Scripting News: Friday, March 27, 2026
- Yesterday I hatched an idea of a demo program that turns RSS 2.0 feeds with rssCloud into a WhatsApp-type communicator. I called it rss.network, and asked ChatGPT to draw a prototype. #
- How I did it. I pasted a screen shot into ChatGPT and wrote:#
- "i want you to draw me something very specific, it's a chat screen like the image pasted above, but in the window it says rss.network. in the conversation two people are talking about how you can plug anything into the network now in 2028 because all an app needs to connect is RSS 2.0 support. it's a conversation between Harry and Sally. two or three messages back and forth. use your imagination."#
- It did exactly what I asked. The result was this image. #
- I bought the domain and turned it into a website in a few minutes with my outliner. #
- One day later (today)..#
- I wrote a description of the app (below) and gave it to Claude.ai, including the image that ChatGPT produced. #
- "here's a screen shot of a mythical app that someday i'd like to develop. i have all the network stuff done, rssCloud servers, websockets software. but the user interface i don't have. i want something as simple as what you see here. a user has a name and each message is an RSS 2.0 <item>. the user's profile info is in the header part of the feed. so don't worry about that stuff, the messages will arrive automatically, all the app has to do is place them on a screen that looks like this. how to??" #
- It came back with a very usable design and implementation as a browser-based JavaScript app. I put it in the demo folder on my Digital Ocean server where you can run it by clicking on this link. It doesn't do anything, but it really would be easy to put it together with feeds, as we use them in FeedLand and WordPress. It's quite a team. #
- For now you'd use FeedLand to set it up for you and your friends, who would just use it. (I thought I needed an identity system, but what I really need to define a chat group is a subscription list, the standard stuff of RSS 2.0 systems.)#
- Should I finish this app tomorrow, or should I let someone else have the honor? :-) #
- It's time to adjust our thinking about where the value is in software. Getting a new design ready to use in order to experiment, to try out a new idea, was a big bottleneck, now you just have to ask for it. #
- I may have found my calling in all this. I know how to design network user interfaces. The important thing is now to use open formats and protocols so we don't go through the same nightmare of silos we've dealt with since Twitter 1.0 (over 20 years now).#
- Did some work on my RSS feed this morning. #
- There was only one source:account element in my RSS feed and it was to a Twitter account I lost control of a few weeks ago, the account I had there since 2006, that at one time was in the top 10 accounts on Twitter. I changed the account to bullmancuso -- one of my many testing sites on Twit, and added my Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. I will check the bullmancuso account every so often, but the masto and bluesky ones are several times daily. And the funny thing is that I have far more Bluesky and Mastodon accounts than Twitter accounts. Put that in your press release. ;-)#
- I updated the JSON version of the RSS feed, but noticed the Masto and Bluesky accounts (above) hadn't come through, and then on further investigation I realized that I hadn't been keeping it up to date for quite some time! The rule is every time something is added to the XML version I have to also add support for it in the JSON version. This is where Claude came in handy, it gave me a list of all the updates that were needed and I did them. We make a pretty good team imho. The two versions should be in sync now. #
- A note on my JSONification of RSS. When I first did it in 2010, it was on a lark. I was tired of hearing how people didn't like XML so could I please switch. So I did and published it, and I think no one used it. The idea of a JSON version of RSS is in the air again, so I brought it up to date. I want to serve it with a different https-friendly address, but probably won't get to that today. #
- The reason I wanted to work on this today because I have to add RSS-generating code to wpIdentity, so I needed to get warmed up on that part of the world.#
- The new version of the daverss package is 0.6.15. #
Linkblog items for the day
No Kings rallies around NY State tomorrow. nyclu.org
Trump's first term as president has been so utterly eclipsed by the savagery of his second one that many people may have forgotten his deadly, abysmal mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. presswatchers.org
Claude Code can now dream. reddit.com
Podcasting's Missing Link. nathangathright.com
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