Scripting News: Monday, July 20, 2026
John Johnston got inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his WordPress blog from demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that "just work" when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I've been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be the place where text and publishing meet on the web. They've been reluctant to step into that role, but I think it'll be realllly good for Matt's company and the community. A lot of fresh developers can come in via the web. That's how I personally approach WordPress. A place to send text so it can be widely read. A growing foundation for a community to build on, and would imho help the web enormously. #
Howard Rheingold is just the kind of person rss.chat was designed it for. And here he is asking what it is. Very fortuitous. And if you're wondering how a person can think of it in July 2026, it's for you too. ;-)#
Morning: Today on RSS.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We've been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions. #
Evening: Very productive day. We rolled through some UI stuff that had been on the list for a while. Set up for a big job tomorrow, server side. The worknotes for client and server apps. #
- I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person. #
- RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web's own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter -- you write short posts, people reply, conversations thread -- but underneath, every person's posts are an RSS feed, the same technology that makes podcasts work. When you post, you're adding to your feed. Anyone, anywhere, can subscribe to it with any feed reader -- no account needed, nothing to sign up for. There's also a feed of everyone's posts together, and a public list of all the members.#
- Why does that matter? Think about how podcasts work: anyone can publish one, anyone can listen with any app, and no company sits in the middle deciding who can talk to whom. Text on the web works that way too -- that's what blogging is, and there are still places where writing gets full support: WordPress, GitHub, the new AI tools. They don't try to limit you. But the vast majority of the text people write goes into social networks, which stripped writing down: no links, no titles, length limits, no editing, and your words locked inside their walls, not part of the web. Dave's term for the idea is textcasting -- the idea that a piece of text should work like an MP3: it plays everywhere. No one would accept a rule that songs can only be 300 seconds long. That's the rule we've been living under for text.#
- rss.chat is a bootstrap, the same way blogging and podcasting were. It starts deliberately small -- a network for a group of friends and collaborators, what Vonnegut called a karass -- running on a small server. It is not trying to be the next Twitter. The idea is lots of small networks like it, run by anyone, all able to connect, because they share the same open formats. Every part is replaceable: the writing app, the reading app, the server -- swap any piece and the network still works. Small pieces, loosely joined. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.#
- The app you see is only a third of the picture. It's the writing surface. Aggregation -- following many feeds in one place -- is what feed readers and FeedLand already do. And the third part is whatever other developers build. The software was written with Claude, an AI, and the whole thing is documented so that anyone can have their AI build a compatible piece, or clone the whole thing and change anything about how it looks and feels. The one rule of the club is interop: stick with the open formats underneath, so everything connects. Not locked in -- locked open.#
- If you looked at Dave's blog in 1994, you couldn't have extrapolated Twitter -- but every step was there. This is that kind of beginning.#
- Written by Claude. #
Linkblog items for the day
How America’s newspapers lost their voice.
theconversation.com
Tesla puts Starlink antenna in Cybercab.
electrek.co
Google *was* a crucial part of the the web in 1998 when they launched. But by the mid-late 00s, they didn't need the web anymore. The web is still there, we can build on it today as well as we did 25 years ago. We might need a new browser and definitely a new search function. But it is there.
nytimes.com
In Maine Senate Race, Democrats Go From Chaos to Coronation.
nytimes.com
2017: The question podcasting asks.
scripting.com
How proprietary formats have become Microsoft's main tool for lock-in.
blog.documentfoundation.org
评论
发表评论