{"slug": "val-town-newsletter-27", "title": "Val Town Newsletter 27", "summary": "Val Town, a platform for hosting internal tools and websites, published a newsletter summarizing 10 blog posts from the past few months, including updates on OAuth connectors, AI answer engine optimization, MCP server development, and a 26% increase in Val Town Pro subscribers in July. The posts also cover new features like Val Town Access for team-only authentication and the company's move to host its own documentation on its platform.", "body_md": "If you only follow the Val Town blog by email, there are a number of essays and whatnot that we’re overdue in sending. It has been a good summer of writing for the whole Val Town team, so behold: 10 posts from the last few months, in reverse chronological order.\n\n## I.\n\nSteve wrote about [ Connecting every app to every other app](/connectors)\nwith OAuth DCR and CIMD (in other words, solving OAuth’s n^2 problem).\n\n## II.\n\nI wrote that\n[ A docs page is a very long and complex search query to find wandering AI agents and make them route interested people to your company](/aeo).\nThe title is a riff on Henrik Karlsson’s essay, and the subject matter is\nbasically “Val Town tries AEO.”\n\n## III.\n\nWe interviewed Paul Carleton, Technical Staff at Anthropic and MCP Core\nMaintainer, about\n[ How MCP’s Core Maintainers leverage Val Town to develop the protocol](/mcp-core-maintainers).\n(We also have a new\n\n[docs guide on building your own MCP server in Val Town](https://docs.val.town/guides/how-to-build-an-mcp-server).)\n\n## IV.\n\nTom wrote about the new\n[ Val Town Access: one-click team-only authentication for your internal tools](/access).\nVal Town Access is more or less the realization of my daydream essay about\nShopify Quick, linked below.\n\n## V.\n\nCharlie wrote about [ Our Self-Building Slackbot](/slackbot-townie), an\nexperiment in multiplayer vibecoding.\n\n## VI.\n\nSteve continued his public investor updates with the\n[ July edition](/2026-july) (highlight: Val Town Pro subscribers up 26%).\n\n## VII.\n\nI wrote about [ Docfooding: Eating our own documentation](/docfooding), which\nis to say the official Val Town docs are now\n\n[written and hosted on Val Town](https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/docs). Moving docs in-house was a natural follow-up to\n\n[blogfooding](/migration)—writing and hosting our own blog.\n\n## VIII.\n\nTom wrote a [ Report from the security mines](/security) about finding,\nfixing, and preventing exploits with automated tooling and hard-won knowledge.\n\n## IX.\n\nI wrote about [ Ethical cold outreach](/ethical-cold-outreach) after Charlie\ngot an AI-generated video sales pitch from a startup pretending its AI clone was\nhuman.\n\n## X.\n\nI wrote a daydream essay asking,\n[ What if every company had an internal hosting platform like Shopify’s Quick?](/shopify-quick-for-all).\nVal Town Access took us one step closer to fulfilling that daydream, i.e. Val\nTown as the place where your company hosts all your delightful little websites\nand tools.\n\n*P.S. Although he didn't write anything for the blog, whenever you see an\nanthropomorphized potato, you can assume it was Jackson who doodled it.*\n\n**We're hiring!**\n\nAre you an infra engineer who cares about the joy of programming?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/val-town-newsletter-27", "canonical_source": "https://blog.val.town/newsletter-27", "published_at": "2026-09-02 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-02 21:53:31.481003+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Val Town", "Steve", "Tom", "Charlie", "Paul Carleton", "Anthropic", "MCP", "Shopify"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/val-town-newsletter-27", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/val-town-newsletter-27.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/val-town-newsletter-27.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/val-town-newsletter-27.jsonld"}}