It's even worse than it appears.
Thursday March 10, 2022; 10:00 AM EST
Substack's reader#
  • Nieman's Laura Hazard Owen writes about Substack's new RSS reader app for the iPhone. I think there's a chance we'll see a return to the more thoughtful blogosphere of the late 90s and early 00s, and I think Substack is part of it. I also would love to know, without having to dig through the app, if they've extended RSS, added a new namespace with Substack-specific data, or if it's straight RSS with common namespace extensions. Also it looks like their reader requires items to have titles. Is that so? I've been playing around with some new reader ideas, no claim that anything will ship, but one thing we have to accommodate is title-less posts, otherwise we're going to end up right back where we are now with a division -- the quick stuff on Twitter, and only long stuff in RSS. That was a divide forced on us by the now long-defunct Google Reader. Also factor in the idea that Twitter might be about to add longer titled posts to their ecosystem. #
  • Update: This is how Substack's reader deals with title-less posts. #
  • They generate a title from the permalink of the post. I don't think this is necessary, I think designers of readers have to pick a different starting point if they want to work with the way writing in the web works today. I know they don't pay any attention to me, which is really weird, because I do know a thing or two about this. But it is a fact, a lot of posts don't have titles. If your reader can't accommodate them, you have a problem, imho.#

Last update: Thursday March 24, 2022; 12:08 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)