The rssCloud Server now features WebSub support, an alternative protocol for notifying subscribers of real-time updates. Following Dave Jones' 2020 suggestion, the integration allows compatibility between rssCloud and WebSub, enabling apps to use either protocol for publishing and subscribing to RSS feeds seamlessly.

I have released the 4.0 rewrite of the rssCloud Server, following a prior version 3.0 aimed at updating the old codebase. The new version features a pnpm monorepo, TypeScript packages supporting both ESM and CJS modules, and is designed to enhance support for RSS in Node applications while preventing server siloing.

I just picked up my ticket for WordCamp US in Phoenix this year. I had hoped to go as an Automattician, but after two months of interviews, I got the bad news on Friday that they are not moving forward with me. I still hope there will be an opportunity for me to join in the future. I’m very excited about everything they’re doing with WordPress these days. I’m excited to see Dave Winer speak. I enjoyed seeing him when he came to Madison for the Forward Technology Conference in 2012. #WordPress

I've been downloading public-domain books for a project, and many of them are kindof bad OCR scans. A lot of the work I was doing was in Claude Code. I created a skill where it would look online for the text I'm seeking and download it into a sources folder with a certain naming convention. At one point, I asked, "What options do I have to clean up files downloaded from Project Gutenberg OCR scans into nicely formatted markdown files? Ideally, tools I can download that won't burn through tokens," and I was surprised by its suggestion.

Another exciting project from Radical Speed Month! Jeremy Herve and Matthias Pfefferle are working on the WordPress Reader feed aggregator. The first thing mentioned is something I'm very excited about. They are adding the Google Reader API so you can use third-party reader apps to view your subscriptions. I use NetNewsWire with FreshRSS as the backend sync system. This means I'll be able to add WordPress Reader to NetNewsReader as an additional source. I'm not going to recap everything in the post, but I'd recommend you check it out. 🙂 #WordPress

I think the marketing for this new theme missed its mark. Dave thinks this is a new short-form blogging app when it's really just a new theme. I was able to post to it from WordLand with no issues. It's still a regular WordPress.com website. This is just a new theme built in a week by two devs as part of Radical Speed Month.

At WordPress.com, we believe short thoughts deserve a real home. Today we’re introducing a new theme built for quick posts, replies, and reblogs: the kind of writing that lives somewhere betw…

There is a new short-form blogging theme for WordPress.com called Blurt. I have a few opinions about this, so I figured I'd chime in. This is one of the hopefully many things we'll see come out of Radical Speed Month at Automattic, which only started a week ago. For those of you not following Automattic too closely, it's essentially a month-long hackathon where pairs of Automatticians get to ship something with no oversight.

With all the advances in AI, I'd have thought someone would have created an interactive AI Max Headroom by now...

I've been making many gradual changes to the RSS Cloud server over the last few months. Things have stabilized enough that I feel comfortable sharing now. New Logger The first big change was a revamp of the log page for debugging. I found that the way it was before made it almost impossible to debug your subscribers/publishers, so I wanted to change it to be more like Loggly, which was a tool I used at my last job.

I've been continuing to work on the modern testing infrastructure so I can make sure the RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress is up to date. The maintainer rightfully wants to keep it as simple as possible, so I want to respect his wishes. The default settings for PHPCS (linting) for WordPress Coding Standards would change almost every line in the plugin.

This article really gave me food for thought about what's required to support the open web. 77% of news publishers now focus on subscriptions. Independent journalists are fleeing to Substack. Podcasters signed 9-figure Spotify exclusives. Not because they opposed openness but because openness stopped paying the bills. The thing we actually cared about, independent publishers reaching audiences on their own terms, isn’t coming back by being defended harder. It comes back, if it comes back at all, by being rebuilt on better foundations.

I've been out of the WordPress plugin game for a while now. I closed my Nofollow Links plugin back in 2021 and haven't kept up since then. However, now I'm running WordPress again and looking to get back up to speed. Since I built and maintain the RssCloud Server and wanted to make sure my blog supports RssCloud, I installed the…

Establishing standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.

I've taken on the challenge of resurrecting a website that's been offline for more than a decade. It had a very expansive and well-normalized database using MySQL. I've been out of the SQL game for about six years, as all my recent projects have used MongoDB. It's been fun...