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This is not my beautiful wife. This is a new outliner. I'm trying to get something online for the third time -- not because the tool is hard to use, but because I tried to mess with it before going through the basics. We'll see if I have any better luck this time. Well looky there -- it worked! One of the reasons I couldn't publish before was that I was trying to change the location of the "www" folder. When that didn't work, I tried deleting my installation of the OPML Editor and reinstalling. That was fine, except that after that I couldn't log in. I keep getting a "password does not match" error and I can't figure out why. I think I'm using the right password. But, and so, I just created a different, second account. But is there a way to get your password if you forgot it? Is there any way around this common newbie problem? Perhaps that's something Dave doesn't really want to worry about in this beta sort of period. Maybe that's something someone will work on when this goes open source and starts being deployed by different programmers in different ways. This will take some getting used to. I now see why Dave Winer uses headlines so infrequently. I think. The paradigm with this tool is definitely different. Since each paragraph is its own "entry" (more or less) with its own permalink, each one seems like it should be more meaningful. It's neat though, for linking purposes -- you can easily link to just one paragraph of a "mega post." I listened to Dave's last couple of Morning Coffee Notes (7/25 & 7/26) the other day and was thrilled to hear how confident he was that a Mac version would be out shortly. I can't wait. All this Windows/My Documents crap is a real drag. Speaking of which, I was pleased to see these instructions for changing the location of your "www" folder. I'm running the OPML Editor off of a flash drive so I'd like everything to stay on that drive. I haven't tried messing with the settings yet, though. That's one of the things that prevented me from getting started before. And while learning about this new tool, Lisa Williams' OPML blog is awesome! Now if I could only figure out the header graphic switch trick. Every time I try to choose a new graphic I get a "file not found" error. ?? UPDATE: After exiting the OPML Editor again and restarting the "Choose header graphic" command seemed to work fine. Bug? As I was typing the above paragraph and making the links to the podcasts, strange things started happening. Lines of text I'd already typed started appearing below where I was typing, but I couldn't put the cursor in them to delete them. It was like they were ghost lines, not really there, but I could see them. And then the whole thing just sort of locked up. I just saved and closed the outline, then reopened it, and everything seemed fine. What does "Add Link" do in the HTML menu? And speaking of links, shouldn't you be able to see and edit them? The way things work now, if I make a link to something (via a standard anchor href tag), once I close the tag the actual link disappears and you just get a blue underline. That means you can tell there's a link, but what if you want to edit the link? Do you just have to delete the text and start over? How do you change the default browser so that when you click a web ink in an outline the page opens up in Firefox rather than Explorer? Speaking of which, I hope someone is working on an OPML plugin for Firefox (and Safari -- even better) so that soon we will be able to view OPML files natively in the browser. I know I'm not the only one dreaming of this. How hard would it be? What about comments and feedback? A blog is much more useful with a comments function. For example, Lisa Williams is writing a manual for the OPML Editor and in it she invites feedback. I note that she's added her email list to her blog's sidebar, so ok. But email is so clunky compared to comments. If I have a suggestion and could make it in a comment where everyone could see it, then others could comment on my comment and others on theirs, etc., creating a much richer conversation than could ever be accomplished through email. I suspect the reply from Dave Winer might be that people should respond on their own blogs and link to LIsa, and that sort of works, but without trackback how will she know? And that creates a fragmented conversation all over the web -- it still can't compare with comments right on the post itself. Not even close. OPML Blogs as Instant Outlines? So this instant outline feature is very cool, but can you subscribe to an OPML blog in this way? Is this the Notepad or Simpletext of OPML? I actually wrote something about this but then the Editor crashed and I lost it. :-( My point was pretty simple: Dave says he likes to think of this Editor as the Notepad or Simpletext of OPML. I can see that. I'm just wondering why isn't Omni Outliner or NoteTaker or NoteBook or some other opml editor also like the Notepad or Simpletext of OPML? All those programs produce and edit OPML files. What's different? Multiple Outline Level Display Dave says the outliner will now make sub-sub-levels visible on the blog.
Back to level two. Does it all work? Oh yeah it does! How cool. Next step: Make the html render w/the same collapsible controls we get in the editor! NoteTaker does this when it renders your outlines into HTML, so it's obviously possible. It does make a page more complex, but once browsers can render OPML, won't we be able to embed an opml file w/in a regular HTML webpage? That would be awesome! The blogroll and the blog itself could be collapsible outlines embedded in an otherwise normal page. How cool would that be? You could keep a month or several on one page, just w/most days collapsed! Stats So, um, how can you tell if anyone has checked out your OPML blog? I guess I need to install a site counter or something... I'm going to go under the hood to see if I can change the location the Editor watches for its www files. If this blog dies, that means I broke something. Ok, I think it worked. If so, the whole Editor is now self-contained on a flash drive. Cool, eh? |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 10:14 PM.
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