It's even worse than it appears..
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
What I'm doing now is preparing FeedLand to reliably do things we haven't had it do yet, at least not at scale. It has one important feature most other feed management systems don't have, dynamic OPML lists that I keep touting here. I have a product that can both generate them and use them on behalf of users. But it's a lot more fun if there are other products that can do the same. It means we can build networks of feed sharing apps, no kidding -- it's going to do new things for us the same way RSS did new things for us 22 years ago. Now it can be fun when there are more FeedLand instances out there. It'd be more fun if they were products like Overcast or Pocket Casts. Sometimes companies like Apple or Microsoft show up in these little projects, it has happened (Apple supported XML-RPC, for example. Microsoft supported Frontier in MSIE on the Mac.). #
I'm looking into the problem in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI. #
BTW, one of the areas of breakage is in our handling of source:markdown. What changed? There are now feeds I didn't create (ie "in the wild") that have source:markdown elements. This bug is 100% my doing. The feeds are fine. These are the kinds of bugs you like to find, and fix. #
A feed that Aaron Swartz put up early in RSS times was a feed of Paul Graham essays. The feed items have no guid or pubDate. The way FeedLand is coded right now for detecting changes, it sees all these items as updating every time we read the feed. Okay we have to make it a little bit smarter. #

© copyright 1994-2025 Dave Winer.

Last update: Tuesday November 18, 2025; 12:59 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! :-)