Friday, July 29, 2005

A couple of major improvements to outline rendering on the blogging server for the OPML Editor community today.  

Version 0.58 of the OPML Editor reads SharpReader subscription lists 

Wow, Tim likes the outliner. And that makes me happy. No sarcasm. 

W3Future has a very useful OPML document displayer.  

The OPML community is a new kind of open source thing, (someone will correct me for sure) in that it is about users and developers working together to build something new. In a few years, when everyone gets it, after Apple has reinvented it and the NY Times is gleefully and giddily giving them credit for it, the reason it will have been so successful is that we worked together. Users will have learned how to talk to developers, and developers will have learned how to listen. In that spirit, I offer one of my favorite howto's -- one that explains in three easy steps, how to report a bug to a developer. There's more that you can do, but these three things really help get the problem solved quickly, with a minimum amount of fuss. It's especially important when we're all working together online, where back and forth questions and answers sometimes take hours for each iteration. You want to pack as much information as possible in the first post, but not too much information -- as Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet, "Just the facts ma'am." 

Michael Gartenberg is interested in a geek dinner in Jerusalem. 

Dave Luebbert on the C source code for the OPML Editor. Just in time for the Open Source Convention. Maybe some of the Linux hackers will start a project to get our humble environment running on that great GPL operating system.  

BTW, we're getting some excellent help from Andre Radke on the Mac version of the OPML Editor. I can't wait until we can unleash the Mac users on this little goodie.  

Andre, who is German, once taught me to count to ten in German. My memory is not so good.  

Kosso counts to ten in four languages. That's forty numbers! 

Apparently Steve Gillmor is not kidding about attention.  

Paolo: "I wonder if anybody is reading this blog." I am. 

I read somewhere that Tim O'Reilly wants to sell you a book, some time in the future, that you write, about interesting RSS hacks. (They call them Syndication Hacks, apparently they still want to get rid of RSS, hey at least they're consistent). Anyway, I just got a pointer to a Wiki where you can get a great list of RSS hacks, today, and add your own (without the retro politics) for free. How about that for disintermediation! 

I'm interested to hear what David Berlind has to say about this. Scoble makes a good point, standards that apply to bloggers don't apply to journalists like those at the Register and the NY Times. They can make unsubstantiated accusations, literally with no substance, and no one calls them on it. Bloggers like Scoble are held to a higher standard. Maybe that's why you get higher quality information from blogs than from the Times and other professional journals. 

David Berlind responds.  

What Rex Hammock said: "Podcasting won't officially be mainstream until it has its first payola scandal." 

It's great that Google has patented ads in RSS feeds. My fondest hope: Their attorneys are hugely aggressive making sure no one implements them. It's like hitching a horse to a horseless carriage. Now the horse can move faster. Innovative. (Sorry for the sarcasm.) 

Testing new features 

In this space I am testing new features for the OPML Editor back-end. I will explain the features here as I implement them. Note that by doing this publicly I am taking a risk that perhaps I may not be able to get it all to work, and will have then gotten the users angry. This will be an experiment for users to understand that developers are people too, and if I try something and fail in my first attempt that this is not in itself a sign of incompetence or unworthyness.

Okay, the next line contains an outline, with the 50 states of the United States. I've just improved the renderer on the back-end to handle multiple levels, so you can see all the sections and all the material underneath over there (even if you can't see them on Scripting News). Next, note that Florida links to an outline. Now you can see that, and click on the enclosure icon, and go there. This probably isn't exactly what you want, but it's a step in the right direction. And if it had been a podcast, it would have been exactly what you want.

United States