📡 RSS Resurgence
Dave Winer has been working on his Wordland publishing interface to WordPress recently. Its simplicity is quite cool and other than not working great with Safari and depending on WordPress has everything that I'd want from a tool like that. From my perspective as a regular minimalist microblogger, Wordpress is overkill though. Simple microblogging systems backed by a sqlite database like LAMB and my own microblog.php installation feel like the correct approach for me, but all three methods have various flaws and don't give me quite what I want.
LAMB, with its built-in markdown support, is potentially the closest right now, but it doesn't have much in the way of built-in themes yet. It also weirdly doesn't seem to be coming from an Apache-supporting place, with caddy and nginx being the web servers it's designed to work with. I'm familiar with caddy and have worked with nginx a fair amount over the years, but Apache is the least work for me at the moment.
I'd kind of like to start from scratch based on my experiences with existing systems, but I also could just fully fork my current system as well. The creator doesn't seem to have an active microblog of his own. I'm kind of reluctant to make further big changes and then keep submitting them back to him when they may differ from his intentions for the project. So I've kind of been spinning my wheels for over a year and just using it as-is in a passable but unfinished state.
On the feed client side of things, Tapestry is out now and adds to my motivation to work on feed-related micro-blogging and communications. Craig Hockenberry was on Daring Fireball recently to talk about it a little bit and I like the idea that it is designed to be a curated reader for a variety of different feeds. Sort of a personal daily newsletter for those things that you want to enjoy daily. For the cool customization and feed coloring functionality, it's $2 a month or $20 a year. $80 for a lifetime subscription. I'm intrigued to play with its customization capabilities a little further, but I'm still a big NetNewsWire fan because of its price and Apple ecosystem synchronization capabilities.
In the meantime, I need to make some further decisions on what I want to do with my own microblogging solutions. Do I want to start over or can I make LAMB work for me (since it is under very active development and is a lot closer to what I'm looking for in terms of Markdown support out of the box. I've also toyed with the idea of hosting my microblog locally on my home network via tailscale because it's mostly for my own purposes and has a very low subscriber count.