First, credit and respect to Manton Reece for helping steer Mastodon to titleless feeds. That's a mega-contribution to moving toward turning the web into a functional writing environment instead of the utterly broken mess stemming from when Twitter and Google Reader couldn't come together on micro-blogging and feeds. Imagine if they had worked it out. We'd be so much further ahead. That was in 2007. Writing on the web has been broken since then. #
Anyway, now most feed readers imho are broken, even the beloved products we depend on every day. We can love them even though they're wrong. I can't be mushy about this. Wrong is wrong. But we can fix it.#
In this document that is both code and prose, I say what I think the purpose of feeds are, to serve writers and readers, and there is no room for the wants of programmers, esp when it's so easy to do what the writers want us to do.#
I've been nice about this for a long time. We need to get together, users and developers and get this fixed so we can start adding more features to the common feature set of writing environments for the web. We can easily get unstuck if we decide to get unstuck.#
Last update: Monday December 19, 2022; 2:32 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! :-)