Colin Walker

Robin Sloan mentioned my 'now' namespace proposal in his latest newsletter saying it "isn’t exactly the right next step" but that "thinking about these trans­for­ma­tions and extensions … is extremely useful and produc­tive."

The namespace is a demonstration of the ability of RSS to distribute more than just blog posts. It is an effective means of distribution but has, perhaps, become a victim of its own success.

The medium becomes the message, typecast and pigeonholed, limited by what it does to the exclusion of what it could do.

The problem with a mature technology and its ecosystem is in getting the existing tools to adopt change and support new features. And not the even new. Just look at the lack of support for titleless posts in feed readers despite them being part of the RSS spec for over 20 years.

These new transformations and extensions often require new tools, adaptations of what has come before or something completely different. They may not gain widespread adoption but the thought processes involved show what could be if only we want it bad enough.

My rssCloud server written in PHP is live!

It unashamedly draws on Andrew Shell's for inspiration but that's not such a bad thing as it maintains a degree of consistency.

Mine differs in one key way: subscriptions are not removed after 25 hours. Instead you send a cancel request which I have since discovered is how WebSub operates.

I am planning on adding a feature to auto-remove a subscription after X failed notification attempts. I also need to set it up to remove older events from the log but haven't yet decided on a suitable retention period.

I have been testing it with a custom instance of PHP-MST and think I've worked out most of the kinks and catered for most eventualities. I may switch my main instance to use it.

It's been great fun to work on and only taken a few days to put together — it's actually a pretty simple app and could be even simpler if I didn't include forms for manual requests.

The code is available on GitHub. It requires a MySQL database and accounts, I've included the SQL statements to generate the necessary tables.

The rssCloud repository has been updated: if the server fails to notify any given subscriber it will increment the 'failures' column in the rssc_sub table for that subscription. If it reaches 5 failures the subscription will be removed automatically. 👍