Another rambly piece... 

For the last six months or so I've used a feature of the OPML Editor called the Instant Outliner to narrate my work. I collaborated with six other people, all programmers of one sort or another, who in their own way narrated their work with the tool.  

Each of users could see each others' outline as it updated. Not as you typed, but when you clicked the Save button. This is the only civilized way to do it. Some programmers think it's cool to have the keystrokes updating in realtime. But that would be a huge waste of human bandwidth. When a colleague of mine updates their outline it's a somewhat disruptive thing in my own workflow. I needed a way to turn it off. Without a good user interface for doing that, a couple of days ago I did turn it off. I know this was jarring for my colleagues. But that's the way to turn a corner. One day, boom -- that's it. I wish I could quit Twitter as easily. (Getting there.) 

Anyway, the I/O experiment was a huge success. One of the things I learned better how to do, and developed systems for, was to simply explain a code update. I've always wanted to have a window into my development work visible from Scripting News, since a lot of the work I do here is about blogging and online writing, I think it would be of interest to some of you guys. But I never had a way to do that.  

Also since most of the software is available for download, and some of it is getting pretty polished and easy to set up. Not all the way there yet.  

It's sort of like live-blogging, but done by oneself, and at a much slower rate.  

This is the technology of narrate your work. 

Anyway, I've now got a public place where you can watch what I'm doing. Or at least the parts of what I'm doing that I can talk about publicly. 

http://worknotes.scripting.com/june2011/  

There's no RSS feed yet, but I know I need to have one.  

But you begin a bootstrap with something that's insufficient, and by using it you learn how to make it more sufficient. 

And it seems I'm always beginning a bootstrap.  

Anyway, if this is confusioning (I know it is), it's always this way in the world I work in. That's the kind of conceptualizing I like to do. Stuff where the details get worked out while the software is being developed. 

It'll get easier to understand over time. 

BTW, if you liked outliners, this is your kind of stuff.