What it is 

Here's what the little status minder looks like in case you can't bear to fire up IE. It's actual size but it seems much bigger to me. (TMBG)

Rendering night in the ol' OPML saloon 

Looking at the changes page late Tuesday night, I see Koan went a little crazy with Active Renderer and Amy Gahran's Women in Podcasting list. Neat!

BTW Fran, the podcasting list Amy is another more famous Amy. I thought maybe you thought she was me or I was her or something. I'm sure she'd like the help. I was thinking of volunteering for maintenance chores, too, and I may, but I'm about to start up my podcast again, and I really have to watch myself or I'll get into too much.

I've been working on my little project to make a sort of poor man's widget so that colleagues can peer in on the status of a project without having the OPML Editor installed. I really appreciate Dan's and Wilk's help on the newbie list.

I wasn't up to the task the way Dan does it, so I ended up going this route for now. It's a very old IE-only method described by Joshua Allen. Everyone at work uses IE so it should be OK for now.

Here's what I did and how it will work:

I give my co-workers this HTML file to put on their desktops. Or they could bookmark the page on the server, but I kind of like the idea of it being local for some reason. (Remember, it only works in IE.)

The content of the HTML file is a Javascript include so that I can add links to other project status outlines in the future.

When they click on the link they get a little window showing where we are on gathering together the supplemental online content that serves as a companion to selected feature articles in one of our print magazines.

I'm making the outline with the OPML editor, and the team is seeing a view-only HTML rendition of the outline. Whenever the writers and editors and publisher want to see where we are, they'll get the current status.