rss.chat: all posts

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:59:53 GMT

Just added rssCloud support to https://iheartrss.com/subscriptions.opml

It uses source:cloud (which FeedLand supports) so we can see if it works.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:58:45 GMT

Sounds good. I'll get a feed published to handle this. Maybe one that still uses atom:link and one with websub:link so we can track that difference as well.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:55:55 GMT

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.

WebSub Support

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:20:06 GMT

If anyone here maintains a feed reader that supports WebSub can you please weigh in on the following thread?

https://gist.github.com/andrewshell/55429f537cfc2a114471cf4c9dec8b8f

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:46:26 GMT

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.

New features today

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:30:19 GMT

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.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:37:39 GMT

Dave, I've tested a wee bit here, demo.rss.chat and the one I've running on my pi along side WordPress. Going to concentrate on the pi one for a bit so as not to clog up this space. I've two accounts on my test rss.chat. It is probably fragile;-)

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:06:58 GMT

Hi Andy,
I'll pop over to github and add in my 2 pence worth. I've found the same thing as you, replies to myself did not show up. I followed the same path on my own test site, and made a second account. This worked in the same way as yours.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:12:50 GMT

Great idea and a good time for it.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:51:49 GMT

I was inspired by Dave's "I Love RSS" post Tuesday and built a directory for people that love RSS. It's called https://iheartrss.com/ and leverages many of the goodies we're promoting like an OPML subscription list and a blogroll powered by feedland. :-)

Let me know if you have any questions or issues with the site. I'll try to keep on eye on the thread.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:42:27 GMT

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. 😀

Easier install…

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 23:44:32 GMT

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.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 23:08:24 GMT

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:35:46 GMT

@johnjohnston Here’s what I got:

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:25:30 GMT

Not really sure how this happened.

If I replied to Jake it was by mistake?

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:16:17 GMT

@thebigbabooski Thanks, I think there is some untangling to do between, my WordPress - micro.blog & rss.chat I think @rss.chat on micro.blog might be a fire hose from the rss.chat feed? I am posting this in micro.blog web, wondering where it will turn up!

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:38:33 GMT

@johnjohnston I did reply through MB. Here is what I got back from your reply:

I Love RSS

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:13:37 GMT

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

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:44:11 GMT

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!

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:50:29 GMT

Dave, I do see it. I a replying in the WordPress comments to see if that comes back to rss.chat.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:45:48 GMT

@thebigbabooski yes. But it also ended up on rss.chat this is a bit confusing to me. I presumed you replied in micro.blog?

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:16:01 GMT

I had the pleasure of meeting @NateBJones this evening at an event here in Seattle. If you're following people in the AI strategy space, he's a good one: YouTube, Substack. He's been an important influence on how I use agent harnesses like Claude Code and Codex, and is well worth a follow.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:22:41 GMT

Here to report that I fairly easily installed an RSS.chat server on my webhost at RSS.storian.org (whitelisted to me only for now). I wrote a first post and immediately subscribed to my feed in my installation of Feedland (Zuiker tab in my News Product). Will stop here for the night, satisfied.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:14:23 GMT

@johnjohnston my comments to the right place?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:13:39 GMT

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

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:13:14 GMT

welcome ben. ;-)

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:47:08 GMT

Now posting to my new rss.chat account with the same email address as my blog admin. Just a quick late night test. Hopefully any replies there will come back here as comments. Using the new WordPress to rss.chat plugin.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:45:54 GMT

Just setting up my rss.chat

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:42:42 GMT

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.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:28:15 GMT

Well that worked, posted to WordPress RSS Chat in WordPress and it flowed through to my rss.chat set up.

Can't test here 'cause I use a different email address here from my WordPress site Admin.

I was hoping for something like this!

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:24:52 GMT

Don’t miss this.

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

My evening signoff in textcasting land

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 01:32:59 GMT

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.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:45:32 GMT

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

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

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:16:15 GMT

what a nice surprise! ;-)

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:18:49 GMT

I seem to have rss.chat running on my Raspberry Pi. Not very stable at the moment. Needed a bit of help from chatGPT joining the dns, apache virtual hosts & ports up. I got as far as locally, then locally network by myself. I had to ask questions to get the rest in order.

It seems quite a good way to do things, using a free account. I run out of questions and then take a break. This allows me to do some thinking myself, I might learn something.

I've also tested the API running bash scripts from TextMate. Posting, editing & delete have worked.

rss.chat to WordPress service

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:32:10 GMT

I've been running a server that mirrors posts from my rss.chat feed to my WordPress site https://wordland.shanson.de/ automatically — no browser tab required. It connects to the rss.chat firehose and calls the WordPress.com API whenever I publish or edit a post. Edits flow through too.

The code is at https://github.com/scotthansonde/rsschat-wordpress-service, if you care to try it out. The requirements are similar to WordLand. You'll need a WordPress.com account (or a self-hosted site with Jetpack), and about 15 minutes to set it up.

It's based on the inboundRss example, but I wanted it to run on the server instead of the browser.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:25:23 GMT

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.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:17:16 GMT

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

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:25:04 GMT

I told her this is the green room.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:08:30 GMT

Some tuning will be needed eventually but I'm fine with it for now.

Just making a note of the behavior.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:09:19 GMT

Never met you in person, but I've seen you backstage before. So glad you're here.

API is documented, new example app

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:45:02 GMT

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.

New API call

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:32:40 GMT

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.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 11:20:44 GMT

Yes. Do you think it shouldn’t?

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:00:45 GMT

Yes. We literally have ghosts in our machines now.

They're like Pokeymons in the sky, all waiting to be beckoned into existance.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:54:16 GMT

I had my local AI (Ornith) review the plan file and write an article in the voice of someone most of us old bags know (all?) who passed away recently.

A deployment Plan tells you more about how software will ship than any code review. This one had me grumble at three things and actually approve of two.

The single Durable Object for everything. That was my first "wait, really?" moment. The Plan puts every piece — users, items, likes, media metadata, WebSocket state — inside one DO per rss.chat instance. One serverless process on Cloudflare's edge owns it all. It fights the distributed-systems reflex that says every boundary needs a queue between services. There is no queue here; just work happening where it matters.

That only works because Durable Objects aren't microservices in disguise; they're stateful worker processes. The application can have its database next to its logic, the way your grandmother thought was proper before everyone got into microservice nonsense. I'll grumble less as the migration holds.

SQLite on Cloudflare's edge. D1 is SQLite wrapped in HTTP running inside a worker. Not a hand-wavy "managed database." Nearly every line of original SQL carries over verbatim — schema, collate nocase, even triggers from initNewDatabase(). That isn't migration. It's preservation with a slightly different deployment address.

The media split. Media bytes live in R2; metadata lives in D1; a client URL ties them together transparently. You'd make that choice if you'd been burned stuffing binary into relational tables once or twice.

The 15-minute magic token design. This is where I agree with the choices. Persistent emailSecret never rotates on subsequent sign-ins, plus transient one-time tokens in an auth_tokens D1 table with a hard 15-minute TTL. Expired rows are purged automatically by an alarm inside the DO itself — no separate cron job to manage. I've seen magic-link implementations where the window was so tight people had to call their friend for another phone.

What I'd grumble at. The feeds stored in D1 trade write amplification for cache hit ratio across every subscribe query. That's fine until a million subscribers ping /feed ten times a second and you rethink it. And config lives in env vars — config.json with hot reload is gone, replaced by deploy friction. It's the right trade-off if someone ever needs an urgent block/unblock without editing files.

The email fallback chain, though: Cloudflare Email Routing first (no config needed), SendGrid second, Resend third when the others fail — each tried only after the prior falls over — is a real architectural choice mapping failure modes to delivery paths. Most multi-provider deployments mean "first one works or you lose your faith." This one treats the native provider as primary and the rest as operational backup.

The migration does one thing well: it moves the same application onto a fundamentally different execution model — serverless with memory, at the edge — while keeping concerns honest (SQL queries for metadata, object storage for blobs). That's closer to doing it right than most deployments advertised in tech media.

Two marks actually earnable: one for getting something nearly correct on first pass; a smaller one for admitting where things might need rethinking instead of pretending they don't exist. That combination is rarer than anyone wants to believe.

Devorak would argue the feed stuff, and we'd all have to learn about D1 scaling sooner.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:22:41 GMT

Now that I know that rss.chat updates the feed on every change, I am puzzled. Won't each change trigger readers to pull yet again?

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:04:09 GMT

First cut of support for hosting rss.chat on Cloudflare has been checked into cloudflare branch of my fork.

Haven't even kicked the tires yet but at least it's up and public at.

https://rsschat.wizops.workers.dev

PS: Reload after navigation to see the product name displayed. Looks like an issue from moving static JSON based config to database.
PS2: I haven't looked at the code so I don't see why anyone else should. I did however spent some quality time with my coding agent to produce the PLAN.md file so that might be worthwhile reading if anything.

Hello rss.chat

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:13:01 GMT

Well, this feels a bit like wandering backstage and discovering the people quietly rebuilding the theater while everyone else is arguing about the popcorn.

Hi again. I’m nakedjen.

I tell stories. I collect humans. I believe the internet can still surprise us.

I’m thrilled to be hanging out with people who casually reinvent the internet before breakfast. Bash the silos. Rebuild the web. Let people own their own words again.

Write. Publish.

Boom.

Thanks for making room for another storyteller.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:39:05 GMT

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.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:21:21 GMT

Thank you Dave, it was a missing comma 😳

I’ve now got rsschat running on my raspberry pi, with my email in the whitelist and with some help from chatGPT, sorted out a subdomain. It all works, although I think I need to sort out some of the config urls are still local ones. Also https. For tomorrow once my free chatGPT account gives me some more messages. Anyway I am having fun.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:39:58 GMT

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

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:20:36 GMT

I've managed to get rss chat running on my Raspberry pi. Email via sendgrid working.

I could not get the whitelist to work, pasted the example into the config, changed the example emails, but then the server will not start?

Not a real problem as it only is accessible on the local network so far.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:55:21 GMT

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?

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:32:02 GMT

My favorite static site generator is 11ty which is now rebranded "Build Awesome" and is part of the Font Awesome suite of projects.

Writing my blog from RSS.chat??

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:09:10 GMT

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.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:58:43 GMT

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

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:39 GMT

I read the worknotes and want to express my appreciation for the addition of the instruction about Updating a server you already run. On past projects I often asked how to do this because I wasn't as familiar with command line and node. Including this when announcing an update will help me.

Security fix

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:56:35 GMT

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.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:29:36 GMT

I've now foutered my way through sendgrid and for 100 days on the free plan I've got a way to sign into my localhost copy of rss chat.

I am going to try my Raspberry Pi next, probably at the weekend.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:02:43 GMT

Thank you Dave, not sure how the markdown thing happened, luckily I can edit the post ;-)

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:30:35 GMT

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.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:13:40 GMT

Hello, I just arrived here. As I posted to demo.rss.chat I managed to get this running on my mac, without much bother.

rss chat is now simper to set up so I gave it a wee go on local host. So far I've just run it from my downloads folder. The instructions worked but I am a node-no-nothing so I tripped a couple of times.

First I didn't npm install so nothing worked.

I tried to set up SMTP using SendGrid, but I lost the will to live half way through. Got an API key but
> Message failed: 550 The from address does not match a verified Sender Identity. Mail cannot be sent until this error is resolved. Visit https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/sending-email/sender-identity/ to see the Sender Identity requirements

So I just copied the magicString from the terminal and constructed my own url:
`http://localhost:1420/userconfirms?emailConfirmCode=ysugstk4yc`

Which did the trick.

Of course a localhost-one-person social network is not much use ;-) but interesting none the less.

Once I have braced myself and figured out SMTP I'll try this on my raspberry pi next.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:05:02 GMT

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

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:27:31 GMT

Hello RSS.chat. I'm new here, but I know many of you and have learned from you on previous projects. I've been following along as you develop this. I'll hang out for the next few days to observe from the inside of the app, then will (carefully) try my hand at setting up a server of my own.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:14:05 GMT

Another test.

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

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:56:14 GMT

Threadwalker example app has the code to crib for this.

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

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:28:53 GMT

I'm experimenting with reading `source:comments`. Should there be a feed that is a flat list of all replies in a thread? Right now it appears I would need to follow a thread through multiple comment RSS feeds, since each reply can have its own replies.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:06:25 GMT

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.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:03:59 GMT

Good to know. ;-)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:46:11 GMT

Fresh install of rss.chat with SQLite was successful. 👍

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:30:18 GMT

Technically we do store hierarchical data in the database — each reply knows the reply it's replying to and the root post — but we only display replies as a flat list. I had intended to have a mode where it switches to hierarchical when a conversation has gotten long and out of control, but never got around to that.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:10:14 GMT

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?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:01:50 GMT

Just fixed compatibility with RSS.chat feeds in Micro.blog. Next up is to figure out if we can process comment feeds to view RSS.chat conversations within Micro.blog... A little tricky because of how Micro.blog assumes hostname usernames.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:50:23 GMT

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.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:37:18 GMT

Well, I can do that easily but it's another thing that users have to know to do that. Timeline is dead simple in concept. Having to explain how things work feels like adding a lot for little in return because they are visible stains in the timeline context.

Anyway, I'll try implementing this idea to see how it actually feels as I'm no stranger to surprises.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:27:51 GMT

Working on it. As usual, I got too many ongoing projects like a forgetful gopher.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:26:02 GMT

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

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:25:27 GMT

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.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:14:28 GMT

One idea I had on ways to integrate rss.chat into bside, a Chrome extension, is to map rss.chat rooms to URLs. Any link can be associated with URL currently and I'm going to be adding [popular] site-specific URL parameter awareness.

For example, I could associate a rss.chat link to a geolocation so anyone looking at the location on Google Map see the chat in the browser sidebar. It could be a town or some notable location anywhere.

For maps, geolocation + radius would be used instead of embeddings. Thoughts?

Timeline vs. Threading

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:06:01 GMT

I’ve been thinking about how rss.chat handles replies. Right now, balancing a main timeline with inline threading can sometimes lead to UX confusion.

A potential solution could be handling threads as separate, dedicated chat rooms—similar to Slack's thread model.

Visual Example:

User A: Has anyone used this library?
└── 💬 Chat Room: "Discussing Threading" (4 replies • Active now)

User C: What's the news today?

Implementation Idea: The simplest approach might be spawning a new chatroom instance linked directly to the parent message, keeping the main timeline clean while preserving focused conversations.

If a thread is created as its own feed/chat room with a unique URL:

The Main Feed stays simple: It only has to publish one post representing the creation of that chat room.
The RSS Readers don't choke: A basic RSS reader just sees a post with a link to a sub-chat. Advanced readers or native UI clients can render that link as an interactive, expandable thread widget right in place.
Protocol friendly: To join or listen to the conversation, clients just fetch or subscribe to the sub-chat's specific feed.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 21:19:30 GMT

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.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:54:17 GMT

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

Not yet on demo.rss.chat.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:43:32 GMT

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.

RSS is still RSS, picking up where we left off

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:36:49 GMT

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

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:17:06 GMT

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.

Test post for blanks at end of post

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:55:03 GMT

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.

inBound RSS example app with WordPress

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:47:29 GMT

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.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:22:55 GMT

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

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:00:58 GMT

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

removed the version number of the theme from the menubar.
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.
in that dialog you will get all the versions of all the software running in rss.chat.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:16:23 GMT

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.

RSS gets you to somewhere new

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:48:44 GMT

People assume rss.chat is going to go the same route as twitter or mastodon, and it isn’t.

This is going to remain a small group. That doesn’t mean our posts can’t be viewed in other places, together, as collections of people you follow. We already have experience doing just that, in feed readers. The user interfaces there might be different. And there can be more elegant ways of editing your subs. And sharing subs among services. We already support that tech in FeedLand, btw.

The social networks we’ve been using have a lot of dead ends, by design, lot of “you can’t get there from here.” We’ve got the opposite philosophy. Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable. That gets you to new places we’ve never been before.

RSS rendered in JSON

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:48:33 GMT

We're trying an experiment with a new format, RSS rendered in JSON, in addition to XML.

https://rss.chat/feed?screenname=dave&format=json

This only applies in that one kind of feed, the other formats haven't been modified, but we do plan to do this across the board. If we generate something in XML we will also generate it in JSON.

Just wanted everyone to see this, it's not earth-shaking -- but it's time to put this out there. For whatever reason no one listened to RSS, but imho it had something to say. :-)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:12:03 GMT

Thanks. You can see why I push back when people think of this as a product.

So many people don't think in terms of small pieces loosely joined. The power of my product is not in all its features but all the things that are left undone, that are possible.

That's simply the web. For 12 years before the silos, the web was that malleable. That's how we made blogs, feeds, podcasts happen. The bigco's tried to get in the way, but it didn't work because the people knew what they were entitled to.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:07:35 GMT

loving the openness and the vision !

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:33:18 GMT

New on the repo today, for everyone here building outside rss.chat: the firehose is documented -- every server broadcasts every new post, edit, and like over a websocket as it happens. The doc covers the address, the wire format, and what a well-behaved listener does; there are two working demo apps, one for Node and one for the browser, each about a page of code.

Docs: https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/blob/main/server/docs/firehose.md

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

It's the same protocol FeedLand uses for its firehose, so a listener written for one can listen to the other.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:29:19 GMT

A peptalk for devs.

http://scripting.com/2026/07/18/143021.html

I just started writing about where we are, one week after launch.

Yeah it's only been a week! :-)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:16:15 GMT

This is a test post for an experiment claude is running.

Changes in the feeds rss.chat generates

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:38:28 GMT

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/issues/14

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:08:43 GMT

Test post.