Saturday, December 29, 2007

 Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Monday, April 09, 2007

Another new version?... Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Hmmm, just tried to an update to the latest version of the OPML editor... Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Movable Type and OPML Permanent link to this item in the archive.

I've just used Niall Kennedy's MT template to create an OPML version of my main blog. Not sure if I can point to it in a true OPML way, but it lives here.

Questions for OPML and MT experts:

 I use some html entities like "…" in my post titles -- sometimes, MT wants to convert this to "CDATA" in the OPML outline entries -- but the OPML editor fails with these entries! I've fixed the problem by removing the Movable Type encode_xml incantation, but now the html entities just show up in raw format in the OPML.

 And what's more, the OPML doesn't seem to load correctly in OmniOutliner.

 Any help for either of these?

Monday, August 29, 2005

Thanks to Guy Dickinson, here's a first step towards joining together (not so small, but pretty loose) pieces of code to do some OPML tasks, as I advocated before. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Greetings from Berkeley, by the way (just like Dave)! Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Dave talks about Google News and Feeds: Permanent link to this item in the archive.

 I'm not sure it's very useful. Why? Well, try subscribing to one of their feeds in an aggregator for a clue. Each item doesn't map onto one story, it maps on to hundreds or thousands....

 So perhaps a different kind of client is called for, and maybe a new format, or maybe there's not really that much value in syndicating something that already is a digested form of syndication? [Dave, I know you are prickly about your quotes, so let me know if I'm misrepresenting your thoughts!]

Isn't this calling for some sort of RSS/OPML hybrid (and some aggregator/Instant Outline hybrid, as well)? The top level would work like RSS, but rather than pointing to a single http address, it could point to, say, an outline which then pointed to the stories.

Monday, August 08, 2005

OK, just spruced the place up with some CSS adapted from SpaziOPML's Kubrick Templates.  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

How often is the homepage rebuilt? I can see these entries on the latest individual archive page, but they haven't yet shown up on the home page! (And of course this will probably change as soon as I save this...) Permanent link to this item in the archive.

An unrelated note: it's very difficult to distinguish between adding an outline level link (using the right/control-click) and an html link (using the HTML menu, and which has the same name).  Permanent link to this item in the archive.

"Small pieces, loosely joined" Permanent link to this item in the archive.

Right now, the OPML Editor is a fairly big piece, and not just because it's got the entire Frontier infrastructure behind it.

Rather, it seems to be built of several parts:

 The outline editor itself;

 The upstreamer, responsible for sending Instant Outline and Blog data to the servers at *.opml.org (for now); and

 The "downstreamer" (not sure what its real name is) which polls the server and displays the Instant Outlines.

I admit I prefer the more Mac-like outline editing capabilities of OmniOutliner. But since, I think, the upstreamer just looks for files in certain folders, I should be able to use OmniOutliner to edit them anyway. (And could probably create some Applescripts to create the files for the appropriate days, include the timestamps, link types, etc.)

Now, if only OmniOutliner could actually read opml files with links in the same manner as OPML itself (although you could probably use Applescript to get it to walk through the file and actually create a local, static version, but that takes away one of the beautiful aspects of OPML -- and would fail for recursive includes anyway!).