John Johnston

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:30:29 GMT

I think that one was posted directly on demo.rss.chat to let Matthias Pfefferle know how I was getting on.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:56:00 GMT

Wonderful. Got this working on rss.chat. Post and comments from that post originated on my site.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:27:17 GMT

pasted image, looks good in the editor.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:03:46 GMT

rss chat is now simper to set up so I gave it a wee go on local host. So far I've just run it from my downloads folder. The instructions worked but I am a node-no-nothing so I tripped a couple of times.

First I didn't npm install so nothing worked.

I tried to set up SMTP using SendGrid, but I lost the will to live half way through. Got an API key but

Message failed: 550 The from address does not match a verified Sender Identity. Mail cannot be sent until this error is resolved. Visit https://sendgrid.com/docs/for-developers/sending-email/sender-identity/ to see the Sender Identity requirements

So I just copied the magicString from the terminal and constructed my own url: http://localhost:1420/userconfirms?emailConfirmCode=ysugstk4yc

Which did the trick.

Ofcouse a localhost oneperson social network is not much use ;-) but interesting none the less.

Testing inboundRSS

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:27:50 GMT

Just saw the notice about the rss.chat example inboundRss for wordpress . I must say I hadn't thought about going that way. I had wondered about POSSE from WordPress to rss chat.

Currently micro.blog does a great job of posting items from my feed to mastodon and bluesky. I've also used FeedWordPress to pull rss feeds from one place to another.

Where inboundRSS differs is that it runs in a browser served from somewhere. The notes suggest it could site on a server or be served via node locally. I guess a simple php script could work too? inboundRss also updates edited items in real time (a few seconds).

I've run through the instructions, I had a bit of difficulty getting my site id, but got that from the WordPress.com API console using GET /me/sites/

I thimk the problem might be that my site is in a folder not at the top? I tried with a couple of other WordPress sites I run and the documented way worked for them.

Once I'd filled in the id and my demo.rss.chat feed I run the file with `php -S localhost:8081`

All I need today is do now is publish this post and it should also go onto my WordPress site. I'll check that and then test editing here by adding a link...

And it worked: Testing inboundRSS

I've now made several edits and they are reflected on my site. I put the php snippet for the terminal in backticks, they stayed as backticks on demo.rss.chat but were converted to code tags on my site.

I am now wondering what happens to edits on the WordPress side? If I added categories & tags? Enough for now though. Lots to think about!

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:27:20 GMT

A wee post about rss.chat based on very little experience.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:23:16 GMT

Thanks Frank, your posts helps put rss.chat in perspective. There are too many questions in my mind at the moment but the appeal of RSS is strong.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:48:23 GMT

Yep 👍

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:02:23 GMT

Is this working in demo.rss.chat, I see %feedUrlEveryone% inside square brackets for the link href here. Safari, mac

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:38:32 GMT

Thanks, always a pleasure to see the work. Looking forward to testing & musing.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:26:30 GMT

All this chat about RSS is making me think back to when I first found out about it & how excited I was. I assumed everybody would have a blog and read others via RSS.

In 2005 I started a podcast with my class of 10 year olds. They had great fun and, I believe learned a lot. Not having a much of an understanding of how to do this I wrote and updated the RSS feed by hand. I then had a php file that used the feed to create the webpage. I had very little understanding of php (still do not) but it worked.

I remember, in 2006, being at an educational conference in Edinburgh. I ended up talking to the keynote speaker on a bus on the way to drinks. He asked me where I thought the technology might be going. I explained my idea that an iPod or similar device could allow audio comments, this would somehow be uploaded, somewhere, they would become linked in some sort of sub element of the episode in the RSS feed with a time stamp. When you listened to the podcast there would be a wee audio alert when you got to a comment. You could press a button on your iPod if you wanted to pause the episode and listen to the comment.

Podcasting was then a much smaller and simpler thing. I did not imagine we would have podcast that were commercial with millions of listeners.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:59:33 GMT

Given the good weather there are quite a lot of butterflies around this week. This looks like quite an old one that has been in the wars, black faded and very ragged. I wonder what tales it could tell. My butterfly by month page is building nicely.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:03:15 GMT

Hello, Just arrived here, very interested to see how this goes. All looks very nice, familiar from Dave’s other recent pieces. Lots of things to think about…