WTN #1: WWW 34, Ghost 6, APIs 2.0

Welcome to the first issue of Web Technology News (WTN), a newsletter I started this week to track what's next on the web. It will be a weekly newsletter, which I'll send out every Friday. For more information about this project, see my announcement post.

The format will evolve over time, but whenever I start on a new platform (Ghost CMS, in this case) I tend to begin with links + light commentary. So I will adopt that format here, across the following 3 categories:

1. Web platform; focusing on the pragmatic side of building on the web (i.e. don't expect news about JavaScript framework updates).
2. Open social web; news from the wonderful world of the fediverse, AT Protocol, and other emerging web standards for social networking.
3. Web + AI; love or hate AI, you can't deny it's impacting web technology. I find this fascinating and so I'll be tracking the intersection of AI and the web here.

Let's get to it.

Web Platform

Not a lot of non-AI web news this week (see below for all the AI stuff). But there was one special anniversary to celebrate...

Wednesday was the 34th anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web.

Even if AI dominates the news these days, many people continue to make cool things on the base web platform. Look no further than HTML Day, which happened last Saturday, August 2. See the highlights on Are.na.

And yet...the web continues to butt up against the dominant app platforms. One piece of good news this week on that front: Apple might actually be forced to open up iOS to other browser engines, at least in Japan.

Open Social Web

Ghost 6.0 launched this week and it was great news for newsletter writers and other indie publishers. Now, Ghost is fully connected to the open social web:

"That means millions of people can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts from any supported social web client - including Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and many more."

Media brands are trying out open social integrations too. Vox Media, which owns The Verge, has a new feature on its sports property SB Nation called "The Feed".

Often the coolest things come from indie devs, though. For example, natalie b. is building Bluesky comments for her blog (via Hacker News).

Meanwhile, on the fediverse, a small part of it met in real life: FediCon was held in Vancouver, Canada last weekend. For those of us unable to attend, the videos are becoming available:

Couple more open social links for ya:

• 🛠️ My IndieWeb Journey: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence; Ana Rodrigues
• 💡 "Social media destroyed personal websites in a lot of ways, but one thing it’s taught us is that brief and published is often better than perfect and still-in-your-head." Chris Ferdinandi

Web + AI

This week I interviewed Oren Michels, who ran API company Mashery in Web 2.0 (a long-time ReadWriteWeb sponsor!). He's back now with a modern twist on API management: Barndoor, a control plane for agentic AI.

"If you take APIs and you take the ‘P’ out, it’s a whole lot more interesting."
- Oren Michels

But of course the big AI news this week was OpenAI releasing GPT-05 on Thursday (Techmeme). The web angle here is that part of GPT-5's appeal, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is using it to create web apps. The announcement post states that GPT-5 "shows particular improvements in complex front‑end generation and debugging larger repositories."

Other news that caught my eye:

• 🤦 Cloudflare claims that Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives (Cloudflare)
• 🛠️ Google on Wednesday launched its AI coding agent, Jules, out of beta, just over two months after its public preview debut in May. (TechCrunch)
• 🛑 Researchers have found a critical vulnerability in the new NLWeb protocol Microsoft announced just a few months ago at Build. (The Verge)

One More Thing

This post by Katie Mack nicely captures why I favour social media products that treat hyperlinks as first-class citizens. Bravo to Mastodon and Bluesky, BOO! to Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn and X. And btw, whenever possible I will use Mastodon and Bluesky posts in my newsletter (although sometimes, as with Sam Altman above, I'll have no choice but to use X).

Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions on news sources for Web Technology News, leave me a comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. And don't forget, you can follow WTN on those platforms too: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky.

You can also get the full content via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web.

I think I need a catchphrase to end each newsletter... how about: Keep On Surfing! (I'll workshop it — comments appreciated 😀)