Publishing

There are 5 posts filed in Publishing (this is page 1 of 1).

A talk between two users

I had a great discussion today with Frank McPherson about OPML, OPML includes, my OPML Includes test app, and our joint experiment in using drummer.this.how to show included files. We agreed that to view updates in drummer.this.how for an OPML file that includes another OPML file, the master OPML file has to be opened in Drummer and refreshed to see updates. In my test app, when a user goes to the app URL, they will get the latest updates for all included files. This will also occur each time the test app is refreshed in the browser.

Another subject we discussed was how a user could know if updates had been made to one of the OPML files. The JSON object for the included OPML files contains the lastModified element from the head of the OPML file, so this date/time could be displayed like in the drummer.this.how app for any or all of the included OPML files. Frank wrote about having each top-level headline as an item in a RSS feed (one way to provide notification of changes). I could envision an app that could look at changes in an OPML file and create some kind of item using the namespace feature in RSS. It is an area worth exploring.

I also spent some time today looking at Dave Winer’s update to the outlineBrowser toolkit. I downloaded his personal site repo and set up a test site using my Oregon elections OPML file, and the rendering/navigation looked good. I am going to work on trying to incorporate these latest changes into my OPML Includes test app.

Continuing experiments with OPML files

I reviewed Frank McPherson’s OPML experiment file, and saw that he suspected that updates to included files would not be visible unless the file was re-opened in Drummer. I decided to give this a test by adding another heading in my test file with some more text, then reloaded Frank’s test file. I did not see the new content. Next, I added Frank’s OPML file being viewed with drummer.this.how to my OPML Includes test app, and was pleased to see that I could view all of the new text in my test file. Another good result from this test is that the OPML Includes app was able to read the content of Frank’s file as an include file, and of my test file, so includes within an include file are brought in using the includes feature of opmlPackage. Excellent!

What does “two-way RSS” mean?

I read Dave Winer’s post on Two-way RSS earlier today, and I agree with the concept (publishing tools should allow other editors to create content), but I am not understanding referring specifically to RSS. In the Micro.blog site, a user can publish to a timeline from a RSS feed. However, all the editing in that context occurs in the tool creating the RSS feed. In past posts, Dave Winer has advocated for publishing tools to allow other editors to create content for that publishing tool. I am just having difficulty seeing how allowing “inbound RSS” solves the problem.

A great example of organizing information for use

Ken Smith wrote a post yesterday showing a great example of activities that wedding attendees could participate in around the wedding date. The example was an outline created in Drummer and published using the drummer.this.how construct/PagePark plugin. This could be done for any event, with a permanent URL that can be sent to a group, and updated as needed since Drummer is a web app. Or – this could be a set of instructions, which could be updated based on feedback. Or – this could be an agenda for a meeting. Or – hopefully you are getting the picture – it could be any information that can be easily structured in an outine. Boom!