- Here's the DocServer page.#
- This is the same code as was used in Old School to generate Markdown text from outlines. #
- It respects the flSinglespaceMarkdown attribute. #
- I wanted to get it into Drummer, so it could be used in lots of circumstances and everyone would not have to reinvent the wheel. #
- I did a new kind of example, more of a narrative, but it includes code that works. #
- I wrote up what happened here. #
- One reason I'm sharing it is that I was surprised that the problem appears not to have been caused by an instant outline updating, rather it may be connected to editing the Scripts menu. I'm wondering if people who experienced this kind of data loss are the kind of people who do that, or even know what it means to edit the Scripts menu. #
- In Drummer, if you end up with a tab with no close box, you can still close the tab if you're willing to do some digging.#
- Before you do anything...#
- The reason the tab is misbehaving is probably because there was an error loading the file. #
- If you know how to access the JavaScript console, open it, and look for an error message. #
- It should offer a clue as to what's going wrong. #
- If there is an error, please report the problem. #
- Try the Close command in the File menu.#
- Click on the tab to activate it.#
- Choose Close from the File menu.#
- That will often get rid of the tab.#
- If that doesn't do it...#
- These instructions are for Chrome, something similar should work in other browsers.#
- Right-click on the tab. #
- Look for an element in the class spCloseBox. Screen shot.#
- Edit the style section by single-clicking on the element and change hidden to visible.#
- The close box should now appear.#
- Click it to close the tab.#
- It's a collection of links to stuff about Drummer. Nicely done. #
- This time I think I have it, for real. I swear. ;-)#
- Here's the deal...#
- All the action is in Old School.#
- A new head-level attribute, flSinglespaceMarkdown.#
- Default: false -- which means we generate two newlines per outline node, with one exception.#
- If a node has an flSinglespaceMarkdown att set true, its subs are single-spaced. #
- The assumption is that most often people will write in the outliner one paragraph per headline. but there are exceptional cases where you need more control over the markdown text we generate, and need to do your own double spacing, so you tell Old School to just do one.#
- Comment here. #
- Update: I deployed the new version of Old School, so this change is available for testing. #
- I was doing some work on a project related to PagePark, and opened up the docs outline, and what I saw reminded me that I can't work with the one-newline per headline rule. You can have a look at the file yourself, choose Open URL from the File menu, and enter this URL.#
- That's the way I write, using an outliner, in Markdown, and how I've been doing it for years. #
- So my current thinking is that it's going to have to be a per-user choice, and it will have to result in a new head-level attribute to communicate the choice between Drummer and Old School, via the OPML.#
A list of changes/fixes.
Fixed a bug where it would generate an HTML <p> for a singular post that had type markdown. This would cause the purple pound sign to appear below the headline, instead of to the right of the headline, in the rendering.
For titled posts of type markdown, enclose the generated markdown text in a div not a span, because that's what it is. The type is divMarkdownText.
Did a few CSS tweaks for Markdown posts, to increase the spacing between headings, and to make the paragraph spacing follow the same rules as non-markdown Old School paragraphs. Checked in the changes.
New release of Old School, v0.7.16. Checked in the changes.
- Going to do some more cleanup work on Markdown in Old School. #
- In the meantime, the thread continues. If you're planning on using Markdown to write blog posts in Drummer, you might want to tune in, because things are being locked down today. #
- I sent a private note to Gruber letting him know this discussion is going on. As far as I know we are setting prior art for outliners being used to generate Markdown for publishing. This is different from the LogSeq/Obsidian model -- which uses Markdown as a file format for outlines. If there is prior art, I would love to know about it now, asap. #
- If you tried to load Drummer in the last hour (betweeen 10:40 and 11:40AM in the Eastern US), it probably didn;'t work very well.#
- I was trying an experiment, and thought it was only deployed locally but that was incorrect. I've restored everything and it should all be working as well as it usually does. #
- Sorry! Still diggin as they say.#
- I made a big change to the way markdown posts are rendered. #
- If you have an experimental post, now would be a great time to try re-rendering it and..#
- 1. Evaluate -- how does it look? #
- 2. Does it make more sense this way, from a markdown point of view?#
- 3. Should we leave it this way -- ie indentation is ignored, you can use it any way you like and 2. we add one newline for every headline, not two.#
- 4. Please provide a link to the rendered page. I'd like to see how you're using it. #
- Comments here.#
- If you expand a node of type "rss" it fills in the items from the feed, whose address is in the xmlUrl attribute. #
- Here's a video demo that illustrates. #
- New Drummer verb, reads an RSS feed, returns a JavaScript object. #
- Be sure to read the blog post on Scripting News. #
- I missed the renewal notices for the domain, so it's out now, but I expect it'll be back shortly. Sorry! :-(#
- The example#
Finnerty
Umpire
Hoosegow
aukland
persephone
raiders
one
two
nested one
nested two
- three
- The RFC#
- If you want to discuss, here's an RFC. I would love to have a collegial discussion about this stuff with people who know both Markdown and how to use Drummer. We should be having these discussions. Come on -- don't be shy! :-)#
Headings
First-level heading
Second-level heading
Third-level heading
Fourth-level heading
Block quote
Oh the buzzing of the bees
And the sycamore trees
A soda water fountain
Unordered list
Ordered list
Code block
.ulCodeSubs {
font-family: "Lucida Console", Monaco, monospace;
font-size: 14px !important;
}
Inline code
console.log ("hooray for hollyood")
Image
Nested lists
Paragraphs
paragraph 1
paragraph 2
- I was experimenting a few weeks ago with Markdown nodes, but didn't get anything I liked or wanted anyone to use. #
- Some people have noticed, which is fine. If you like, start an RFC thread on it, but right now I don't promise the whole thing won't completely change or even go away, so it wouldn't be wise to use it expecting what you do will continue to work. 😀#
- One of the reasons btw I don't pursue these things is because there's
nonot enough interaction. I can't design something like this without real users in the loop. If you want new features like this you have to be ready to participate. #
- op.getCursorJstruct#
- op.getOutlineJstruct#
- These two verbs get the equivalent of op.getCursorOpml and opml.getCurrentOpml, but instead of returning XML text, they return JavaScript objects, which makes processing the outline data both easier to program and faster. I needed these routines for a new bit of functionality I'm working on, and as now is the custom, when I write new functionality, I try to include the basic functionality as documented Drumkit verbs. #
- I know you all didn't pay any money for Drummer, and I know that changes the psychology of how you view the product. And that's cool, I still don't want to try to make a business of this, maybe at some point, but not now. #
- But -- it is really imporant that at least a few people try each change that's posted here within a few hours of its posting. That's how we build a rhythm. It really does become much harder to address problems when I've moved on from that area of the product. If you own a house, it's like this -- you have the roofing guys there working on stuff, and you remember there's a leak under the upstairs bathroom. But you don't think of it until a week after they've left. It's going to cost a lot more if you have to have the come out again. The time to speak up is when that part of the product is being worked on.#
- It's especially important if you report a problem and there's a fix for that problem that you verify that the problem was fixed (or not). That has actually happened here in the last few days. #
- The thing I want you to know is that I can't work on this product in any meaningful way without interaction coming back from users. That's not "I won't" -- it's "can't." I will at some point give up and do other things. As I've mentioned before this has been happening regularly with all the products I've created in the last few years. It sucks. I want to work, and share what I create, but it only works if people participate.#
- Now I understand you all have lives and jobs, your own realities, and so do I. So I want you to understand how important your participation is. #
- BTW, the thing I'm waiting for feedback on is the tuneup in the bookmarklet. Does it work for you? I wasn't getting good reports on the problem, they were vague and not reproducible. So I've been trying out things that make it more conservative. Seems a shame to slow a feature down when it might not have anything to do with the problem people are experiencing. But how could I know? The communication has been really inadequate. #
- There have been some additional reports of problems with the Bookmarklet. #
- I moved the processing of the bookmarklet to later in the launch process. There's a lot of realtime multithread stuff going on in Drummer as it starts up. Usually you don't have to worry about this, but the bookmarklet possibly opens a tab that isn't already open and might not be frontmost. So there's the potential for trouble. #
- It's so useful, I really want it to be reliable. #
- Keep reporting problems, try to be specific about what happened. #
- It has been described as a personal Yahoo. I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe we can render these outlines like Yahoo. There is plenty of prior art for that, from Frontier days. #
- Thanks! ;-)#
- This verb takes a date created in your local time zone and converts it to a date in a different time zone. #
- This has become such an important operation, I would nominate it for inclusion in the standard JavaScript library.#
- Here's the DocServer page. #
- @sabre23t reported that when he clicked on the Eye icon when viewing the Change Notes outline, that it computed the URL incorrectly and resulted in a 404 error. It was fascinating because this was a use-case I didn't consider when designing the feature.#
- It should work now. #
- To test:#
- Hard-reload web Drummer.#
- In the Docs menu, choose Change Notes.#
- Click on any headline in that outline to move the bar cursor to it.#
- Click the Eye icon#
- To solve this problem, I implemented a new verb that will be good to have around for future work in this area.#
- New verb, returns the URL of the post the bar cursor points to.#
- If it's a titled post, the cursor points to the specific line in the post the cursor points to.#
- The verb returns undefined if the file doesn't have a head-level urlBlogWebsite attribute. #
- I've posted the source code for this verb, for review -- because a few prolific Drumkit scripters have produced their own versions of this function, and I want to be sure I've got the bases covered. #
- Also, I wired this function into the Eye icon, to make it easier to access. #
- I was following a discussion in the support group, and reading code that @amit wrote, about matching up with the permalinks that Old School creates from within Drummer. #
- Anyway, in the rush to fix the problem with Far East blogs and time zones, in October, something weird slipped through, and it can't be changed now, so I might as well document it. :-)#
- Suppose I have a headline, either a singular post or part of a titled post, and I want to, in a Drummer script, generate a permalink to it. #
- So first, I have to figure out what the year, month and day is, so I point to the right page. This is done in the user's timezone. That was the tricky part of the October problem. #
- Then I have to figure out the permalink, the link to the purple pound sign on the line. Here we use the time in GMT.#
- I have posted this as an RFC, and see if people agree, and I might bake some funcitonality in Drummer to smoothe this out. #
- Scott Hanson has been working on running PagePark behind Caddy, which makes it possible for all your sites to be accessible via HTTPS.#
- If this works, the goal is to have Drummer itself run as an HTTPS app. #
- So if you're interested, have a look at his RFC on the PagePark site.#
- I added the feature he RFC'd, and it appears to work. #
- Various tools-for-thought products use Markdown as an interchange format for outlines. #
- Whatever I personally think of the format, there's enough support out there so that it's wise for Drummer to support the format if possible.#
- I've started writing some code to do it, starting with export.#
- Here's the thread on the RFC site. #
- Here's a demo, the serialization of the states outline. #
- Frontier has a table, system.temp, which you can emulate in Drummer.#
- The thing about system.temp is that it's ephemeral. Anything you put in system.temp goes away the next time you launch Frontier. #
- That made it useful for little one-line scripts, or demos -- it was a way to save a value to be used in a future one-liner, without cluttering up your object database.#
- Here's how you do it in Drummer. #
- In an outline, enter root.temp = new Object () and press Cmd-/#
- Now when you need a temporary place to hold a value, use that object.#
- root.temp.fname = "hello.opml"#
- Not very high tech, but useful! 🥁#
- Not sure if this has ever been called out specifically.#
- To include a podcast, record an MP3 then...#
- Copy the URL to the clipboard.#
- In your Drummer blog, create a new headline with the big + icon. #
- Type in some text like Here's my latest podcast hope you like it. #
- With the cursor on the headline, click the suitcase icon. #
- Create a new attribute called enclosure with the URL of the MP3 as the value.#
- Click OK to save the atts. Drummer will automatically fill in the enclosure type and length by checking the file. If those don't show up that means there was a problem reading the file.#
- Build the blog to publish the enclosure in the RSS feed.#
- There was a report on problems with the bookmarklet a few days ago, and I changed the way it works at startup to make it a bit more reliable, perhaps. Wondering -- if you're using the bookmarklet, how is it going? Is it putting the notes where they should? Any reliability issues? Comment in this thread.#
- If you had an image attribute on a node it would appear in the HTML rendering of the page and not in the RSS feed. This is a longtime oversight. I read about this on a blog, so I had a few minutes, and I fixed it. These kinds of omissions are generally easy to fix, just things that slipped through the cracks. It couldn't hurt to also mention it in an issue on a Drummer Support thread. It's more likely to get addressed that way. 😄#
- I was reading about this on Ryan Tate's blog the other day, and it was a passionate story about how he loved editing his blog in an outliner, because sometimes an idea that's buried 8 levels deep could be promoted to become a post in its own right. That struck a never because yes, that's exactly how outlines work. And it was a sad tale because a change I had made recently made that no longer work.#
- It was necessary to have that restriction while I was trying to sew the patient back together after a massive distruption. A change I never should have tried to make at the stage Old School was at, had to be made or the blogs wouldn't work at all for people in the Far East. #
- But the dust has settled from that disruption, I'm pretty sure that the patient has healed, so I took another look at this issue in Old School and realized I could, without introducing much complexity, relax the rule. #
- Here's a screen shot that illustrates. #
- Note all the typeless nodes in this blog? #
- Well, here's the rendering of the blog for today. #
- Yes it seems it was possible to relax this rule.#
- I like it when everyone wins. 💥#
- So go forth and promote and if you know what you're doing don't worry about the types, but please when you can use the big + icon to create new posts and we'll all be happy, I think. ;-)#
- Scott Hanson has been working on getting PagePark HTTPS-capable using an app called Caddy, which I did not previously know about. He requested a feature be added to PP which I have now added. #
- Update: Thanks for all the feedback. I'm satisfied it's a good release. #
- I haven't gotten any reports that the new release of Electric Drummer works, or doesn't. #
- Please, if you use it, try using the new version and let me know if it works. This is really important. If you try it in two weeks and it doesn't work I won't be in as a good placde to fix problems as I am now. #
- Also it wouldn't hurt to try the GitHub stuff. I only have one confirmation that it works. #
- This is a two-way street. Without help testing and giving feedback, we're not going to be able to move. This is why LO2 and all of my other projects sputtered out. Lots of people using them, no one feeding back. I hope that isn't the fate of Drummer. #
- Comment here. #
- I've added a sub-menu for GitHub to the DW test menu.#
- github.connectViaOauth does not work yet in Electric Drummer. But you can still use the github verbs with a little bit of hand-coding. #
- In web Drummer, open your Notes outline, or some other private outline where you can enter one-line scripts and run them. #
- Connect to GitHub by running this one-line script: #
- github.connectViaOauth ()#
- Get the value of the access token with this one-line script:#
- github.getAccessToken () #
- Copy the value to the clipboard. #
- Launch Electric Drummer, in an outline, enter this one-line script. In place of xyz123, put in the access token you copied.#
- localStorage.githubAccessToken = "xyz123"#
- Press Cmd-/ to run the one-line script. #
- Now you're effectively logged on to GitHub in Electric Drummer.#
- You can test it by running this one-line script:#
- github.getUserInfo ()#
- I rewrote this with less casual language. :-)#
- The place to ask questions is here. #
- Before anything -- be careful!#
- The GitHub functionality is simple, easy to master -- but incredibly powerful.#
- I just got an alert from GitHub that they noticed that I uploaded a valid access token to my tmp1 repository, #
- It's good that they were watching. #
- How did I do this? I uploaded the OPML of my notes outline that had one-liners in it, including one that returns my access token. I was debugging my code, so it was a natural thing to do. And uploading the file was a one-liner! Really easy. I was so proud. #
- Okay they revoked the token. Good move. But if there were other sensitive info there they would not have been able to revoke it. #
- So be careful! Don't upload before thinking. And don't enter security oriented info into your outlines, ever. A rule I am pretty good at following, except sometimes when I'm feeling successful apparently. #
- Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. #
- Things I still have to do --#
- Review DocServer docs. Some of the requests return huge amounts of info, not really great for DocServer, so I want to edit things so it's less cumbersome.#
- New release of Electric Drummer. This will be the first release since the first ship of Drummer on Oct 10. But I have some programming to do to make E/D work with GitHub, but I don't think it'll take too long to get done. #
- Test error conditions. I haven't tried getting the directory of a file, for example. It shouldn't work. I have no idea what it returns. #
- Things you should do next#
- First thing you should do, in an outline, with Cmd-/. #
- github.connectViaOauth ()#
- What it does -- it redirects you to GitHub where it knows about Drummer (I configured it, and it gave me back a client ID and secret). Your request includes the client id, that's how it knows where you came from. Then you will authorize Drummer to do stuff on your behalf. I think I have only asked for access to repos. You should verify that? It's a little confusing perhaps, for me too.#
- Then, assuming you've given permission, it redirects back to drummer.scripting.com, and it opens the client in your browser, with your access token as a parameter. The client sees the access token, puts it in localStorage on your machine, and then redirects back to itself without the access token param. So you may see a little loading and reloading, but when everything settles down, you'll be logged in. #
- The way to verify that you're logged in is to specifically check, thus --#
- github.getAccessToken ()#
- Then here are some other things you can try out#
- Do you have a repo? If so, try downloading a file, here's an example that works for me.#
- github.download ("scripting", "Scripting-News", "/blog/stories/2020/02/15/a142106.md")#
- You can also upload files, but only to repos where you have permission to write. #
- There will be 7 verbs initially, keep it simple to get started.#
- github.connectViaOauth ()#
- github.disconnect ()#
- github.download (username, repository, path)#
- github.getAccessToken ()#
- github.getDirectory (username, repository, path)#
- github.getUserInfo (username)#
- github.upload (username, repository, path, data, message)#
- After a break I'm going to write the DocServer pages, and then deploy.#
- Might wait till tomorrow to deploy. #
- Update: The docs are written, but I will wait until tomorrow to deploy. #
- Want to be sure I'm here as people are trying it out. #
- Some blog pages would have weird garbage at the top of the page, when I looked into it, it was an extension to Twitter metadata I implemented as an experiment a long time ago. As far as I know, no one was using it. And I did not have time to investigate the source, so I just commented out the code that puts out the element. Problem solved, hopefully. #
- Plumbers can see the change in the Old School repo if you're interested. #
- Scott proposed a couple of changes to the proxy server in appServer, which I made and deployed. #
- I uploaded the OPML source for tcp.httpClient in Frontier, which is prior art for http.client. It's an invaluable reference, because all the issues we're encountering today were dealt with, and documented, over 20 years ago in Frontier. #
- I added a User-Agent header in http.client, which can be overridden by the caller. This is its value. #
- drummer.productname () + " v" + drummer.version ()#
- Anton asked why don't the outlines rendered through PagePark support the same Instant Outlines feature that Drummer and Concord Reader support. There was no good answer, so I made it work. It's nice. Thanks for the suggestion Anton.#
- Here's a quick video demo.#
- On a walk today I was going over things I wanted to look at, based on what I'm hearing from Drummer users, and standalone files is high on the list. The thought had been that we'd do it based on the partially done feature in Old School. But then I realized that Old School isn't the only way to do standalone pages. Look at how the Drummer docs work. Why shouldn't Drummer users have the ability to do docs like that? Indeed. And then I recalled that we have that for LO2, so why not do it for Drummer? Yes. It's done and it works. 💥#
- An example, the canonical states.opml, viewed through this lens.#
- I just constructed another path to the file as follows: #
- states.opml is a public file in my Drummer directory.#
- I direct the request at a special site on the server in a folder called drummer.this.how. #
- The second part of the URL is my username.#
- And the third part is the name of the OPML file. #
- It's just a simple PagePark plug-in, written in JavaScript. #
- It should work for you too!#
- There's a new version of the http.client verb. #
- You can help by running a simple experiment, explained here. It's definitely something a poet can run, but it's mostly for plumbers. 😀#
- Before testing please reload your Drummer web app to get the latest changes.#
- For now, the changes are only in web Drummer. I use Electric Drummer myself so you know getting a new release of that is high on my list. #
- Devs: This is very fluid right now, if you see things that are wrong, now is the time to speak up. Once it's frozen, the no-breakage rule kicks in. #
- This is a central verb, and the better it is, the more flexible Drummer scripting will be. It's how Drummer will connect to the web. Everything will go through it. It pays to get this right. #
- This is the thread. #
- I've been working on a big HTTP client verb, that does all the things you'd ever want to do via HTTP. #
- This is a first release. It will get more features over time. And there will be breakage, that's why I'm putting the thread to discuss this on the RFC site. #
- I want feedback, and reserve the right to make breaking changes as is made very clear on the DocServer page. #
- Kevin Tofel started off an interesting thread. #
- I still want all my OPML archives in various tools-for-thought databases.#
- I'm most hopeful wrt LogSeq. But eventually we will have lots of databases (imho) that work well with OPML. #
- And I think even would-be-dominant products like Roam will want to open up, rather than be left out of the party. #
- PS: An important point I don't want anyone to miss -- #
- I asked Sabre23t for examples of LogSeq outlines in Markdown, and he came back with exactly what I wanted and I didn't even have to say what I wanted. ;-)#
- He took the canonical states outline, in OPML, imported into LogSeq (which it can do) and exported it as Markdown, and pasted it into a comment on GitHub. #
- I'm bookmarking it, so when I swing around to working on this I'll have everything I need ready to go. #
- I love how the users of Drummer are reaching out and making it work with all the other cool tools! :-)#
- One of the holy grails of integrating Drummer with everything is connecting through GitHub. #
- I have lots of code that pushes stuff to GitHub, it's how I automate my nightly backups, for example. Or the opmltweets project. It's easy when all I want to do is upload to my own repo. I store the credentials in a config.json file on the server, access the file via Node.js and upload via Node. #
- But the problem comes up if I want to do something that works for Drummer users. #
- Well, Scott Hanson may have the answer in the form of GitHub Actions, which is something that I really don't understand. But here's Scott's explanation. If you're a GitHub person, here's something for you to help with possibly. #
- Gary Thompson is writing in Drummer for Obsidian. #
- As I spent all last week rewriting a big part of Old School, the details of how that piece of software are swapped into my brain. So I'm going to focus there for a while, to do some things that should be done but require a comfort level that I don't usually have wrt this fairly complex piece of software. #
- What's new --#
- Old School returns more data about what files it built.#
- The number of secs it returned previously was not accurate. Now the number of seconds is closer to reality. Old School isn't quite as fast as it used to appear. #
- It returns the version of Old School. This is helpful for everyone to debug wtf is going on. Sometimes we're running an old version. #
- It also returns the head-level atts from your OPML file. It's a way to do a reality check if you're trying to debug weird behavior. Maybe something was wrong in your head level atts? It's worth checking out. #
- Updated the oldSchool.buildBlog verb. #
- It now takes an optional boolean parameter saying whether you want the full data Old School returns or not.#
- If it's false or not provided, the verb returns the URL of the blog, as before (no breakage).#
- The data Old School returns is pretty fantastic if you ask me. ;-)#
- {#
- "baseUrl": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/",#
- "ctSecs": 1.199,#
- "oldSchoolVersion": "0.7.9",#
- "eventLog": {#
- "pagesPublished": [#
- "2021/10/30/174131.html",#
- "2021/10/30/152252.html",#
- "2021/10/30.html",#
- "index.html",#
- "homepage.html",#
- "rss.json",#
- "fb/rss.xml",#
- "index.json"#
- ],#
- "pingsSent": [#
- {#
- "urlServer": "http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/ping",#
- "urlFeed": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/rss.json"#
- },#
- {#
- "urlServer": "http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/ping",#
- "urlFeed": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/fb/rss.xml"#
- }#
- ]#
- },#
- "headLevelAtts": {#
- "dateCreated": "Mon, 09 Aug 2021 16:53:40 GMT",#
- "flPublic": "true",#
- "urlPublic": "http://oldschool.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/",#
- "description": "Searching for clues, so far no luck.",#
- "urlHeaderImage": "http://scripting.com/images/2020/10/05/sky.png",#
- "copyright": "copyright 2021 Dave Winer",#
- "titlex": "I don't have a clue",#
- "title": "No clues",#
- "urlGlossary": "http://scripting.com/publicfolder/misc/glossary.opml",#
- "urlLinkblogJson": "http://radio3.io/users/davewiner/linkblog.json",#
- "urlAboutOpml": "http://drummer.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/about.opml",#
- "urlBlogWebsite": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/",#
- "timeZoneOffset": "-5",#
- "urlTemplate": "http://scripting.com/code/drummercms/templates/minimal/index.html",#
- "ownerTwitterScreenName": "cluelessnewbie",#
- "ownerName": "Clueless Newbie",#
- "ownerId": "http://twitter.com/cluelessnewbie",#
- "urlUpdateSocket": "ws://drummer.scripting.com:1232/",#
- "dateModified": "Sun, 31 Oct 2021 15:07:36 GMT",#
- "expansionState": "1,2,8,13,14",#
- "lastCursor": "12",#
- "generator": "opmlPackage v0.4.9"#
- }#
- }#
- You can see a lot more about what it does on your behalf. #
- Here's the DocServer page. #
- I'm interested in processing Markdown in Drummer:#
- Reading outline files that are encoded in Markdown, which is popular in Obsidian and LogSeq. #
- Generating output from the outliner using Markdown syntax. #
- I haven't yet figured out how to do either of these, thinking about it -- looking for ideas. #
- In the meantime I thought it would be a good idea to get easy Markdown support into the language, see what happens. #
- I started a thread for discussion. #
- The way to go about it is to post an item to on the RFC issues page. #
- If people want to see it, they will. The other option, spamming other people's messages is exactly what we don't want. It's the equivalent of the rule at BloggerCon where people weren't allowed to talk about their own products unless invited to by the discussion leader. In this case the DL is the person who started the RFC. It's not okay to volunteer a pointer to your project in response to an RFC. You could politely and humbly send an email. But please don't overdo it. Spam is spam and no likes it. #
- This has to be a hard line, because if it's not, if this product is able to grow, it will eventually devolve into something like Twitter where almost everyone all the time is trying to be heard. Nothing wrong with that, I love Twitter, but that won't work for a collegial developer community, as the one this is and will stay. #
- You must know that I've been through it all. I'm not particularly open-minded about this stuff. I love it when people put out their ideas, and it gives us away to connect with other products, or other users, or help each other have a more powerful environment to use. #
Not related to Drummer specifically, I had to update my freeDiskSpace Node package and app because there was a breaking change (undocumented apparently) in a package called node-cmd. #- The problem was fixed by figuring out which was the last version of node-cmd that worked, and editing my dependencies list to make sure that was the version we used. The routine that disappeared was the central routine, basically the only thing the package actually did. #
- Is this a way to run a platform? #
- As usual this change came up when I was provisioning a new server, when I was already juggling lots of other details, as if I needed to go rewrite a package of my own that I have allocated zero percent of my consciousness to. 😄#
- I carefully documented the monthly ritual this month because it's the first time I did it since Drummer shipped.#
- There was a bug. The first time I built the Scripting News home page after deleting the October branch, the month of October was a jumble of days in October, whcih now that I found and fixed the problem make sense. #
- It was a matter of calling the JavaScript function getDay when I meant to call getDate. Otherwise even though the new code that was untested until today, it seems to be correct. The home page of my blog is good, even though the content for October is coming from the cache Old School keeps, not from my outline. #
- If you want to try it, you can -- but be sure you have a backup! I was glad I had mine. #
- Here's the advisory I posted on the 30th.#
- An announcement from Scott Hanson that he has Drummer working with Gatsby. #
- Here's the post that is the proof of concept. #
- Apparently the software is a Gatsby plugin. #
- Gatsby is an open source static site generator. It's also a company. Based in Berkeley, has raised $46.8 million.#
- Looking for an easy tutorial. I have literally never used it, so i would like to at least be able to talk about it, explain what it is and what this connection means. #
- Glad to have it! Our goal is to connect everything with everything. Outlines in the middle. We rock! 😀#
- Here's the DocServer page.#
- This is the same code as was used in Old School to generate Markdown text from outlines. #
- It respects the flSinglespaceMarkdown attribute. #
- I wanted to get it into Drummer, so it could be used in lots of circumstances and everyone would not have to reinvent the wheel. #
- I did a new kind of example, more of a narrative, but it includes code that works. #
- I wrote up what happened here. #
- One reason I'm sharing it is that I was surprised that the problem appears not to have been caused by an instant outline updating, rather it may be connected to editing the Scripts menu. I'm wondering if people who experienced this kind of data loss are the kind of people who do that, or even know what it means to edit the Scripts menu. #
- In Drummer, if you end up with a tab with no close box, you can still close the tab if you're willing to do some digging.#
- Before you do anything...#
- The reason the tab is misbehaving is probably because there was an error loading the file. #
- If you know how to access the JavaScript console, open it, and look for an error message. #
- It should offer a clue as to what's going wrong. #
- If there is an error, please report the problem. #
- Try the Close command in the File menu.#
- Click on the tab to activate it.#
- Choose Close from the File menu.#
- That will often get rid of the tab.#
- If that doesn't do it...#
- These instructions are for Chrome, something similar should work in other browsers.#
- Right-click on the tab. #
- Look for an element in the class spCloseBox. Screen shot.#
- Edit the style section by single-clicking on the element and change hidden to visible.#
- The close box should now appear.#
- Click it to close the tab.#
- It's a collection of links to stuff about Drummer. Nicely done. #
- This time I think I have it, for real. I swear. ;-)#
- Here's the deal...#
- All the action is in Old School.#
- A new head-level attribute, flSinglespaceMarkdown.#
- Default: false -- which means we generate two newlines per outline node, with one exception.#
- If a node has an flSinglespaceMarkdown att set true, its subs are single-spaced. #
- The assumption is that most often people will write in the outliner one paragraph per headline. but there are exceptional cases where you need more control over the markdown text we generate, and need to do your own double spacing, so you tell Old School to just do one.#
- Comment here. #
- Update: I deployed the new version of Old School, so this change is available for testing. #
- I was doing some work on a project related to PagePark, and opened up the docs outline, and what I saw reminded me that I can't work with the one-newline per headline rule. You can have a look at the file yourself, choose Open URL from the File menu, and enter this URL.#
- That's the way I write, using an outliner, in Markdown, and how I've been doing it for years. #
- So my current thinking is that it's going to have to be a per-user choice, and it will have to result in a new head-level attribute to communicate the choice between Drummer and Old School, via the OPML.#
A list of changes/fixes.
Fixed a bug where it would generate an HTML <p> for a singular post that had type markdown. This would cause the purple pound sign to appear below the headline, instead of to the right of the headline, in the rendering.
For titled posts of type markdown, enclose the generated markdown text in a div not a span, because that's what it is. The type is divMarkdownText.
Did a few CSS tweaks for Markdown posts, to increase the spacing between headings, and to make the paragraph spacing follow the same rules as non-markdown Old School paragraphs. Checked in the changes.
New release of Old School, v0.7.16. Checked in the changes.
- Going to do some more cleanup work on Markdown in Old School. #
- In the meantime, the thread continues. If you're planning on using Markdown to write blog posts in Drummer, you might want to tune in, because things are being locked down today. #
- I sent a private note to Gruber letting him know this discussion is going on. As far as I know we are setting prior art for outliners being used to generate Markdown for publishing. This is different from the LogSeq/Obsidian model -- which uses Markdown as a file format for outlines. If there is prior art, I would love to know about it now, asap. #
- If you tried to load Drummer in the last hour (betweeen 10:40 and 11:40AM in the Eastern US), it probably didn;'t work very well.#
- I was trying an experiment, and thought it was only deployed locally but that was incorrect. I've restored everything and it should all be working as well as it usually does. #
- Sorry! Still diggin as they say.#
- I made a big change to the way markdown posts are rendered. #
- If you have an experimental post, now would be a great time to try re-rendering it and..#
- 1. Evaluate -- how does it look? #
- 2. Does it make more sense this way, from a markdown point of view?#
- 3. Should we leave it this way -- ie indentation is ignored, you can use it any way you like and 2. we add one newline for every headline, not two.#
- 4. Please provide a link to the rendered page. I'd like to see how you're using it. #
- Comments here.#
- If you expand a node of type "rss" it fills in the items from the feed, whose address is in the xmlUrl attribute. #
- Here's a video demo that illustrates. #
- New Drummer verb, reads an RSS feed, returns a JavaScript object. #
- Be sure to read the blog post on Scripting News. #
- I missed the renewal notices for the domain, so it's out now, but I expect it'll be back shortly. Sorry! :-(#
- The example#
Finnerty
Umpire
Hoosegow
aukland
persephone
raiders
one
two
nested one
nested two
- three
- The RFC#
- If you want to discuss, here's an RFC. I would love to have a collegial discussion about this stuff with people who know both Markdown and how to use Drummer. We should be having these discussions. Come on -- don't be shy! :-)#
Headings
First-level heading
Second-level heading
Third-level heading
Fourth-level heading
Block quote
Oh the buzzing of the bees
And the sycamore trees
A soda water fountain
Unordered list
Ordered list
Code block
.ulCodeSubs {
font-family: "Lucida Console", Monaco, monospace;
font-size: 14px !important;
}
Inline code
console.log ("hooray for hollyood")
Image
Nested lists
Paragraphs
paragraph 1
paragraph 2
- I was experimenting a few weeks ago with Markdown nodes, but didn't get anything I liked or wanted anyone to use. #
- Some people have noticed, which is fine. If you like, start an RFC thread on it, but right now I don't promise the whole thing won't completely change or even go away, so it wouldn't be wise to use it expecting what you do will continue to work. 😀#
- One of the reasons btw I don't pursue these things is because there's
nonot enough interaction. I can't design something like this without real users in the loop. If you want new features like this you have to be ready to participate. #
- op.getCursorJstruct#
- op.getOutlineJstruct#
- These two verbs get the equivalent of op.getCursorOpml and opml.getCurrentOpml, but instead of returning XML text, they return JavaScript objects, which makes processing the outline data both easier to program and faster. I needed these routines for a new bit of functionality I'm working on, and as now is the custom, when I write new functionality, I try to include the basic functionality as documented Drumkit verbs. #
- I know you all didn't pay any money for Drummer, and I know that changes the psychology of how you view the product. And that's cool, I still don't want to try to make a business of this, maybe at some point, but not now. #
- But -- it is really imporant that at least a few people try each change that's posted here within a few hours of its posting. That's how we build a rhythm. It really does become much harder to address problems when I've moved on from that area of the product. If you own a house, it's like this -- you have the roofing guys there working on stuff, and you remember there's a leak under the upstairs bathroom. But you don't think of it until a week after they've left. It's going to cost a lot more if you have to have the come out again. The time to speak up is when that part of the product is being worked on.#
- It's especially important if you report a problem and there's a fix for that problem that you verify that the problem was fixed (or not). That has actually happened here in the last few days. #
- The thing I want you to know is that I can't work on this product in any meaningful way without interaction coming back from users. That's not "I won't" -- it's "can't." I will at some point give up and do other things. As I've mentioned before this has been happening regularly with all the products I've created in the last few years. It sucks. I want to work, and share what I create, but it only works if people participate.#
- Now I understand you all have lives and jobs, your own realities, and so do I. So I want you to understand how important your participation is. #
- BTW, the thing I'm waiting for feedback on is the tuneup in the bookmarklet. Does it work for you? I wasn't getting good reports on the problem, they were vague and not reproducible. So I've been trying out things that make it more conservative. Seems a shame to slow a feature down when it might not have anything to do with the problem people are experiencing. But how could I know? The communication has been really inadequate. #
- There have been some additional reports of problems with the Bookmarklet. #
- I moved the processing of the bookmarklet to later in the launch process. There's a lot of realtime multithread stuff going on in Drummer as it starts up. Usually you don't have to worry about this, but the bookmarklet possibly opens a tab that isn't already open and might not be frontmost. So there's the potential for trouble. #
- It's so useful, I really want it to be reliable. #
- Keep reporting problems, try to be specific about what happened. #
- It has been described as a personal Yahoo. I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe we can render these outlines like Yahoo. There is plenty of prior art for that, from Frontier days. #
- Thanks! ;-)#
- This verb takes a date created in your local time zone and converts it to a date in a different time zone. #
- This has become such an important operation, I would nominate it for inclusion in the standard JavaScript library.#
- Here's the DocServer page. #
- @sabre23t reported that when he clicked on the Eye icon when viewing the Change Notes outline, that it computed the URL incorrectly and resulted in a 404 error. It was fascinating because this was a use-case I didn't consider when designing the feature.#
- It should work now. #
- To test:#
- Hard-reload web Drummer.#
- In the Docs menu, choose Change Notes.#
- Click on any headline in that outline to move the bar cursor to it.#
- Click the Eye icon#
- To solve this problem, I implemented a new verb that will be good to have around for future work in this area.#
- New verb, returns the URL of the post the bar cursor points to.#
- If it's a titled post, the cursor points to the specific line in the post the cursor points to.#
- The verb returns undefined if the file doesn't have a head-level urlBlogWebsite attribute. #
- I've posted the source code for this verb, for review -- because a few prolific Drumkit scripters have produced their own versions of this function, and I want to be sure I've got the bases covered. #
- Also, I wired this function into the Eye icon, to make it easier to access. #
- I was following a discussion in the support group, and reading code that @amit wrote, about matching up with the permalinks that Old School creates from within Drummer. #
- Anyway, in the rush to fix the problem with Far East blogs and time zones, in October, something weird slipped through, and it can't be changed now, so I might as well document it. :-)#
- Suppose I have a headline, either a singular post or part of a titled post, and I want to, in a Drummer script, generate a permalink to it. #
- So first, I have to figure out what the year, month and day is, so I point to the right page. This is done in the user's timezone. That was the tricky part of the October problem. #
- Then I have to figure out the permalink, the link to the purple pound sign on the line. Here we use the time in GMT.#
- I have posted this as an RFC, and see if people agree, and I might bake some funcitonality in Drummer to smoothe this out. #
- Scott Hanson has been working on running PagePark behind Caddy, which makes it possible for all your sites to be accessible via HTTPS.#
- If this works, the goal is to have Drummer itself run as an HTTPS app. #
- So if you're interested, have a look at his RFC on the PagePark site.#
- I added the feature he RFC'd, and it appears to work. #
- Various tools-for-thought products use Markdown as an interchange format for outlines. #
- Whatever I personally think of the format, there's enough support out there so that it's wise for Drummer to support the format if possible.#
- I've started writing some code to do it, starting with export.#
- Here's the thread on the RFC site. #
- Here's a demo, the serialization of the states outline. #
- Frontier has a table, system.temp, which you can emulate in Drummer.#
- The thing about system.temp is that it's ephemeral. Anything you put in system.temp goes away the next time you launch Frontier. #
- That made it useful for little one-line scripts, or demos -- it was a way to save a value to be used in a future one-liner, without cluttering up your object database.#
- Here's how you do it in Drummer. #
- In an outline, enter root.temp = new Object () and press Cmd-/#
- Now when you need a temporary place to hold a value, use that object.#
- root.temp.fname = "hello.opml"#
- Not very high tech, but useful! 🥁#
- Not sure if this has ever been called out specifically.#
- To include a podcast, record an MP3 then...#
- Copy the URL to the clipboard.#
- In your Drummer blog, create a new headline with the big + icon. #
- Type in some text like Here's my latest podcast hope you like it. #
- With the cursor on the headline, click the suitcase icon. #
- Create a new attribute called enclosure with the URL of the MP3 as the value.#
- Click OK to save the atts. Drummer will automatically fill in the enclosure type and length by checking the file. If those don't show up that means there was a problem reading the file.#
- Build the blog to publish the enclosure in the RSS feed.#
- There was a report on problems with the bookmarklet a few days ago, and I changed the way it works at startup to make it a bit more reliable, perhaps. Wondering -- if you're using the bookmarklet, how is it going? Is it putting the notes where they should? Any reliability issues? Comment in this thread.#
- If you had an image attribute on a node it would appear in the HTML rendering of the page and not in the RSS feed. This is a longtime oversight. I read about this on a blog, so I had a few minutes, and I fixed it. These kinds of omissions are generally easy to fix, just things that slipped through the cracks. It couldn't hurt to also mention it in an issue on a Drummer Support thread. It's more likely to get addressed that way. 😄#
- I was reading about this on Ryan Tate's blog the other day, and it was a passionate story about how he loved editing his blog in an outliner, because sometimes an idea that's buried 8 levels deep could be promoted to become a post in its own right. That struck a never because yes, that's exactly how outlines work. And it was a sad tale because a change I had made recently made that no longer work.#
- It was necessary to have that restriction while I was trying to sew the patient back together after a massive distruption. A change I never should have tried to make at the stage Old School was at, had to be made or the blogs wouldn't work at all for people in the Far East. #
- But the dust has settled from that disruption, I'm pretty sure that the patient has healed, so I took another look at this issue in Old School and realized I could, without introducing much complexity, relax the rule. #
- Here's a screen shot that illustrates. #
- Note all the typeless nodes in this blog? #
- Well, here's the rendering of the blog for today. #
- Yes it seems it was possible to relax this rule.#
- I like it when everyone wins. 💥#
- So go forth and promote and if you know what you're doing don't worry about the types, but please when you can use the big + icon to create new posts and we'll all be happy, I think. ;-)#
- Scott Hanson has been working on getting PagePark HTTPS-capable using an app called Caddy, which I did not previously know about. He requested a feature be added to PP which I have now added. #
- Update: Thanks for all the feedback. I'm satisfied it's a good release. #
- I haven't gotten any reports that the new release of Electric Drummer works, or doesn't. #
- Please, if you use it, try using the new version and let me know if it works. This is really important. If you try it in two weeks and it doesn't work I won't be in as a good placde to fix problems as I am now. #
- Also it wouldn't hurt to try the GitHub stuff. I only have one confirmation that it works. #
- This is a two-way street. Without help testing and giving feedback, we're not going to be able to move. This is why LO2 and all of my other projects sputtered out. Lots of people using them, no one feeding back. I hope that isn't the fate of Drummer. #
- Comment here. #
- I've added a sub-menu for GitHub to the DW test menu.#
- github.connectViaOauth does not work yet in Electric Drummer. But you can still use the github verbs with a little bit of hand-coding. #
- In web Drummer, open your Notes outline, or some other private outline where you can enter one-line scripts and run them. #
- Connect to GitHub by running this one-line script: #
- github.connectViaOauth ()#
- Get the value of the access token with this one-line script:#
- github.getAccessToken () #
- Copy the value to the clipboard. #
- Launch Electric Drummer, in an outline, enter this one-line script. In place of xyz123, put in the access token you copied.#
- localStorage.githubAccessToken = "xyz123"#
- Press Cmd-/ to run the one-line script. #
- Now you're effectively logged on to GitHub in Electric Drummer.#
- You can test it by running this one-line script:#
- github.getUserInfo ()#
- I rewrote this with less casual language. :-)#
- The place to ask questions is here. #
- Before anything -- be careful!#
- The GitHub functionality is simple, easy to master -- but incredibly powerful.#
- I just got an alert from GitHub that they noticed that I uploaded a valid access token to my tmp1 repository, #
- It's good that they were watching. #
- How did I do this? I uploaded the OPML of my notes outline that had one-liners in it, including one that returns my access token. I was debugging my code, so it was a natural thing to do. And uploading the file was a one-liner! Really easy. I was so proud. #
- Okay they revoked the token. Good move. But if there were other sensitive info there they would not have been able to revoke it. #
- So be careful! Don't upload before thinking. And don't enter security oriented info into your outlines, ever. A rule I am pretty good at following, except sometimes when I'm feeling successful apparently. #
- Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful. #
- Things I still have to do --#
- Review DocServer docs. Some of the requests return huge amounts of info, not really great for DocServer, so I want to edit things so it's less cumbersome.#
- New release of Electric Drummer. This will be the first release since the first ship of Drummer on Oct 10. But I have some programming to do to make E/D work with GitHub, but I don't think it'll take too long to get done. #
- Test error conditions. I haven't tried getting the directory of a file, for example. It shouldn't work. I have no idea what it returns. #
- Things you should do next#
- First thing you should do, in an outline, with Cmd-/. #
- github.connectViaOauth ()#
- What it does -- it redirects you to GitHub where it knows about Drummer (I configured it, and it gave me back a client ID and secret). Your request includes the client id, that's how it knows where you came from. Then you will authorize Drummer to do stuff on your behalf. I think I have only asked for access to repos. You should verify that? It's a little confusing perhaps, for me too.#
- Then, assuming you've given permission, it redirects back to drummer.scripting.com, and it opens the client in your browser, with your access token as a parameter. The client sees the access token, puts it in localStorage on your machine, and then redirects back to itself without the access token param. So you may see a little loading and reloading, but when everything settles down, you'll be logged in. #
- The way to verify that you're logged in is to specifically check, thus --#
- github.getAccessToken ()#
- Then here are some other things you can try out#
- Do you have a repo? If so, try downloading a file, here's an example that works for me.#
- github.download ("scripting", "Scripting-News", "/blog/stories/2020/02/15/a142106.md")#
- You can also upload files, but only to repos where you have permission to write. #
- There will be 7 verbs initially, keep it simple to get started.#
- github.connectViaOauth ()#
- github.disconnect ()#
- github.download (username, repository, path)#
- github.getAccessToken ()#
- github.getDirectory (username, repository, path)#
- github.getUserInfo (username)#
- github.upload (username, repository, path, data, message)#
- After a break I'm going to write the DocServer pages, and then deploy.#
- Might wait till tomorrow to deploy. #
- Update: The docs are written, but I will wait until tomorrow to deploy. #
- Want to be sure I'm here as people are trying it out. #
- Some blog pages would have weird garbage at the top of the page, when I looked into it, it was an extension to Twitter metadata I implemented as an experiment a long time ago. As far as I know, no one was using it. And I did not have time to investigate the source, so I just commented out the code that puts out the element. Problem solved, hopefully. #
- Plumbers can see the change in the Old School repo if you're interested. #
- Scott proposed a couple of changes to the proxy server in appServer, which I made and deployed. #
- I uploaded the OPML source for tcp.httpClient in Frontier, which is prior art for http.client. It's an invaluable reference, because all the issues we're encountering today were dealt with, and documented, over 20 years ago in Frontier. #
- I added a User-Agent header in http.client, which can be overridden by the caller. This is its value. #
- drummer.productname () + " v" + drummer.version ()#
- Anton asked why don't the outlines rendered through PagePark support the same Instant Outlines feature that Drummer and Concord Reader support. There was no good answer, so I made it work. It's nice. Thanks for the suggestion Anton.#
- Here's a quick video demo.#
- On a walk today I was going over things I wanted to look at, based on what I'm hearing from Drummer users, and standalone files is high on the list. The thought had been that we'd do it based on the partially done feature in Old School. But then I realized that Old School isn't the only way to do standalone pages. Look at how the Drummer docs work. Why shouldn't Drummer users have the ability to do docs like that? Indeed. And then I recalled that we have that for LO2, so why not do it for Drummer? Yes. It's done and it works. 💥#
- An example, the canonical states.opml, viewed through this lens.#
- I just constructed another path to the file as follows: #
- states.opml is a public file in my Drummer directory.#
- I direct the request at a special site on the server in a folder called drummer.this.how. #
- The second part of the URL is my username.#
- And the third part is the name of the OPML file. #
- It's just a simple PagePark plug-in, written in JavaScript. #
- It should work for you too!#
- There's a new version of the http.client verb. #
- You can help by running a simple experiment, explained here. It's definitely something a poet can run, but it's mostly for plumbers. 😀#
- Before testing please reload your Drummer web app to get the latest changes.#
- For now, the changes are only in web Drummer. I use Electric Drummer myself so you know getting a new release of that is high on my list. #
- Devs: This is very fluid right now, if you see things that are wrong, now is the time to speak up. Once it's frozen, the no-breakage rule kicks in. #
- This is a central verb, and the better it is, the more flexible Drummer scripting will be. It's how Drummer will connect to the web. Everything will go through it. It pays to get this right. #
- This is the thread. #
- I've been working on a big HTTP client verb, that does all the things you'd ever want to do via HTTP. #
- This is a first release. It will get more features over time. And there will be breakage, that's why I'm putting the thread to discuss this on the RFC site. #
- I want feedback, and reserve the right to make breaking changes as is made very clear on the DocServer page. #
- Kevin Tofel started off an interesting thread. #
- I still want all my OPML archives in various tools-for-thought databases.#
- I'm most hopeful wrt LogSeq. But eventually we will have lots of databases (imho) that work well with OPML. #
- And I think even would-be-dominant products like Roam will want to open up, rather than be left out of the party. #
- PS: An important point I don't want anyone to miss -- #
- I asked Sabre23t for examples of LogSeq outlines in Markdown, and he came back with exactly what I wanted and I didn't even have to say what I wanted. ;-)#
- He took the canonical states outline, in OPML, imported into LogSeq (which it can do) and exported it as Markdown, and pasted it into a comment on GitHub. #
- I'm bookmarking it, so when I swing around to working on this I'll have everything I need ready to go. #
- I love how the users of Drummer are reaching out and making it work with all the other cool tools! :-)#
- One of the holy grails of integrating Drummer with everything is connecting through GitHub. #
- I have lots of code that pushes stuff to GitHub, it's how I automate my nightly backups, for example. Or the opmltweets project. It's easy when all I want to do is upload to my own repo. I store the credentials in a config.json file on the server, access the file via Node.js and upload via Node. #
- But the problem comes up if I want to do something that works for Drummer users. #
- Well, Scott Hanson may have the answer in the form of GitHub Actions, which is something that I really don't understand. But here's Scott's explanation. If you're a GitHub person, here's something for you to help with possibly. #
- Gary Thompson is writing in Drummer for Obsidian. #
- As I spent all last week rewriting a big part of Old School, the details of how that piece of software are swapped into my brain. So I'm going to focus there for a while, to do some things that should be done but require a comfort level that I don't usually have wrt this fairly complex piece of software. #
- What's new --#
- Old School returns more data about what files it built.#
- The number of secs it returned previously was not accurate. Now the number of seconds is closer to reality. Old School isn't quite as fast as it used to appear. #
- It returns the version of Old School. This is helpful for everyone to debug wtf is going on. Sometimes we're running an old version. #
- It also returns the head-level atts from your OPML file. It's a way to do a reality check if you're trying to debug weird behavior. Maybe something was wrong in your head level atts? It's worth checking out. #
- Updated the oldSchool.buildBlog verb. #
- It now takes an optional boolean parameter saying whether you want the full data Old School returns or not.#
- If it's false or not provided, the verb returns the URL of the blog, as before (no breakage).#
- The data Old School returns is pretty fantastic if you ask me. ;-)#
- {#
- "baseUrl": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/",#
- "ctSecs": 1.199,#
- "oldSchoolVersion": "0.7.9",#
- "eventLog": {#
- "pagesPublished": [#
- "2021/10/30/174131.html",#
- "2021/10/30/152252.html",#
- "2021/10/30.html",#
- "index.html",#
- "homepage.html",#
- "rss.json",#
- "fb/rss.xml",#
- "index.json"#
- ],#
- "pingsSent": [#
- {#
- "urlServer": "http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/ping",#
- "urlFeed": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/rss.json"#
- },#
- {#
- "urlServer": "http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/ping",#
- "urlFeed": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/fb/rss.xml"#
- }#
- ]#
- },#
- "headLevelAtts": {#
- "dateCreated": "Mon, 09 Aug 2021 16:53:40 GMT",#
- "flPublic": "true",#
- "urlPublic": "http://oldschool.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/",#
- "description": "Searching for clues, so far no luck.",#
- "urlHeaderImage": "http://scripting.com/images/2020/10/05/sky.png",#
- "copyright": "copyright 2021 Dave Winer",#
- "titlex": "I don't have a clue",#
- "title": "No clues",#
- "urlGlossary": "http://scripting.com/publicfolder/misc/glossary.opml",#
- "urlLinkblogJson": "http://radio3.io/users/davewiner/linkblog.json",#
- "urlAboutOpml": "http://drummer.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/about.opml",#
- "urlBlogWebsite": "http://clueless.lucky.wtf/",#
- "timeZoneOffset": "-5",#
- "urlTemplate": "http://scripting.com/code/drummercms/templates/minimal/index.html",#
- "ownerTwitterScreenName": "cluelessnewbie",#
- "ownerName": "Clueless Newbie",#
- "ownerId": "http://twitter.com/cluelessnewbie",#
- "urlUpdateSocket": "ws://drummer.scripting.com:1232/",#
- "dateModified": "Sun, 31 Oct 2021 15:07:36 GMT",#
- "expansionState": "1,2,8,13,14",#
- "lastCursor": "12",#
- "generator": "opmlPackage v0.4.9"#
- }#
- }#
- You can see a lot more about what it does on your behalf. #
- Here's the DocServer page. #
- I'm interested in processing Markdown in Drummer:#
- Reading outline files that are encoded in Markdown, which is popular in Obsidian and LogSeq. #
- Generating output from the outliner using Markdown syntax. #
- I haven't yet figured out how to do either of these, thinking about it -- looking for ideas. #
- In the meantime I thought it would be a good idea to get easy Markdown support into the language, see what happens. #
- I started a thread for discussion. #
- The way to go about it is to post an item to on the RFC issues page. #
- If people want to see it, they will. The other option, spamming other people's messages is exactly what we don't want. It's the equivalent of the rule at BloggerCon where people weren't allowed to talk about their own products unless invited to by the discussion leader. In this case the DL is the person who started the RFC. It's not okay to volunteer a pointer to your project in response to an RFC. You could politely and humbly send an email. But please don't overdo it. Spam is spam and no likes it. #
- This has to be a hard line, because if it's not, if this product is able to grow, it will eventually devolve into something like Twitter where almost everyone all the time is trying to be heard. Nothing wrong with that, I love Twitter, but that won't work for a collegial developer community, as the one this is and will stay. #
- You must know that I've been through it all. I'm not particularly open-minded about this stuff. I love it when people put out their ideas, and it gives us away to connect with other products, or other users, or help each other have a more powerful environment to use. #
- Not related to Drummer specifically, I had to update my freeDiskSpace Node package and app because there was a breaking change (undocumented apparently) in a package called node-cmd. #
- The problem was fixed by figuring out which was the last version of node-cmd that worked, and editing my dependencies list to make sure that was the version we used. The routine that disappeared was the central routine, basically the only thing the package actually did. #
- Is this a way to run a platform? #
- As usual this change came up when I was provisioning a new server, when I was already juggling lots of other details, as if I needed to go rewrite a package of my own that I have allocated zero percent of my consciousness to. 😄#
- I carefully documented the monthly ritual this month because it's the first time I did it since Drummer shipped.#
- There was a bug. The first time I built the Scripting News home page after deleting the October branch, the month of October was a jumble of days in October, whcih now that I found and fixed the problem make sense. #
- It was a matter of calling the JavaScript function getDay when I meant to call getDate. Otherwise even though the new code that was untested until today, it seems to be correct. The home page of my blog is good, even though the content for October is coming from the cache Old School keeps, not from my outline. #
- If you want to try it, you can -- but be sure you have a backup! I was glad I had mine. #
- Here's the advisory I posted on the 30th.#
- An announcement from Scott Hanson that he has Drummer working with Gatsby. #
- Here's the post that is the proof of concept. #
- Apparently the software is a Gatsby plugin. #
- Gatsby is an open source static site generator. It's also a company. Based in Berkeley, has raised $46.8 million.#
- Looking for an easy tutorial. I have literally never used it, so i would like to at least be able to talk about it, explain what it is and what this connection means. #
- Glad to have it! Our goal is to connect everything with everything. Outlines in the middle. We rock! 😀#