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 Hi, my name is Les, and this is my plan. Looking for my usual blog? Try 0xDECAFBAD. |
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Just put on your XOXO-colored glasses A couple of years ago, I said "Put on your RSS-colored glasses and forget about Atom." (Wow, has it been that long?) Well, right now I'm saying this: Put on your XOXO-colored glasses and forget about OPML. Here's an outline snagged from my OPML blog today:
Now, here's that outline in some semblance of XOXO:
Here's the XSLT that I used to transform from OPML to XOXO:
And, here's the mod_rewrite chicanery I threw together to facilitate this:
I think my XSLT could use some work to better conform to XOXO, and I still need to find a non-CGI-based URL-line XSLT processor for around here, but this seems like it might be a way to provide XOXO-colored glasses to visitors who don't like the cut of my OPML. Does anyone have an RDF-based outline format for me to use? I could throw that in, too. Is there anything I'm missing here that makes this idea suck completely? I was chatting briefly with Ed last night about chatbots and Jabber. And, apropos my recent enthusiasm for the OPML Editor platform, it's just come back to me: Frontier and Radio UserLand have support for instant messaging via AIM and Jabber. I wonder how up-to-date that support is in the OPML Editor? It's like 2002 all over again. Living in the OPML Editor The OPML Editor has now supplanted both Tinderbox and Ecto for idea management and publishing on my PowerBook. Speaking as an avowed neophile, who knows if this will be a permanent change, but it's looking pretty interesting so far. I'm wondering if I'll miss the more advanced visualization tools in Tinderbox. I never quite got into the export features, beyond converting my notes into XOXO and OPML. And, I always stopped short of truly "living" within the powerful agents and structured data facilities of Tinderbox. I'm not sure if it was a reluctance to develop a dependency on something not Open Source, or what. Tinderbox is nonetheless a powerful and rich tool. And as for Ecto, it has wonderful features for managing existing entries and has a great preview window - but I can publish to my OPML blog so fast that I never need preview, and I if I actually need to manage existing entries I can either edit the OPML or go to my WordPress administration screens. I also realize that I never quite "lived" in Radio UserLand, back when I was heavily using it. I never did much with outlines in it, mostly using it as a news aggregator and a quirky hacking environment. Not that the same parts are cobbled together as an idea management and publishing system called OPML Editor, the perspective changes a bit for me. The OPML Editor is Open Source Dave says: "I'm starting to get a new release of the OPML Editor together, as part of the release I asked Andre Radke to prepare a download for the kernel source. The OPML Editor is an open source app, licensed under the GPL." I can certainly attest to the fact that the OPML Editor is Open Source, and not vapor or a mirage of any kind. In fact, I'm writing this on version 10.1a6 that I compiled myself with Apple's Xcode from a SourceForge CVS check-out. It's a serious effort to have made it this easy. I didn't have to tweak or coax anything - I just clicked on the Build hammer. And, to expand on what I said earlier this week: The OPML Editor and Frontier Kernel is an Open Source release of a project with a decade or more of legacy as a commercial product - yet, it still compiles into a useful application and runs without much fuss. That was the big thing that Mozilla missed when it was first released as Open Source. This is exciting stuff and a hard thing to have accomplished, me thinks. A few years ago, maybe back around 1998, I lost my college class ring at a KMFDM/PIG concert in Detroit. I was sweaty, there were bodies slamming around, I was pushing bodies away from me, and after one push my ring was gone. Crap. Yesterday, though, I received the ring in a package. Someone had found it after the concert back then and was finally able to find me online to tell me about it. How's that for cool? |
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