Micro.Blog

There are 225 posts filed in Micro.Blog (this is page 1 of 23).

Updates on building a feed-based social network

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was able to use a reference app to test rssCloud support for WordPress.com sites and WordPress.org sites. Since then, I have migrated some of the features in the reference app into a demo instance of MyStatusTool, the app I developed in 2022-2023 to provide a Twitter-like experience using rssCloud for notification. Here is a screenshot of the demo instance:

Currently, the app is subscribed to 11 WordPress.com sites, 1 WordPress.org site, and 6 non-WordPress sites. I did perform tests to confirm that all of these three types of rssCloud sites appeared within seconds on my demo instance. Woohoo! I will let this demo instance run for several days to check the re-subscribe function, but I think this is a good enough start to plan for a rollout of the feed-based social network.

My thoughts on Inbound RSS

Dave Winer recently wrote a summary of what he calls “Inbound RSS”, and Rob Fahrni and Manton Reece also contributed to the conversation. Rob had a great one-line summary in this Bluesky post:

Basically when you publish RSS that’s outbound. If you read it and do something with it, that’s inbound.

Now, where are some examples of this “in the wild” – who has this deployed? And why should we care?

As far as I know, the only service/tool that takes a RSS feed as an input and allows users to publish based on the content of that RSS feed is the Micro.blog service. I take advantage of this to publish posts from my WordPress blog that I want to appear on the Micro.blog timeline. Some platforms allow users to post via email (I found WordPress and Blogger, after a quick search). However, my impression is that people who have blogs use the interface provided within the blogging tool to create posts, and few people use alternate methods to post. So, from a quick search session, one blog tool that takes RSS as input to create posts.

In Dave Winer’s post, we can see that he wants to be able to post to other services (Substack, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky) by using an editor of his choice and providing a RSS feed to the service, which is then processed by the service into posts. This becomes even more clear after searching his blog for mentions of “Inbound RSS”. My response is: Good luck with that! Why should those services care, or make this available to users? What is the “win” for them. Moreover, what is good for the goose should be good for the gander, right? Of the blogging tools that Dave Winer has developed (1999.io, Old School tool within Drummer, Fargo), none of them has supported this feature. Why not?

In conclusion, I think that “Inbound RSS” as a publishing technique can be implemented by anyone (it’s only software, right? we can do anything in software, right?). Whether there is a business case for this, or a market for this, is for me an open question.

Reference: Paying for the development of software

Taking steps to build a feed-based social network

In a previous post, I mentioned that my vision of a feed-based social network included the use of rssCloud as the notification system within RSS feeds. Back in 2022, I did some investigation regarding support of the rssCloud protocol in WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, and using FeedLand as the most prominent feed reader supporting the rssCloud protocol. It turned out that although WordPress.com sites had included support for rssCloud since 2009, and WordPress.org sites through the use of the RSS Cloud WordPress plugin, there was some misunderstanding about what a client needed to do to register with the WordPress rssCloud support. This Github gist goes into the details, but to summarize, the client trying to register with WordPress needs to be running on port 80 or 443 to be recognized. Both Feedland and the River5 feed reader (the two prominent feed readers supporting rssCloud notification) did not necessarily run on those ports, and as a result the “real-time” notification of rssCloud did not occur. Those feed readers were able to read the WordPress RSS feed and display updates, but not in real-time.

FeedLand was updated and now supports WordPress rssCloud registration. As part of that effort, Dave Winer created a rssCloud server demo project to use to check rssCloud server implementations. I decided to check this out with a WordPress.com site and a WordPress.org site using the RSS Cloud plugin. On my server, I am using the Caddy web server, and had some subdomains being hosted through Caddy. I updated the rssCloud demo code to use the port I am running on, and to use one of those subdomains with Caddy doing a reverse proxy so that the app would appear to be running on port 80. My test was successful! I was able to see the app register with both the WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, and to see the app respond when the sites notified the app of a new post. Here is my copy of the main app and the stats file created by the app.

This is an important step in creating the feed-based social network I have in mind. WordPress is the largest generator of RSS feeds supporting rssCloud, so it is important to understand how the WordPress rssCloud implementation works to make sure that apps interacting in this social network can get real-time updates from WordPress sites.

Dave Winer has created a new Bluesky account for political news, and is planning to create a “river of news” site for feeds (placeholder here). Dave has other news rivers (as well as my news rivers for general feeds and WordLand users), so nothing new here in terms of technology but good to get more rivers out there. I applaud any effort to “own your social net“.

UPDATE 3/31/2025: Dave Winer changed the URLs for the Bluesky account and the placeholder site (see reference)

How to update a SSL certificate for a site hosted by Caddy web server

I recently checked a site of mine (Andy Status Tool) that was being served under https using the Caddy web server. However, my browser was telling me that the site was “not secure” and making me click two times to get to the site, and still showing “Not Secure” in the URL window.

I asked ChatGPT what to do about this, and of course it gave me 7-8 things to check/try. I decided to do the third thing (manually trigger certificate renewal). I logged into my server, navigated to the directory that had my Caddyfile, and entered the command “sudo caddy reload –force” (there are two dashes in front of the word “force”). I waited about 10 seconds, then closed the browser tab to my site, opened a new tab, and went to the site again – it was secure again! Thanks ChatGPT!

What the “Writer’s Web” means to me

Crossposted from my WordLand test blog:

I am responding to Dave Winer’s call for posts about his post “The Writer’s Web“. 

I never left “The Writer’s Web”, as my primary web presence is my WordPress blog, where I have all the benefits of not having a tiny little text box, and support for all aspects of Textcasting, as defined by Dave Winer. I have never relied on social media as a place for my writing, so I have not been “hampered” by the user interface of such tools.

I think that WordLand will appeal to a set of users – how big that set will be is TBD. 

I do have two quibbles about  “The Writer’s Web”. For the part about “Open, for real” – sounds good, still waiting to see “the source code”. For the part about “We know how to do this. The only question is whether we choose to.”, that “we” sounds like the royal “We” to me. You go first, Dave, then maybe others will follow.

What should a social network have?

I am cross-posting this from my WordLand blog.

The mention of a social network built around RSS has come up again. I added my off-the-cuff thoughts on this topic in this post, but I also wanted to review Dave Winer’s description on the rssCloud website:

There are three sides to the cloud:#

  • The authoring tool. I edit and update a feed. It contains a element that says how a subscriber should request to notification of updates.#
  • The cloud. It is notified of an update, and then in turn notifies all subscribers.#
  • The subscriber. A feed reader, aggregator, whatever — that subscribes to feeds that may or may not be part of a cloud. #

I think that these three elements are the minimum features for a social network to exist. By breaking this down into three parts, it is easier to see that multiple applications cane be created or assembled to create a social network. It does not have to be an “all-in-one” application (like Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.). Users can use whatever tool they want to create their content, and they can use whatever tool they want to consume the content. Finally, both of those tools can interact with a “cloud server” which performs notification. 

So why has this idea/concept not gained traction? I think there are several reasons. Many authoring tools create feeds, but do not support notification. Many subscriber apps read feeds, but on more of a “polling” basis, and not because the app has been notified that a feed has updated. To me, these are places where innovation could start.

I have been waiting for “someone else” to do this work, but “no one” has stepped in to start, so I am going to try adding some “notification” features to some other blogging tools. I would be remiss if I did not point out that there is a RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress blogs, and WordPress.com supports rssCloud. In my experience, though, my self-hosted WordPress blog has not experienced “real-time” performance due to caching of the RSS feed by my host, Bluehost. I have tried many ways to turn this off, with no success.  Anyway, there is nothing “stopping” me from innovating here, so here goes!

My Oscars thoughts

Watched the Oscars last night on ABC, I would say that big films got small awards, and small independent films took the big awards – interesting! “Wicked” has gotten quite a lot of notice (especially on NBC) since its release, I would say they “already received their reward”.