Speaking of memorials, do you remember UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier. Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today’s hardware and for today’s web. He’s documenting it on his blog. I can’t wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He’s basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it’s running and I don’t doubt that he will get it running, it’ll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader. #

Good morning. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don’t give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause. #

I’ve worked with both these guys, JY Stervinou and Don Park, for a long time, and now we’re in the same sphere again, and it’s very useful to be able to tell them about what I’m doing. They understand. It’s not over their heads. Refreshing.

This is happening on Elon Musk’s X, but that won’t be forever. I want to move the conversation into a new piece of software I’m doing with Claude Code. Which is coming along nicely.

Anyway I just posted this, and thought it should be here too.

• my philosophy is that i’ll only use the absolutely necessary formats and protocols.
• i’ll leave experiments with other stuff to other people.
• the purpose of my project is to show what can be done with just a few bits of tech. that the whole thing is really simple.
• RSS 2.0 with rssCloud, OPML, WebSockets, basic web UI stuff. That’s about it.
• same as FeedLand btw.
• i want minimum complexity. a baseline for what can be done with very little.

The web can do a lot more than people think without getting too complex. And because it’s the web, you can connect anything to anything, you don’t need to AT Protoize your code, or ActivityPublish it. Just plain old RSS 2.0 with rssCloud, thank you very much.

“I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.”