My thoughts on Drummer

  • New user Frank McPherson has written an excellent technical summary of the Drummer software application. I agree with him that, for my purposes, I would most like to have a desktop version of the application (Electric Drummer) for Windows. However, I would say that is a feature request, so I will have to wait and see when and if that happens.
  • I am glad to see some people I know trying out Drummer! for people who have made their Drummer blog URLs known, I have added them to the Old School Drummers river of news – check it out to see what other Drummer users are writing. If new users see this and want to add their content, send me a tweet at @AndySylvester99 with your URL.
  • As much as I like using an outliner for blogging, I have a problem with my content being hosted somewhere else not under my control. For Old School blogs, that appears to be the way it will be for a while. There have been some postings to the Drummer support site of people seeking to host their own sites. I think it is good that they are making their wishes known, and that some efforts are being made to perhaps make it easier to support independent hosting. However, I would still like to have my own copy of the outliner (like Frank McPherson mentioned in his post). In that way, I am independent and able to support my own writing, instead of depending on hosting and/or web apps supported by someone else. Using PagePark as a “reverse proxy site” to read OPML files from somewhere else is not my idea of “hosting my own site”.
  • I am also glad to see that there seems to be some willingness to allow “feature request”-type postings on the Drummer support site. During the private testing period, issues and comments that were not directly related to problems with the software were universally deleted, Since Dave Winer wrote on October 8th that “Maybe other devs can make software without users, but not me. I need the feedback.”, I am glad that he is allowing some of that feedback to “stick around” for now. It might be good for Dave Winer to further clarify the intentions of the support site (although I see on the README page that the following was added two days ago: “We like hearing about how you’re using Drummer. If you want to share, please post the story as an issue here. You can also post a link to a post on your Drummer blog.”).
  • I think that the scripting part of Drummer interests me the most, and I am looking forward to doing more of that now that Drummer is public. A close second is collaboration using outlines (to paraphrase Ken Smith: “Instant Outlines, I’m looking at you here.”). I hope that the environment will continue to grow and thrive.

PS – this is a copy of a post from my Drummer blog

Drummer is now public – congratulations to Dave Winer for making this great tool available. I will have more comments in the days to come, but again – welcome!