Mumbling about a puppetry database. 

I had a little play with the OPML Manager yesterday, and made a start on a file of puppetry links and resources. I was also taking a better look at the possibilities of del.icio.us, which I had shelved a while back without really exploring, and now I see why people get excited about it.

With the puppetry resource file, the attraction of OPML in the long run is having distributed data entry. That way, once anyone was in the file, they could update their entry with the greatest of ease; perfect, for instance, if companies wanted to list upcoming performance seasons, or recent review links and so on. Realistically, distributed data entry is not going to happen soon in the puppetry community, but it's great to have that potential.

I also really like the way the OPMLoutline can collapse and expand. It's also good that you can include notes and comments, so, for example if I wanted to I could add in the puppet company I learnt with, now defunct, but which still has a place in the history of puppetry in Australia.

I still have to work out how to differentiate the links (eg with colour), like Amy Gahran has done in her Women In Podcasting list. I guess it's CSS, and I am a bit at sea with that. Sad but true. I'm also not sure if you can put lists such as these on a non-OPML blog or page. Also sad but true! An option to run it like Kosso's Flash blogroll (see my sidebar) on a page would be cool, too.

Del.icio.us has that wonderful capacity - I wonder what the name for it is? - to attach a variety of tags to a stored entry, so that you can search and sort in multiple ways. It's the thing I like best about gmail, too. Which has me wavering between whether, at this stage, a puppetry resource list would be better in del.icio.us, or do both.

I wonder if there is any way at the moment to amalgamate the collapse/expand, distributed data entry and other cool things of OPML, and the multiple layers and multiple tag sorting of del.icio.us? It has to happen, don't you think?