So the answer was, until yesterday -- no -- you can't do it or we don't know how to do it. Except I asked the question again, on micro.blog and Manton says they have the feature. Of course he does. Manton covers every freaking protocol ever invented.
It’s starting to work, we have a table editor odb browser, and can edit, update and run scripts. The runtime lives in the cloud, the client is an electron app. I had to call it a day early because my poor human mind is having trouble keeping up with the new reality. Do you know how long I’ve wanted this? Btw the builtin webserver works. I’ve mastered Node, but frontier has so more factored, the model is much simpler iirc.
I love it. Thank you for being part of this project. ❤️
The credit really goes to Andrew Shell who made it really easy for us to hook in, then we figured out the rest of it. We're using the header, not adding anything to our feeds.
Update -- I didn't like the idea of turning Drummer into a programming environment so instead I asked Claude to give its version of Frontier a user interface. Parts of it are starting to work one hour later. Using Electron, Concord (the outliner I keep reusing) and all the other stuff. If it all works I will be able to run Frontier on my desktop. Also the ODB is a SQL database.
Previously we were only able to notify via rssCloud.
Now we also support WebSub because there are also a fair number of feed readers that only use WebSub.
We're using Andrew Shell's rsscloud.io as our WebSub hub, as we have for a long time with rssCloud.
Andrew please help us figure out if this is working correctly.
The source is in the repo, along with a worknote.
Andrew wrote a post about the fantastic FreshRSS.
https://andrewshell.org/2026/08/enhancing-freshrss-with-rsscloud-support/
Claude, must read.
It certainly hasn’t been deployed on feedland.com yet, and we should update the npm stuff, I think I wrote change notes, esp in the issues section on feedlandinstall. That’s the best place to ask for help.
Ahh I misunderstood. Now I get it.
There's no redirect involved, we serve the HTML shell of the app, including the full section straight from the rss.chat server. You should get all our meta data when you just do an HTTP read of https://rss.chat/.
Very nicely done Don! ;-)
not clear exactly what's not working. will wait for details.
I just fixed this issue, but I have to post something to cause the feeds to rebuild.
Absolutely!
I think you're serving a great purpose, you just made my site better. Haven't made the change yet.
Don, thanks for this idea, we can't use it here at this time, for this reason:
I want to keep this site as the basis for what we're doing overall, and while voice in a conference system like this makes a ton of sense, it isn't a core feature.
But there seem to be a few forks of RSS.chat out there, and they're adding features at a pretty rapid rate. Why don't you try this idea out with one of them? Then we could see what people do with it, without changing what the reference version does.
You can chage the favicon.
In config.json add this:
"urlFavicon": "https://url-to-your-favicon"
Then restart the server. If you look carefully you can see that I changed the favicon for this site.
Signing us up for https://iheartrss.com/.
Must link to site! 🤠
It’s very clever and a bit of a validator which is great.
I registered as https://rss.chat/ but the channel-level link element points to http://rss.chat/.
No good, you don’t live RSS sufficiently it reports. Try again tomorrow, I say.
What is this referring to?
A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version asap.
We also implemented rssCloud for OPML files in FeedLand. ;-)
It's only operating on a test server and on feedland.social.
But the test server has been calling your rsscloud server and claude likes what it sees.