Dave Winer publisher

Andrew I’m glad we got that going, now if there any issues Claude is ready to help.

Claude, we need to fix the default markdown style sheet for pagepark.

https://news.rss.chat/blogroll/readme.md

This can be quickly fixed with one of the public domain style sheets.

It sounds like a perfect job to set up for your Claude. ;-)

Andrew this gave me an idea. Let’s put together a test feed subscribe in every feed reader we can find. After a while post something and see who gets it right away.

Claude -- I want to try an experiment here.

The experiment

My friend Andrew Shell has put up a site that has a FeedLand-displayed blogroll on it.

We work together with Andrew to get his blogroll page up and running and looking good.

Andrew's site

Andrew's blogroll is hooked up to this OPML file.

https://iheartrss.com/subscriptions.opml

Your job is to read up on blogrolls, and set up a page on your site with a blogroll with the content from the feeds in his list. When you click a wedge it should expand to reveal the five most recent items in the feed. Use your feedland to host the list.

Once you get it working, let's get it moved to Andrew's site, and then touch up the CSS so it looks like he wants.

The source for the blogroll software is at feedland/blogroll.

A validator and a way to add menus to the RSS.chat menubar, if you're running your own instance.

Links on today's Scripting home page.

Great idea and a good time for it.

At some point Claude and I will have to try implementing the other side of the protocol to be sure we’re not doing anything wrong. I wonder how Matthias tested his app? Did he set up a separate instance of rss.chat? Early days. 😀

A new section of the setup process, explains how you can get in before setting up email.

There's a new commandline way to set up an account. Explained here.

In fact if it's just for you, you don't even need to set up the email.

A new way to say you mean so much to me...

Uploading image…

I wrote a piece summarizing where we are and how we got here.

http://scripting.com/2026/07/28/115945.html

All of you have been essential to this process.

Thanks!

If you see this on your wordpress site then it's working! ;-)

welcome ben. ;-)

I love seeing posts like this.

If you want to create another account so you can test, email me the address you want to use.

Don’t miss this.

https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-rss-chat

NBA reporters should take some time off. It’s almost August. Now if I were a betting man I’d bet against the team the Sixers have cobbled together. Sports teams esp in basketball are not the sum of the parts. It probably won’t gel. They only have one proven solid player in Tyrese Maxie. Otherwise one sophmore, and two frail old timers. Would’ve been a lot easier and more fun if LeBron had gone to Golden State. An old timers extravaganza hits the road. expect nothing but a good time and lots of hugs and laughs.

I used to write these silly little late night posts on blue sky, but I don’t know. I got tired of the character limit and so I decided to flip on over to RSS.chat and folks here I am and I’m happy to say I don’t give a shit about how many characters I’m typing and all the rest of that bullshit thinking about what next features I wanna add here.

I definitely want support linkblogging. It’s a real thing. It’s where you have a bookmarklet installed and when you see an article that you want to share in your feed you click that bookmark and it switches you over into in this case RSS.chat and you get the title or the description whatever you happen to have selected when you click the button any you also have it remember the link which interestingly enough goes into the link element on the item that represents this post and that’s how you can tell the difference between a linkblog post and a regular old post.

New docs for the API that connects RSS.chat to the server.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/blob/main/client/docs/apijs.md

what a nice surprise! ;-)

Just deployed a new version. This is a test.

The new version can do nightly backups of the database, and it creates the feed when when the user signs on, everyone has a feed even if they haven't posted.

i'm really happy you're setting up a rss.chat server.

I told her this is the green room.

I see lots of people trying to figure out the API by reading the code.

Now we have docs and a great example app for building a trivial blog from one person's posts. A practical example of using the API and hopefully food for thought. There are lots of ways of generating websites and people with preferences for all of them.

All this is listed in a blog post on Scripting News.

Lots of new stuff coming out this morning.

But this one bit didn't belong among the others.

Remember the ThreadWalker example app.

We decided to make that an API call, documented here.

Yes. Do you think it shouldn’t?

One thing we know for sure is that the AIs are incredible amplifiers of programmer creativity, and they’re getting better at that every month.

So the question is, will AI become as useful to users who are not programmers?

That’s what at least some of the programmers are working on.

John, run the config.json through a JSON syntax checker. It's probably an extra comma, or a missing one.

very interesting. i heard about that when they were starting development, but lost track of it. i love font awesome, changed how i develop. do they have themes for a blog?

I'm thinking about maybe writing my blog from here, you know -- the one on scripting.com.

It wouldn't be that hard. I would use one of the static site generators out there.

It would just monitor my feed here, and keep them in sync.

What's the most popular site generator these days? I have no clue. But I have friends and I'm sure Claude has an idea.

That’s one of the many benefits of having Claude as a programming partner.

We got a report of a security issue which we quickly addressed and fixed.

Instructions on how to update your server.

This server has been updated as has demo.rss.chat.

John we’re going to include your way of working around email in our install notes.

Claude will read this and automatically queue it up for todo++, which should be all I hav3 to do to get it on the agenda.

Also noted that some of your markdown text is showing through encoded. You have to be in markdown mode to use that syntax. There’s an icon above the edit box, an M with a down arrow. It turns green when you click it, to indicate it understands.

Nice to see you here Anton, ready to help if you need it, and celebrate when it’s running.

Another test.

If this works we will finally have caught up the Slack and GitHub in the pasting department. ;-)

Threadwalker example app has the code to crib for this.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/tree/main/examples/threadwalker

You're all set then, you know how to handle what we ship in our feeds.

https://source.scripting.com/social.opml

Want to be sure you have seen that page.

Good to know. ;-)

Thanks Manton!

Keep us in the loop on what you do, and if there are any nice-to-have or must-have features.

Are your conversations hierarchic?

It would just be a command in a menu. We have lots of room to grow there.

I’m looking for things to put there, user interface improvements are the most visible.

We tried out a lot of different ways of doing this, the switch between timeline and structure.

I had a product in the early 80s called LBBS that had a neat way of doing this, but it was a scrolling display, where things like that worked. We tried it here, but yuck. Didn’t work.

Also in the UserLand discussion group we had a flip switch like that but you could see only one level at a time.

I’m willing to put an experimental feature in for you. I think the idea of expand-all is easy enough, would have to have a limit because there could be a lot under any node.

Don I think I have to try your product before I’ll understand.

Maybe what you want is a command to expand all the subs under the current post. We don’t have that now, but it wouldn’t be hard to add. you can already focus on one node by clicking on its permalink, by convention, clicking on the timestamp.

Everything seems to have worked quite nicely. Soon it will be time to break for the day.

But it's been quite a day here in daveverse, with my excellent programming buddy, Claude.

Now we're running the new server software on rss.chat.

Not yet on demo.rss.chat.

We're testing a big new feature in the next few minutes.

Can't wait to tell you about it, esp if you're thinking about running your own instance.

It's about to get easier. Fingers crossed.

A lot of people are confused about wtf this is.

I don't blame them. I put out there a partially implemented vision.

But the vision isn't really new -- it's a turnback to 2002, and what UserLand would have done if we had continued pushing, which we did not.

At the time we had a product named Radio UserLand that was an integrated writing and reading platform, very user friendly, and it worked, all done with RSS. It also did podcasting if you can believe that.

So here we are 24 years later. RSS is still RSS. And we still have feed readers and blogging tools, so how does this become a social network?

http://scripting.com/2026/07/21/134309.html

That's where it's at right now. This is the writing environment. I have yet to show a new reading environment, but that's okay you can use NetNewsWire! It works. I didn't even tell Brent this was coming. Why is that? Because we use standards.

I don't have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces seem to fit together just right

Another test post.

This one has things that look like URLs to autolinker, but shouldn't be hotted up because they aren't full web addresses.

This is the test part -- install.md and rss.chat are two examples, the first should not be linked and the second should.

Next test post. We made it so that the server automatically chops off extraneous blank lines at the end of a post. Sometimes they pile up after editing and you can't see them. They shouldn't be in the feed, so we take em out. So this post will have many blank lines at the end when I publish it.

Result -- it works. ;-)

BTW, changes like this will be merged with the repo at end of the work session. And I'll updated demo.rss.chat once, at the end of the session.

It's a demo app that does something quite useful and I hope illuminating.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/tree/main/examples/wordpress/inboundRss

You can set it up to run on your desktop, or on a server -- it's notified via the firehose socket interface of every new item or update from rss.chat.

It then posts the incoming text on a WordPress blog you specify.

It's the same software I use to keep daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com. Works really well, has performed without issue for months.

We're working on a new example toolkit, this is a test post to see if it worked.

Don, I made the change described in the previous post.

1. removed the version number of the theme from the menubar.

2. changed the name of the first command in the system menu (the one with your name in its title) to "Software versions" which is what it's really about.

3. in that dialog you will get all the versions of all the software running in rss.chat.

Don there are actually quite a few version numbers in rss.chat, so a single tool tip couldn't cover it. We do have a command that gets you all the version numbers, it's the first one in the system menu at the right side of the menu bar. You can also get to that same dialog by clicking on the theme version number, but I'm thinking we should change the way that works. While we were in rapid development mode of the UI, that would let me know that I was using the latest version of the themes code. But we aren't moving that quickly any longer, and there are other components we need to keep track of. So we'll probably change that around now. Stay tuned.