Author
Posts by Andrew Shell.
Dave Winer recently wrote The web of Markdown proposing a new simpler web. I quickly realized that much of this was already present with sites like mine that serve markdown for LLMs.
It was only a quick claude coding session to spin up Markdown Browser which is a web proxy that allows us to browse the Web of Markdown.
I'm really happy with how quickly this came together and how many sites I was able to find in Dave's blogroll that already support this.
I’m at WordCamp US in Phoenix Monday through lunch on Wednesday. Feel free to say hi. I have “I ❤️ RSS” stickers!
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 even looks for the latest and greatest <source:cloud> element from Dave Winer's source namespace.
But wait, there's more!
Since FreshRSS supports subscribing to an OPML file, I'll even look for a <source:cloud> element on OPML files and subscribe for real-time updates. This is super handy if you want to subscribe to the OPML feed for the super cool I ♥ RSS directory!
Article rssCloud
Over the weekend, I released rssCloud Server 4.0 and wanted to discuss how I added WebSub support to the server.
Last night, I finally released the 4.0 rewrite of the rssCloud Server.
I'm very paranoid about breakage, so technically there was a version 3.0 that came out in May, but it was a necessary step to shore up the old codebase before the big rewrite.
The big changes have been reorganizing the repo into a pnpm monorepo and extracting packages for reuse in other projects. The packages are being rewritten in TypeScript and export both ESM and CJS modules. So far, I haven't published the packages to npm, but that will be coming soon.
I was inspired by the rssCloud plugin for WordPress in that it exposed the subscriber side of the protocol, but doesn't expose a ping endpoint because that half is handled internally. My hope is to allow any Node apps that produce RSS to easily add support without relying on an external server. That's ultimately the best case for the future of the protocol and the decentralized web. I don't want my server to become a silo.
Expect to hear more this week as I write about some new features and ecosystem improvements.
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.
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.
It actually recommended I use Ollama (a local LLM runtime) to go through and clean up the text files. I'm not sure if it suggested it because it could see it was already installed, or if it would have suggested it either way, but this is the first time it did that.
It ended up writing a Python script to work with Ollama and a bash script to bootstrap the process. 14 hours later, I had three massive OCR scans cleaned up, and it didn't use any of my Claude Code quota. It recommended I use the "qwen2.5:14b" model, which seemed to do a good job and ran fine on my M4 Mac Mini with 24 GB of RAM.
In reply to Radical Speed Month — The Reader Meets the Fediverse by 
Two weeks into Automattic's Radical Speed Month, the WordPress.com Reader has grown a Mastodon tab, a Bluesky tab, and a Google Reader-compatible API. Here's what shipped, what's still to come, and how it connects back to the ActivityPub plugin.
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
In reply to a post by 
More thoughts on Automattic’s new short-form blogging app. I wish I could use WordLand to post to it. That would make things so simple. But their limits are like Twitter’s limits. Tiny little textboxes. And the funny thing is 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 by two devs as part of Radical Speed Month.
