Pete, that should be possible. For some reason, I'm Frontier-frazzled at the moment. Give me a day or so and I'll write all the hacks we need! Meanwhile, there is "Get Outline URL" in the Community menu which should sort out some of your problem. 
Thanks for the meta-fu, Amy.
I have officially entered meta-land. I'm controlling my AMD Windows box using VNC over wifi from my Intel Mac, telling it to torrent me Dave's Dvorak video (a QuickTime movie) and upload files to my Mac, while I wait for Parallels to put out their "1.0" version. My Mac now has three ways of running Windows - dual-boot, Parallels and VNC. And the only reason I'm using Windows on that box is because I have grown a hearty distrust of Mandrake, which I'm in the process of replacing with Kubuntu 6.06 (the DVD is also torrenting) since (a) it seems to be updated more often and with less bullshit and (b) IRC support tends to be better.
Next project: local blog rendering combined with Dan's FTP upstreaming script. Think of it as another route to the goal, which is freeing ourselves from the Community Server (as today's outage demonstrates the need for).
Where next? 
Here's what I've been thinking (and I hope I've been thinking, not just sitting out here in the garden doing nothing). When someone downloads the editor, they need to start publishing to the Community Server. Then there would be an option, like in Radio UserLand, to let people publish to an FTP server.
What would then happen would be that you'd tap in a location for an FTP server, and you'd have the option to either publish to both the Community Server and your FTP server simultaneously or just to the FTP. There would also be the possibility of directing different content to different places - having just your blog published by FTP or the suchlike. Dan's script (see link above) can be hacked easily to serve such purposes.
If you are blogging with FTP, your blog material would be rendered up and stored in a folder on your machine, much like with Radio UserLand, and then it would be upstreamed in much the same manner.
Further than that, we can then try and build an OPML renderer for the server-side. We'd then have a bunch of possible solutions. We can either set up new Community Servers on Windows or OS X (or whatever other platform Frontier gets ported to), or we can set up a PHP (or similar) Community Server (like Les' server). Or we can deliver the content to the server via FTP, and it's rendered up on the server.
Blood's got blog
I picked up Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook while in Cambridge, Mass., and this is as much a story about America, and Britain correspondingly, as it is a review of Blood's book and a discussion of weblogs, its important subject.
Where shall we start? How about Tim Berners-Lee? Okay. What's there to say about Sir Tim Berners-Lee? I'd say the simplest thing is that he's a "weirdo". I'm not saying that in any interpersonal way - I'm sure he's an absolutely genial guy, and as far from most people's conception of weirdo as possible - he has neither weird public habits nor is he some kind of sociopathic killer in the style of Fred West or a creepy alleged paedophile like Michael Jackson. But he is a rarity - he's not only a visionary thinker about software, he is also British. Those categories usually go together about as we well as conspiracy theorist and logician.
We in Britain don't dream about our software. Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, Marc Canter, Dave Winer. I'd hazard a guess that they all dream, or at least day dream, about software. Bill Gates either dreams about software or dreams about money (if it's the latter, Microsoft have some subordinate dreamers who turn Bill Gates' money dreams in to software dreams, which the market then converts back in to money). Tim is one of them, but because of his Britishness, he stands out as a bit of a weirdo. No offence, Tim.
Every bookshop I visited during my recent stay in the States contained numerous "tech vision" books. Almost every person I'd think of as a tech visionary is an American, with only a handful of exceptions. Think how this has played out. I mean, name some web startups from either Web 1.0 or 2.0. Google, eBay, Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr. Add a pile of fifty or a hundred more on there. It makes no difference. I can nearly guarantee you that however many names you throw out there, you won't get in to double digits counting London-based startups. If you said Freeserve, lastminute.com and boo.com, congratulations. Look in to those three, and you'll see exactly the subtext of the whole debate. What we want - creative, technological startups - just doesn't exist here. Across the Irish sea, things seem to be happening, as James and company will attest. But here, we're dead.
If you happen to be in London, don't go looking for Blood's book in the big West End bookshops - I've tried, and you'll fail - what I did find that was in the vein of Blood's book (no pun intended) I bought, and it hardly left me with too much of a backache carrying them home. Save your shoe leather and go straight to Amazon.
Blood's book then, after that wandering introduction (it makes up for my scant blogging presence over the last few days - blame estate agents and those funny 'friend' people who drag you out and pour drinks down your throat) - what is there to say? It was published back in 2002, and is still as relevant today as it was when it was published. It is a total breath of fresh air.
Other blog books will tell you how to set yourself up with a Blogger account and teach you exactly what a Trackback is. If you'd bought a book about writing, and it spent the first chapter explaining to you what a pen was and how to use one, then went on to tell you that when you write you start at the left side of the page and progressed to the right hand side, then moved down to the next line, you'd feel a bit, well, swindled. Yes, it teaches you how to write in the technical sense of the word, but it doesn't teach you how to actually put, as Coleridge said, the best words in the best order.
Instead, Blood covers the real hows and whys of blogging - the real big proper questions like "where the hell am I going to find time to write all this shit?" (a rather rough paraphrase) and "why, oh, why am I doing this?" and the suchlike. This is important. Explaining blogging to anybody who is intelligent enough to be able to possibly be a blogger is easy. If you can send an email or post to a message board, you've got all the technical skills to maintain a blog.
But the weblog is more than just some HTML on a page - to say that it's just a webpage is to be entirely fatuous and to risk the scary label 'reductionist', something which is misapplied by just one too many a Guardian columnist, and nothing but tears results. Dave Winer describes it as "the unedited voice of a person", and the prevalence of the weblog has led so many other people to describe it as something akin to an "electronic diary".
Blood though has none of it. Blogs are really meta-journalism for the masses. This ties in with what I hope has been and will be one of the key audiences for the book: old-fashioned, "MSM" journalists. These are also the people least likely to read it, as all the brouhaha around the recent WeMedia event definitively demonstrated. They have the luxury of knowing exactly what a blog is, having never written one and probably never reading one either.
Blogs, to the mainstream, are diaries, preferably written by freaky or offbeat characters who may or may not be real (and that's a really, really, really interesting question), and who have outlandish and gossipy stories to tell. Hence Belle de Jour, the raunchy call-girl with the French day-naming and the "is she or isn't she?" rubbish that filled the papers for, well, however long that little ruckus went on for. Hence the equally juicy 'moral panic' angle to the MySpacers and LiveJournallers who are taking their kit off and baring their underage flesh for all their online buddies to gawk over.
Real bloggers, the type which Blood writes about, rarely get such press attention. When we do, we're either nauseating racists (Catherine Bennett's recent nonsense in the Grawn) or we're tapping away at our keyboards whilst in our pajamas. Real blogs are written by people from all walks of life, rather than by hyperactive Big Brother wannabes or pseudonymous call girls (although both sorts are welcome if they want to play our game). The real blogs are written by real people like you and me, and we talk about stuff we're interested in, and we have opinions. Why would anyone want to fake this blog? What possible advantage would there be for me to be a "faker" - perhaps someone could doppelgang my moderate libertarianism or penchant for acoustic instrumental music? But, of course, why bother with issues when non-issues are so much more interesting?
Blood's book holds up for current bloggers as it does for prospective bloggers. It's the education that I wish everyone could have in the ways and whys of the blogosphere. As for the dreamy, visionary stuff, it's not much of that, but there is a purpose to my verbose introduction. Once you understand what the blogosphere is, rather than the bizarre impersonation given to you by the papers, that's when the dreaming can begin. Here's a dream to imagine - once those $100 laptops get out to the cities and villages of the third world, and people get Internet access out there in places where it doesn't currently happen, imagine what will happen when they have blogging software. Yes, there are barriers to this big dream - economic, political, psychological, technological and cultural - but the thought of the open source, open ideas model dispatched to the poorest areas is a thought to savour.
If you listen to the old media, it's the blogging medium's Paris Hilton's who define the medium. There is a symbiotic relationship at work in presenting that view - it softens the real blow that blogging will have on the mainstream media, or at least distracts them from the pain they will start feeling from blogs (and, I would think, being a journalist these days would be the sort of thing you'd have to try and distract yourself from - I mean, what with the coke habits and London press junkets, it must be rather tiring!). This is what makes The Weblog Handbook worth reading - it cuts through the utter bullshit and tells you how to be a blogger. And for me it induces big dreams, and thus I escape my dreaded, shopkeeping, "don't get ideas above your station" Englishness.
You can order The Weblog Handbook from Amazon.co.uk.
