Saturday, November 26, 2005

Notes to first-time-user JCD: 1. You can change the header graphic, and if you edit the template, remove it altogether. The picture of Harry is just to get you started. See the docs for the blogging tool. 2. You can use an external editor to edit the OPML. Just save the files in the same place (and leave the OPML Editor running, it's got the code that pushes the stuff up to the server). Where is that place? Choose Open www Folder from the Community menu and look around. Works the same on Mac and Windows. I agree the outliner could use improvement. It's GPL. Download the source and have a go, or hire a programmer to do it for you.  

Jeff Jarvis tells Yahoo and others to hand over "his" attention data. 

Media Life: "While Cooper may have wowed audiences reporting from New Orleans, he's off to a poor start anchoring CNN's revamped primetime news show." Just bring back Aaron Brown and all will be forgiven. 

Oy I have time to kill in NYC, but I'm lazy and it's cold. Such problems!  

Phil Jones: "The art of software creation is to discover interesting sweet-spots which capture the syntactic commonality between a lot of different things people want to do, while adding useful constraints that simplify the task, and just enough semantics to make the whole thing plug into the real-world requirements of users." 

I had a great dinner last night with my parents. Wish we had podcast some of it (some of it was uncastable). Whatever. My dad has a bunch of different blogs, the one he seems to care the most about, though, isn't a blog at all, and has no RSS feed for people to subscribe to. Lots of people have sent mail asking why, and I say it's not up to me. The author doesn't want to make it a blog. I asked him about this last night, and he said it was a blog, he adds stuff to it all the time. I tried, but some things are hard to explain. Anyway, this morning he wrote a great piece, a confessional, as if written by our President, explaining why he did what he did. It's on a blog you can subscribe to.  

Lisa Williams, who's doing a fantastic job of covering the OPML developer and user community (subscribe here) is happy to get the OPML Editor working with her WordPress site. I must say that the WordPress experience has been very gratifying. There have been some difficulties with non-wordpress.com installations, there appear to be limits in their XML-RPC handlers, but a nice little sub-community is booting up. We'll figure out what the fixes are, in due time.  

Kosso is playing with OPML as a way to author multimedia apps. (This post was here last night, but I added the wrong link. This is the correct one.) 

J Wynia samples RSS feeds, mixing in Yahoo's search API, producing an OPML list.