Yesterday's Scripting News was one of the most news-full days in a long time, maybe going back to the rollout of RSS 2.0 in Sept 2002. If you look at what's there, a post about re-opening the Frontier object database format would be considered the top item on any other day, but it's the last of the untitled posts for the day. #
At the top of the page, a surprise that Matthias Pfefferle at Automattic had built a substantial (and unforeseen!) bridge between WordPress and RSS.chat. It builds on the new features. This may turn out to be the moment RSS started being accepted as a social web protocol by the insiders, alongside ActivityPub and AT Proto. #
Look at what we've done. I stress we. Matthias didn't need to tell us about what he did until it was done. That my friends is how the web works, that's what I've been trying to show you, and now it has been shown. In a way the clock has gone back to the world before Twitter when events like this happened pretty routinely. #
Small pieces loosely joined and all parts replaceable. The web in a sentence. That's what you're buying into when you put your work on the web. And it's a much more honorable way to work, imho.#
Anyway, now we've got half of the big picture working.#
Also yesterday, before I knew what Matthias had been cooking up, I wrote a piece about how I see the network evolving. I predict, if this bootstrap works, we will come back here in a year and say things like "If he only knew." But that's how it goes, you tell your story and leave a record of it, and then later you can go back and see what it looked like as it happened, not as you remember it. #
I'm proud that I have a record of Sept 2002 for you all to scroll through. That was when we knew that RSS was going everywhere. NYT support got us the full support of the news industry, and they worked fast in part because it is really simple. :-) #
And almost unnoticed, something even I seem to forget -- this is also a new launch for RSS. We're using old reliable RSS 2.0 as specified in 2003, even using one of the elements that had never had been much used. Claude suggested it, I never would have thought of it, a perfect fit. What people may realize but don't realize the importance of, that RSS is extensible. I've accumulated all the extensions I use in my software since the early teens in the source namespace. And that's where the new stuff went. Guess what folks, RSS got an upgrade. First time in a long time. Perhaps you didn't think that was possible.#
I played with a lot of names while RSS.chat was in development but decided the name had to be RSS.something. It deserves a lot more love than it has gotten from the tech world. I don't want to hide it, I want it to get a victory parade like the one the Knicks got on Broadway after winning the championship. It's an incredible gift that all that came together the way it did. People think they understand how it happened, but they only understand the BigCo version of how they buried RSS and were proud of it. Well I'm here to tell you that didn't happen. It's still here to pick up the pieces of what's left of the social web, after the VCs got through with it. We're picking up where we left off in 2006.#
Because of Claude, we are able to work very fast now as long as we know what we're doing. I'm doing some projects on the side with Claude that are bearing fruit amazingly fast, because we have a very clear idea of what we hope to do. The tools keep getting better, and in this period, the art of creating software has blasted into outer space. It's as if the best transport we had was a horse and buggy and now all of a sudden we have everything we have today, bikes, cars, planes, rocket ships. The challenge is how high do you dare to set your ambition. It seems, based on experience, it doesn't matter how high it is as long as you know where you want to go. #
Journalism only sees the threat. This change is on the level of curing cancer. We may have thought it might be possible someday to do what we're doing now, so amazing that as you watch Claude make it happen you get goosebumps and can't help but laugh out loud. #
I thought my career was winding down, but now it feels like it's just getting started.#
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! :-)