I recently learned about Standard.site, which is a lexicon for getting long form blog entries into the ATmosphere (the collection of AT protocol enabled applications). I had meant to learn more about the AT protocol and Bluesky, but when I started, I had a tough time figuring out where Bluesky ended and AT began. Standard.site is a separate lexicon which uses the AT protocol and stores different records on your personal data server (PDS) repository. Since Standard.site is distinct from Bluesky, but still uses the AT protocol, it was easier for me to see where the line was between Bluesky and AT.

There are also some tools that have been developed to explore the records in a PDS. One tool which has really helped me explore my own collection of records and figure out how they work is PDSls. The records that make up Bluesky entries are prefixed with app.bsky, while other records have other prefixes. The Standard.site records have a prefix of site.standard. There are two main record types. Publication is a record which gives the website information, and document, which are records that relate to a particular blog entry or page on the website. There are a couple of other record types, including subscription, which indicates a user has subscribed to a particular publication, and recommend, which is an indication that a user recommends a particular document. All of these records can be used by an application to potentially create a feed, like an RSS feed of entries from a blog, or it could be used to create a recommendation system or subscription system for websites. Any app is welcome to build off these records and there have been a number that have.

I used a command line tool called Sequoia to create records for my hugo-based blog. In order to validate that the blog is indeed related to the records I created I add an at:// link to the publication record in my .well-known directory, and get hugo to create a link to the appropriate document record by adding the following to my post page header template:

{{ if .Params.atUri }}
<link rel="site.standard.document" href="{{ safe.URL .Params.atUri }}" />
{{ end }}
<link rel="site.standard.publication" href="at://did:plc:jx54v4rmscfwzit7fmgz24ba/site.standard.publication/3mnrsqmzz3w2e" />

Sequoia takes care of injecting the atUri in the front-matter of my entries as well as producing the appropriate file for the .well-known directory.

This seems like an interesting way to create an ecosystem of long-form writing from personal websites. I look forward to more adoption and seeing what people build with this lexicon. I think I may try to make a feed of publications I subscribe to.