Val Town Newsletter 27

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.

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. I. Steve wrote about Connecting every app to every other app /connectors with OAuth DCR and CIMD in other words, solving OAuth’s n^2 problem . II. I wrote that 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 . The title is a riff on Henrik Karlsson’s essay, and the subject matter is basically “Val Town tries AEO.” III. We interviewed Paul Carleton, Technical Staff at Anthropic and MCP Core Maintainer, about How MCP’s Core Maintainers leverage Val Town to develop the protocol /mcp-core-maintainers . We also have a new docs guide on building your own MCP server in Val Town https://docs.val.town/guides/how-to-build-an-mcp-server . IV. Tom wrote about the new Val Town Access: one-click team-only authentication for your internal tools /access . Val Town Access is more or less the realization of my daydream essay about Shopify Quick, linked below. V. Charlie wrote about Our Self-Building Slackbot /slackbot-townie , an experiment in multiplayer vibecoding. VI. Steve continued his public investor updates with the July edition /2026-july highlight: Val Town Pro subscribers up 26% . VII. I wrote about Docfooding: Eating our own documentation /docfooding , which is to say the official Val Town docs are now written and hosted on Val Town https://www.val.town/x/valdottown/docs . Moving docs in-house was a natural follow-up to blogfooding /migration —writing and hosting our own blog. VIII. Tom wrote a Report from the security mines /security about finding, fixing, and preventing exploits with automated tooling and hard-won knowledge. IX. I wrote about Ethical cold outreach /ethical-cold-outreach after Charlie got an AI-generated video sales pitch from a startup pretending its AI clone was human. X. I wrote a daydream essay asking, What if every company had an internal hosting platform like Shopify’s Quick? /shopify-quick-for-all . Val Town Access took us one step closer to fulfilling that daydream, i.e. Val Town as the place where your company hosts all your delightful little websites and tools. P.S. Although he didn't write anything for the blog, whenever you see an anthropomorphized potato, you can assume it was Jackson who doodled it. We're hiring Are you an infra engineer who cares about the joy of programming?