It's even worse than it appears..
Eric Kidd did a fantastic review of the tech of Mastodon. Now the work can get started in earnest! #
The most kickass Democratic ticket for 2024 is Newsom and Whitmer or vice versa. On the campaign trail only young brilliant Democrats including Demings, Abrams, Warnock, Buttigieg. The older Dems wait to campaign till the end. Win everything. Have the power to really fix stuff. #
  • The feed list page in FeedLand is also a feed reader. A new kind. All the feeds you're subscribed to are listed in reverse chronologic order. Click the wedge next to any feed to see the five most recent items in the feed. Each time you expand an item it gets the latest stuff. I never anticipated people using this as their only interface to FeedLand, but it works. So I'm thinking about ways to improve it. That's why it's good to have users. You never know what kinds of patterns will develop. #
  • Screen shot of my feed list showing the stories from the BBC expanded. #
  • See also: a video demo: #
  • Built into FeedLand is a way to move updates to feeds efficiently and quickly. We use the protocol that's built into RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. I'm finding out that more people are supporting the protocol than I thought. Last time I checked all WordPress sites support it for example. micro.blog supports it. Since I'm spending more time there these days that was a nice surprise. #
  • What I'm describing here are the feeds that users write in FeedLand, not the ones that FeedLand gets from reading feeds. This is a very new feature, here's a screen shot, and the docs. #
    • These are feeds that emanate out of FeedLand. When I write about Two-way RSS -- I'm talking about FeedLand and hopefully many other writing products. I'm trying to show people how to do this, and why you would want to. If you make a feed reader you might want to include a simple feed writer.#
  • Here's the RSS feed that's in the screen shot, above. You literally are editing a feed. Any feed reader can subscribe to it. #
    • And it has some extra features that you can use, notably -- the text is provided both as HTML in the description element, and in Markdown in the source:markdown element. The intention here is to seed the use of markdown in feeds, something I was writing about in the summer, when I was developing this feed editor. #
  • I think I'm going to provide a websocket-based service for apps to hook into, to not only get new items in this format, but also updated items. I think since we're starting fresh on federation let's have realtime updating built in from the start. And Markdown support. All the while producing an RSS feed that all feed-reading software understands. No breakage. But a way to move forward. Back when RSS 2.0 was first specified in 2002, there was no Markdown. If there had been we would have built on it as we did with MP3 for podcasting. And while we're at it -- there's OPML in there so tools for thought integrate beautifully with RSS. (I haven't forgotten about OPML.)#
  • So this is a heads-up. Not sure exactly what form this service will be in. But it will really be simple, that's for sure. 💥#

Last update: Sunday November 13, 2022; 4:47 PM EST.

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! :-)