Scripting News: Friday, June 12, 2026
I want to keep my podcast subscriptions in a single OPML file so I can subscribe in three different clients using the same list.#
- There's an account on Mastodon containing a flow of gift articles. #
- Because Mastodon supports outbound RSS, you can subscribe to it in any RSS reader.#
- But the RSS is not very good. Have a look. #
- So I built a little app in my new scripting language, with the help of Claude, and boom now I can read the output of the mangled feed.#
- I don't know what is responsible, probably has something to do with the account, and something to do with how Mastodon. But the information is being communicated. #
- https://giftarticles.feedland.org/#
- This is not finished, it needs some css and the normal structure of an HTML page. We will come back to it. #
- I am using Claude Code to create a toolset that makes it easy to write internet scripts at the same high level as Frontier. #
- I was looking for a little project it could do, and came up with this. #
- I like Wikipedia, but I know it has trouble with transparency. In areas I know well I see one-sided articles that even include ads for products that totally don't belong there. Having an open system like that makes this kind of abuse impossible to manage, there's no one to do it. Esp in web standards, where people create fame for themselves basically by editing those pages, it can get really egregious. Here's a place where AI can help, it has an amazing ability to somehow sort out the truth amidst all the fighting. #
- I put together an app with the help of Claude that takes the name of a place, person or thing, and publishes a page on a static site. Each article has a date in its path, so it represents what was known about the item at the time it appeared on my blog. #
- It needs more development, like a template that says what it is, etc. #
- For nerds, this is what the script looks like, it's written in a more debugged version of the scripting language built into Drummer. Claude is good at that kind of work! There's no limit on the amount of complexity it can manage, and there's a lot of that in designing and implementing languages. #
- And here's an example of the type of page it generates. #
- One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that. #
- And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area.#
- If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is -- this -- CRUSH.#
- It's hard to escape this. Upton Sinclair said --“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”#
- If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there's some functionality on their side of the API. You're helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what is your strategy?#
- This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn't theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation.#
- Lots of other examples. It's very rare when they don't try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo's).#
- The problem is this -- the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we've been suppressed by the the BigCo's has meant we haven't built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn't tech? And can we change that? I want to. #
- If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that supports it, and if it's an area I know, i'm up for at least talking about how to get an open dev community growing around it. #
- PS: I wrote this on EMX and decided it also should be here. #
Linkblog items for the day
Justice Department posts more Epstein files related to accusations about Trump.
npr.org
Scripting News: Using AI to sort out the noise.
scripting.com
Mike Brown was a victim of the NBA's coach-firing trend, and then he became its greatest success story. Uhhh not yet.
cbssports.com
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive.
simonwillison.net
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