I’m at WordCamp US in Phoenix Monday through lunch on Wednesday. Feel free to say hi. I have “I ❤️ RSS” stickers! Andrew at WordCamp US

I’ve been using FreshRSS for a while as a backend for NetNewsWire and decided to finally create an extension to add rssCloud support. This not only does what you’d expect: subscribe to feeds that support rssCloud <cloud> elements. But it also supports subscribing via HTTPS when port 443 or the protocol “https-post” are specified. It […]

Today, I launched I ♥ RSS, a directory for people who love RSS. I’ve already added the badge to my footer and submitted my site to the directory. It also shows a nice live blogroll on the homepage (powered by FeedLand). If you love RSS as much as I do, take a look and add your own […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

One of the reasons I migrated my site to WordPress was all of Dave Winer's evangelism. One of the things Dave has done is an external editor for WordPress called WordLand. I had tested it out briefly with a test site on WordPress.com, but now that my main site is on WordPress, I'll see how […]

I just completed a major update to my website. Two things at once. I’ve moved my site from blog.andrewshell.org to andrewshell.org (dropping the subdomain) and migrated it from 11ty to WordPress. I put a lot of effort into setting up redirects, so everything should keep working (I hate broken links). If you find I missed […]

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So far, my time at PetPlace has been a whirlwind. Although I was hired as a senior dev and have been contributing a lot of code, I've gradually moved into a more leadership role. It became increasingly clear that, due to the team composition, there needed to be a strong tech...

In August, I paused my Keto diet. I was traveling a lot with my daughter for summer vacation, and you might be surprised to find it's hard to eat Keto at Circus World. I had plateaued and been out of ketosis for over three months (since the new job), so I'm guessing it's related...

Just about a week ago, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during one of his college debates. Since then, a war has erupted between people who celebrated his death (or said they thought he had it coming) and those who believe that political violence is never acceptable. I've had a...

For the last few weeks, I've been playing around with Claude Code and have found it to be very useful. In particular, I've been leveraging it to modernize my RSS Cloud Server project, which has been on the back burner for several years. It's very much AI-assisted and not...

Today I decided to share my ThothGPT System Prompt which I'll keep updated as it changes and evolves. I've been using a variation of this prompt, first with ChatGPT and now with Claude for several months. It has been an indespensible tool in my recent journey of self...

Two weeks ago, I started a new role at PetPlace, and it's been incredible. The responsibility, the challenge, the potential for growth. Everything I'd hoped for. But there's been an unexpected side effect. I can feel myself getting close to burnout. This isn't your typical...

At my last job, I could literally go days without accomplishing anything significant. I'd wake up with the best intentions, but then I'd open my computer and immediately feel overwhelmed by everything I needed to do. So, instead of tackling any of it, I'd escape into a game like...

“Hey Dad, do you want to hear some popular music?” I looked up from my phone. My daughter was sitting next to me on the couch, already queuing up her favorite songs. Then she jumped up and started showing me the dances she’d learned from YouTube. It was spontaneous and...

It’s 5:30 a.m. My house is still. My mind isn’t. Every morning before my daughter wakes up, I pull a tarot card and ask ChatGPT to give me an inspired journal prompt. I spend time mining my subconscious, bringing thoughts and feelings that had been buried to the surface. But what...

I just quit a job I held for over five years—and I'm walking into something I don’t feel fully ready for. I'm changing jobs. After 5.5 years at Johnson Health Tech, my last day will be May 13th. I accepted an offer at PetPlace, a new team building software for pet...

I thought I was just tired from a busy Easter weekend. A few days of family events and broken routines. I figured a good night’s sleep would fix it. But by the middle of the week, I was still exhausted. It was not the kind of tired that rest could solve. I knew it was not about...

I've been working through the iCanStudy course, and while it’s packed with valuable ideas, the biggest thing it’s done is force me to confront a pattern I didn’t know I was stuck in. I thought I was just learning how to learn. What I actually found was a deeper issue that’s been...

This week, I’m going to circle back to a concept I mentioned in How I’m Making My Learning Actually Useful, and that’s the concept of 12 Favorite Questions. I had mentioned that Richard Feynman liked to have a written list of his 12 favorite problems, so he’d always be on the...

Everyone’s talking about goal setting. You see it in books, podcasts, and blog posts. Everyone has a method. Most of them sound good on paper but fall apart in real life. I’ve tried all of them. SMART goals, GTD, vision boards, you name it. Some made me feel busy. Others made me...

At 43, I’m not scared of dying. I’m scared of wasting time. Neil deGrasse Tyson says mortality gives life meaning. I think it robs us of ambition. As I get older, I have less time left, and because of that, I can’t take the wild swings I would have when I was younger. What I...

I bought a course to improve my study skills and time management. I block time on my calendar to work on the course, but I keep missing my study sessions. The irony? The first module of the course talks specifically about urgency trapping, which is exactly why I kept missing...

Curiosity is desirable and powerful, but when fragmented, it becomes a liability. Every time you mindlessly consume content without context or an objective, you’re building a mental bottleneck. However, you want to make room for serendipity and be able to follow rabbit holes even...

I’ve spent hundreds of hours reading books and taking courses, hoping they would help me grow. But most of the time, I finish and can’t remember a single thing that matters. There are no big ideas, no change, just a hollow, frustrating feeling that I wasted my time. I knew...

The trail was covered in ice. Where people had walked, the snow was compacted and slick, and I was heading downhill over a lot of rocks. It’s easier to be present when you’re just trying not to slip and crack your head open. This weekend, I conducted an experiment. I headed to...

I’m overwhelmed, tired, and not getting anything done. I know I want to focus on foundational skills and habits to help improve my day-to-day, but there are so many different things I could work on. Do I improve my software development skills? If I need to switch jobs, I should...

In September, I stepped on the scale, and I felt like I would puke. I clocked in at 307.1 lbs, an all-time high. All year, I had been hovering around 300, which was frustrating because I was trying to lose weight. In May, I walked 6,500 steps every day, and in August, I had a...

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...

Today is the 30th anniversary of Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. I've followed Dave's writing and podcasting for my entire career and have had the privilege of many conversations with him over the years. We may not see eye to eye on everything, but most of the time I do agree...

Dave Winer has been working on something interesting. He's modernized the blogroll from the early days of blogging by combining it with an RSS aggregator. This lets you interact with the blogroll and see what posts have been published recently. Today, I finally had the time and...

I've been programming in one form or another for as long as I can remember. Since my family got its first computer when I was five, I couldn't have programmed much before that. However, I knew DOS well enough to help teachers with their computers in first and second grade, so I...

In 2018, I built a time-tracking demo in React for a job I was applying for. I had spent the years prior working with Angular (via Ionic), but many of the jobs I'd seen asked for React. Since then, it's been dormant while I moved on to other things. I still only do a little...

Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, the scale just won’t budge? This might be because you're focusing on the wrong type of metric. I've previously written about the differences between lead and lag metrics and why it's important to differentiate between them when...

Many have told us that to achieve our goals, we should focus more on building effective systems rather than setting specific objectives. But this advice skips a crucial first step: setting goals is essential because it guides how we create those systems. Let's look closer at why...

This post is the first of several articles about the technology around Understanding ActivityPub. The first question I had while reading the ActivityPub specification was, "How do I find the different feeds and documents defined by the spec?" One of the first things...

I define a project as something I do with an outcome I want. The problem is when I keep starting projects, then one day, I realize I have created dozens of projects. Every week the list grows longer. Why do I create projects and not finish them? Because I don't know what done...

Today I created my first NFT. I'm not really sure how useful it is, but what the heck. The general idea is that it's in my best interest to become knowledgeable about blockchain and related tech because there are starting to be some interesting use cases and I'm better off being...

Today is the last day of my Ship 30 for 30 cohort. When I started on October 9th, I said that success would simply be posting 30 items I'm proud of, so it was certainly a success. It started pretty easy, and I had a lot of notes that I could draw from. Notes from books I've read,...