The OPML Editor is a continuation of a community that has been going since 1992 when UserLand Frontier 1.0 first shipped. In those days the central focus of the community was a CompuServe forum, now long-gone, and an AppleLink group, again also residing only in our memories.
Along the way there was AutoWeb, Clay Basket, Aretha, 24 Hours of Democracy, Frontier-User, Frontier-Server, various XML mail lists, Manila, Radio, RSS, and most recently the OPML-Support mail list and weblog.
All of these communities have now more or less gone quiet. The mail lists sometimes filled with spammers, I left UserLand, the Frontier-Kernel list went in another direction, and the bootstrap I imagined for the OPML Editor didn't happen the way I had hoped it would.
Earlier this summer I realized that much of what the OPML Editor does could be relevant to the world of Twitter, identi.ca and FriendFeed, the same way Frontier became a great web content management system and then evolved to become weblogs and RSS, there seems to be some kind of a fit with OPML and the world of micro-blogging. But the editor was shipping with too much extra stuff for a clean start in a new direction.
I realized then that the problem was all the extra stuff, and what we needed was an OPML Editor that shipped with an empty Tools folder, and an easy mechanism for installing Tools, so the Tools can develop independently of the editor and of each other.
As it developed, it really started making sense. I told a friend I felt like I was writing a story and couldn't wait to see how it would end. Well now we're getting close, the plot is thickening, is it about to climax?
So here we are, with a new release, not quite finished, but definitely usable. And to shake the bugs out a community appears to be re-forming, very slowly, but in a nice way.
We don't know yet how we will communicate, but we're using a couple of mechanisms that seem promising, a FriendFeed room and this website that's not quite a blog, but in some ways is a lot like a blog. Every page has comments, thanks to Disqus, so if you have a question or something to add, there's an easy way to do that. If you're an early-early adopter type, a pioneer, someone with arrows in your back, now's a good time to join our little effort. :-)
How to report bugs
This is always the first thing -- how do you ask for help. It's especially important in an open source community -- where it's no one's job to help. You have to do a little work to entice someone into helping. It's all common-sense actually, the same kind of advice that would apply to getting help from a doctor with a medical problem. How well you describe it determines the quality of help.
1. The basic form of a bug report: I did this, expected this to happen, but this is actually what happened.
Example: I chose Save from the File menu with an outline window in front. I expected a dialog to appear asking where I wanted to save the file, instead the computer locked up and I had to reboot.
2. Is it repeatable? How many times did you try it? Did you vary what you did? If so did the problem always appear? Can you narrow the description of the problem now?
Example: It seems to only happen on Tuesdays between 3PM and 4:30PM.
3. Was there something unusual about what you did or is it the kind of thing most people would do? If it's unusual, in what way is it unusual? (This is what we're going to have to figure out, because if it's a bug, it probably worked for someone, probably most people, so we have to determine what was different this time.)
4. Can we see your data? Is the file available on the web somewhere? That might help us spot what's different. Enclose the script or outline or picture or whatever it is that triggered the error.
5. In general, stack dumps are not helpful. Almost no one knows how to read them.
6. Use common-sense, put yourself in the shoes of the person helping you. Try to anticipate questions they might ask and answer them up-front. Very often if you do this, you'll solve the problem without having to get help from anyone.
7. When the problem is solved thank them. Everyone likes to be appreciated. :-)
