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Imho, the OPML Editor is not hard

Friday, July 10, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I've heard people say, here and there, that the OPML Editor is too hard to use, or overkill for certain projects, but honestly -- I don't think it is. I think there may be other problems, and confusion about what it does, because it surely does a lot. But for a specific task, it's not really that hard to set up and use. If it is, I want to work on making it easier.  

Let's start with an application that a fair number of people have, that the OPML Editor has a solution for -- backing up your tweets, and those of the people you follow. As Apple likes to say about the iPhone, "There's an app for that." 

http://editor.opml.org/twitterCalendarTool.html  

The docs on that page explain how to install the tool. 

Installing it is much like installing an Adobe Air application. First you have to install the runtime, I don't think there's anything complicated about that, then install the tool, which requires a little setup, but again it's not complicated. If you were to install an app in .Net or Java it would work the same way.  

Then, once you have the runtime installed, installing new tools is even easier. There's a list of tools that are available, it's called the Tool Catalog. There's a menu item in the OPML Editor app that opens the catalog. Next to each tool there's an Install link. If you click on it, guess what, it installs the app. A confirmation dialog appears, making sure that's what you want to do. And if the app requires you to set some prefs, a page where you enter those prefs appears.  

Now I'm working to make it easier. And if people hit walls installing this stuff, I want to fix them. There are still some things I can't do. I can't build the OPML Editor kernel on Macintosh, and this may present a problem down the road, but for right now everything is cool. And if more people use it, it'll be easier to get the build process streamlined. It's all chicken and egg.  

So when you use the OPML Editor you help make it better and make it easier for me to develop more tools, which I am working on, all the time.