New OPML viewer now available

Recently, I was doing some work to make sure that the OPML files I created using Drummer and available via Drummer were available from my site instead of drummer.scripting.com. My initial effort was using code from the outlineBrowser2 and opmlPackage repos from Dave Winer. After reviewing the code, I felt that I could focus more on using the outlineBrowser2 application. I also wanted to remove dependency on jQuery and any other hosted files (got Claude to help me with that….).

My updated viewer is now available on Github (opml-outline-viewer). The README file covers how to use the viewer to view multiple files. The rendering of the OPML file bolds each top-level headline, and uses triangle icons to expand/collapse outline elements. The default is to render the file with all headlines expanded. There is a function that allows the user to modify this behavior in code.js (collapse_everything), which is currently commented out.

Give it a try – let me know what you think!

Archer Aviation acquires Wisk, Skygrid, and InSitu from Boeing

LinkedIn: Wisk CEO Sebastian Vigneron announces deal

Archer Aviation: Press release

LinkedIn: Thomas Wagenberg comments, noting this was a “no-cash” deal

LinkedIn: Ken Morris sees this consolidation as strengthening the urban air mobility sector

CNBC: Boeing sells eVTOL subsidiaries, takes stake in Archer

CNBC: Archer Aviation shares jump 10% on news of Boeing deal

The Air Current: Interview with Boeing/Brian Yutko and Archer/Adam Goldstein

An interesting note from the press release and other coverage used the term “AI”, but this stands for “aircraft intelligence”, not “artificial intelligence” (see press release).

My take: Wisk was still years away from certification and entry into service, Boeing chose this path to keep their hand in the air taxi market, but divested itself of the cost of running Wisk and Skygrid. This is a “good business deal” for Boeing and Archer, but will probably result in job losses at Wisk and Skygrid in areas of duplication.

How I backed into subscribing to the New York Times

For a long time, I resisted subscribing to news services. After all, pretty much all the news was available somewhere for free…

For years, my go-to news hub was CNN. I still check it more often than any other news site. In the past year or two, though, CNN has gone from unlimited access to a limited number of stories per day before the dreaded “subscription popup” appears. I decided that rather than support a large mainstream media outlet, I subscribed to my local metro newspaper (The Oregonian/OregonLive), The Atlantic, and Oregon Capital Chronicle.

I did, however, subscribe to several free newsletters from the New York Times (Breaking News and The Morning). The Breaking News letter was a cue to go look elsewhere for more on a story, as the link always lead to a subscriber-only story. The Morning would provide several stories and links to other stories. In June 2026, I got an NYT Editor’s Picks email with the title “Tina Fey Cooks Only 3 Things, and This Soup Is One”, with a link to a story. I clicked it, because I wanted to find out about this soup recipe. The story did have a link to the recipe, but (of course), I had to at least sign up for a 7-day free trial of NYT Cooking to get access to the ACTUAL RECIPE. I decided it was worth a try, and the recipe was a success.

I decided that I wanted to keep using the NYT Cooking recipes, but I did not like the price. I then remembered that I had gotten a “all-access” email for $1/week from NYT just before I cancelled my trial. I saw in my inbox that the NYT regularly (at least once a month) sent me this offer. Based on that, I was resolved to wait for that offer before subscribing. The first offer I got was for a half year at $1/week and access for four people. I decided to wait until the full-year offer, and that email arrived this weekend – HAH! I signed up at the rate I wanted – yeah!

Saw an interesting behavior in Claude Code

I have been working on a tool to access the sitemap of a news website to try to create feeds when the site does not provide feeds. The tool starts by reading the robots.txt file, which usually has a list of things that are “disallowed”. On one of the sites, it specifically included “Claude Code” in the “disallow” list. Claude told me that it could not run the tool, since it was on the disallow list, but I could run it, capture the output, then give it to Claude for further processing. This was the first time I have seen any “limit” imposed on Claude by itself – interesting!

Looking to reduce memory usage for WordPress sites

I migrated all of my websites from Bluehost to Opalstack this summer. I am on the Single Stack plan, which provides shared hosting with 1 GB of RAM. When I was on Bluehost, I never worried about how much memory was being used when a site was accessed. Since moving to Opalstack, I noticed that there were times when individual WordPress sites would use up to 500 MB of memory. I also have several Node.js apps running which take memory from this 1 GB limit. Most of the time, there is not a problem, but when one of these WordPress memory spikes happens, my account hits the 1GB limit, and all of my Node.js apps are stopped.

I have done some tuning of the Node.js apps, but decided to look at the WordPress sites. I tried using a caching plugin on my main site, but had problems with it, so I disabled the plugin. With Claude’s help, I took the following initial steps to address the memory usage:

  • From the Opalstack Dashboard, changed FPM Max Child Threads setting from 30 to 14
  • In each of the WordPress site folders, edited .user.ini to change memory_limit from 256M to 96M

I will monitor my usage to see if this helps.

More gripes about RSS feeds from newspaper websites

I am continuing work on my Feed News Archive project, adding feeds from US newspaper websites. There is a combination of sites that do not offer feeds, sites with difficult ways to access feeds, some WordPress VIP sites that block access to their feeds (?!) and one (Seattle Times) that seems to only allow access to feeds via a web browser – ugh! To get around this, I am looking into news sitemaps as a way to create feeds for sites, then subscribe to those feeds. It’s more work than I want to do, but I am pressing on.

Dave Winer talks about how to create a standard in 2026, but offers RSS.chat as the standard being described. I don’t buy it. Is this project leading to developing a standard for chat networks? I don’t think so….can anyone help me out here?

This story about a pop-up restaurant in Woodstock NY (via Daveverse) is puzzling. My takeaway is that they did not have enough staff – did people not want to work in Woodstock?

“Moderation” at demo.rss.chat

When Dave Winer first released the rss.chat application, he stated that the rss.chat instance would be restricted to a small number of participants. He later created the demo.rss.chat instance for anyone to try out. In his initial post, he said he did not “want to get into moderation”. Soon, however, he posted comment guidelines, which he used for comments on his blog (before he dropped that) and for Github issues.

Yesterday, I did some testing of the WordPress plugin for posting to rss.chat from a WordPress site. I created an issue on the plugin repo for some behavior on the propagation of comments, and created an account on demo.rss.chat to post a note on the issue and ask for feedback from other users. By the end of the day, my post had been deleted (although still available in the feed). The offensive post text was as follows.

Testing the WordPress/rss.chat plugin from Matthias Pfefferle with my WordPress site and my rss.chat instance (rsschat.andysylvester.com), seeing some possible issue with propagation of comments/replies, would be interested to hear from other users if they are seeing any problems with this feature. Thanks!

Around the same time, the user Richard posted a link to a feed for another blog service. Dave Winer replied that it looked “spammy”, then followed up with this comment on spam:

No spam, personal stuff, etc

I like this site, I want to keep it open, and as long as moderation is a rare thing, ie people behave like adults and professionals, we’ll be fine. But if the moderation gets to be too much, it’ll become read only.

Hmmm…here is the “spam” comment on the comment guidelines:

It’s not a place for you to promote your products, services, blog, initiatives, political causes. Don’t post spam.

From a review of the content on demo.rss.chat, many posts focus on rss.chat topics, including references to other rss.chat instances, so not sure how my post on rss.chat plugin issues hits a wrong note. However, there are a fair number of posts that are just “linkblog” material or other stuff, so it is unclear where the “spam” line is drawn.

Just a word of warning to demo.rss.chat users – be careful about what you post….it might get “deleted’…