Andy's Blog

April 2022
  April 2
    Looking for magic numbers
      Ken Smith wrote a post with the question (my version): how many people posting on a subject does it take to provide a good weekly overview of the newest posts on the topic? Now, I think the version of the question he posted on Twitter is slightly different: "How many people who write about your topic do you have to read before you're likely to hear about most any new development?". I am going to address both of these questions, then ask some of my own...
      My guess on the original question is five to seven people. I think that people who read blogs/websites on a specific topic follow at least this many blogs/websites to get a full overview of what is happening on the topic, and probably more than seven. On the second question, I think the number goes up (say 15-20) if you want to hear about "any new development". Of course, people who use feed readers can have hundreds of sources (my reading list is 143 feeds, but not all of those feeds have new posts every day).
      Some examples: the Election Law Blog created by Rick Hasen at UC-Irvine Law School has 15 contributors besides Hasen. One of their posting methods has been to have contributors take responsibility for one or more days of daily news coverage. All of them have had individual posts on topics within election law. The Daily Kos news site appears to have a staff of over 30 contributors (although this is now more of a professional site). A subscription site I follow uses a group seven people to post content, so that falls within the 5-7 range I gave as my early answer.
      I think that the real question Ken is asking was really asked in his post "It's actually a web" - how many people does it take to sustain a useful conversation for a long time? I think that the answer is "at least two". Derek Sivers, in his post "First Follower: Leadership Lessons From A Dancing Guy", analyzes a video of a guy dancing at an open air concert, how he gets his first follower, and then how the dance party grows within a few minutes to include a majority of the attendees (also see TED talk link). The role of the first follower is key - it legitimizes the one who went first.
      So Ken - I am trying to follow you in the topic of "organizing information for use" - it looks like we have a conversation going - take a look at Derek Sivers' post - over to you...
March 2022
  March 30
    Starting a conversation on the web
      Ken Smith wrote a post titled "It's actually a web" on March 29, talking about people posting on the web, linking back and forth to each other around a shared topic to help creating meaning and understanding. This resonated with me, much like Ken's post on "Organizing information for use". So, I am taking a little step to start a conversation and a beachhead, like I mentioned in my post "How to organize information for use". I have created a Github repo to collect/digest/collate information on organizing information for use. To start, I will link up posts from Ken and myself, but plan to add more information. Anyone who wants to contribute is welcome!
  March 18
    My impresssions of the current state of Drummer
      I read some comments by Dave Winer on March 15th about users/development of Drummer and how he got little feedback on a feature and how he might go back to just writing software for himself. I also just finished listening to a podcast from March 16th where Dave Winer talks about the need for Drummer users to test new features, or "we can't move". As an early tester and user of Drummer, I would like to offer my perspective on these items.
      I was one of the early testers of Dave Winer's Drummer application. I was pretty active in the first month or two, but then I had a negative experience - getting deleted from the Drummer support repo for posting a link to a river of news of Drummer users using Drummer to create blogs. I understood the reason for the deletion (I wasn't reporting any problem), but I felt the attitude was wrong. As I watched other Drummer users giving opinions on the product, instead of reporting problems, their comments would get deleted, usually after some negative back and forth with Dave Winer. I can understand having rules about participation in support forums, but this consistent pattern gave me the impression that Dave Winer did not want any other feedback except for problem reports on Drummer. To me, this behavior does not give the impression that someone is interested in other people's opinions. Also, I think if someone is going to criticize others in public, be prepared to stand behind your comments. For people who followed the Drummer support repo, all of this back-and-forth was plain to see via the Github emails.
      I spent some time working on developing outline renderer scripts, but got a dig (I think) for using the word "Drummer" in the title of my Github repo. That didn't feel good. I had started work on integrating a presentation library with Drummer, but decided after that to hold off on investing more. I guess some people can include Drummer in their repo name, but not others.
      The first major feature of Drummer to get traction was the Old School blogging tool. Many people gave it a try (including me (original blog and relocated blog when I had a overwrite problem) and there were lots of comments and problem reports. At first, these were welcomed, but within a short period of time, negativity returned. In addition, people posting about the tool or possible changes were deleted or got negative responses. I worked with another Drummer user to create a separate repo (awesome-drummer) to collect information on Drummer, and to provide a place where non-problem-report conversations could occur. Dave Winer created a separate repo called "RFC" - Request For Comments - where people could contribute ideas that could be developed further. There were some user posts there, but most initial posts were by Dave Winer, so it did not appear to have much uptake in terms of suggestions from users. Full disclosure - the awesome-drummer site did not take off either, but at least no one's comments were deleted for being off-topic...
      When Dave Winer rolled out the Daytona search engine, some reasonable initial comments were met with replies like "...people who won't even read the fucking manual.", but those "docs" were somewhat hidden in the first days of the release of Daytona. How does this behavior help build a community?
      I have worked in software development for 37 years, primarily in small teams in the aerospace industry. If I or other team leads treated team members in the way other Drummer users have been treated in the Drummer development project, I believe they would go find some other project to work on.
      Frank McPherson sums it up well: "Developer yells at users, wonders why then users don't participate in the development process."
      So how much activity is Drummer getting now? The small flood of users who tried use Old School for blogging have stopped. There are an average of five people who still post to their Old School blogs on a regular basis (from reading the Old School Drummers river of news). New items on the support repo have slowed. This could mean that Drummer is working great. To me, it says that many of the early Drummer users have moved on.
      I am glad that Dave Winer made a choice to share Drummer with the world. I am using Drummer to write this blog post. I have a copy of Electric Drummer for Windows, for which I am happy. What I don't have is a compelling reason to use Drummer. I don't need another writing tool (strictly speaking), writing in outlines is fun but getting that text into something other than a blog post using the Drummer tool being hosted on someone else's site is not straightforward (did I mention that the blog is hosted on someone else's site?). I don't have a lot of content that could be searched using Daytona, so that is not enticing. Markdown is not part of my workflow, so the work on that feature is not something I am interested in.
      There are ways to add functionality through scripting, which is great. Several users did develop some independent features (WordPress integration, Gatsby integration, HTTPS proxy mapping, my outline renderer script), but these did not get much participation from other users. Still, their contributions are still present and available for use.
      I get the comment that Dave Winer wants feedback on features. The work I did was a collaboration with two other Drummer users. However, the tone of the podcast comments and the blog post comes off to me as more "demanding" than "asking" or "requesting". In the end, my impression of Drummer is that this is Dave Winer's application, a logical outgrowth of his previous work on Frontier and the OPML Editor. It is his application to shape and grow. Other people may not share his vision or interest, but that should not be a roadblock for development, unless Dave lets it be a roadblock. Look at how other development tools have evolved/grown over the past 20 years - a tool scratches someone's itch, gets some users, gets traction, interest grows, people start to talk about the tool itself, people start making contributions to the tool or environment. Perhaps it will take more time. Perhaps it will take a change in attitude. I don't know, but I think there are at least two sides to this story.
  March 12
    Just added a new Old School Drummer blog to the river - welcome to Folke Hermansson Snickars!
February 2022
  February 28
    How to organize information for use
      Ken Smith had two recent posts ("For the team" and "Or maybe not"), discussing the ideas of forming a community, collecting information on a topic, processing information as a group, and providing a summary of that information. I think the collection and processing tasks are attainable and occur on a regular basis. The task not being performed well is the curate/share/maintain steps.
      As an example, I started collecting information on the topic of personal book lists in a Github repo. I provided a chronology of recent posts on the subject, collected tools and techniques, and also created some tools of my own. The recent Github repo for Drummer stuff would be another example, as well as other "awesome-fill-in-the-blank" sites on Github. A mega example of this is a tech guide put together by Stephen Downes on resources for creating an online community, class or conference.
      Perhaps the main thing is to start a "beach-head" of some sort where people can collaborate, then publicize and support that beach-head. Thoughts, anyone?
January 2022
  January 29
    I have downloaded a copy of the Windows version of Electric Drummer and wil be trying it out. I would be interested in hearing from other Drummer bloggers if they have been using Electric Drummer for blogging (reach me at @AndySylvester99).
    After a somewhat long hiatus, the Thinking About Tools for Thought podcast is back. In episode 10, I interview Phil Nunnally on how he uses his many tools for thought, and how he switches back and forth between them.
  January 15
    I am really happy to read that a Windows version of Electric Drummer is in work!
    Ton Ziljstra is doing some more wor k on federated bookshelves (additional post here and Github stuff here). Chris Aldrich is also organizing a IndieWeb pop-up session on this topic. I reviewed my federated bookshelves Github repo today, I came up with requirements and use cases for an app called Booklist Browser. I think my next step is to work on class diagrams...
  January 8
    Revision C of my two level outline renderer is now available, see my shared scripts OPML file to get the latest version!
  January 6
    Today is the one year anniversary of the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol. I created a liveblog of the events of that day, click this link to see the OPML in Little Outliner. The original post is here, and another rendering of the liveblog showing all entries expanded is here.
  January 1
    Starting the new year off right - with a blog post! I added links to shared script files for Drummer/Drumkit from Frank McPherson and myself to the awesome-drummer script examples section.
December 2021
  December 26
    I have completed a draft update of my outline rendering script, I posted an update to the Github issue for the person who suggested it, but if anyone else is interested, please take a look.
    Well, I was going to try moving this blog (PDXProtestNews) back to its original location (AndySylvester99), but (surprise!) had a file overwrite problem. I took my hands off the keyboard and wrote up the report on the current Github issue.
  December 18
    I read Frank McPherson's latest thoughts on the tab overwrite issue, and I agree that I think there is a UI problem. From the stress test issue on the Drummer support repo, it looks like the programmatic manipulation of outlines did not yield any failures. In my work today to investigate problems with tab.openFile, I could see a callback trail in the Javascript console showing interaction between functions that deal with tab navigation and opening. For more details, see the issue I wrote on the Drummer support repo.
    Looked into Gary Teter issue with tab.openFile, saw some apparent tab overwriting, decided to create a new issue to document steps to reproduce the problem with the verb tab.openFile.
  December 12
    I did some playing around with switching between tabs today to see if i could duplicate the tab overwriting issues that have been observed in the Drummer community. First, I tried creating two local private files, and adding text and switching between tabs before the NOT SAVED message changed to SAVED (following the report by Frank McPherson). I did not see any issues. Next, I created a new public file, and did the same type of testing, again no issues. I then opened the Scripts menu and repeated the test between the Scripts menu file (menubar.opml) and public/private tabs, with no issues.
    I tried to capture my tab overwrite problem in issue 106 on the support repo. In that instance, I had an instant outline created by someone else open, and was switching between the Scripts menu tab and that outline tab. What happened was that the text of the instant outline overwrote the content of the Scripts menu tab menubar.opml. I ended up having to click on items and then delete them to remove all of that text so that I could then have normal operation of Drummer.
  December 10
    How the Old School Drummers News River works
      Soon after the Old School blogging tool was developed for Drummer, I decided to create a news river of all of the people who were creating blogs using Old School. I did create a post in October 2021 with a little more information on the tools used, but I wanted to take some time today to describe a little more about how the app works, how I am using it, and how others can use it.
      The app linked in the previous paragraph is a single web page that is displaying a "river of news" created by the River5 RSS feed aggregator. River5 is running on a Linux server and once a minute it checks the list of Old School blog RSS feeds that I have compiled. If someone in that list posted to their blog and updated their RSS feed, River5 detects that and updates the river file, which is a collection of all posts by the blogs in the list (I think there is a limit of 300 items, so it can be pretty long). Every five minutes, that river file is transferred via FTP using a cron job over to another server which hosts the main app page and the river file. So, within five minutes, a post should appear at the top of the news river app.
      The format of how posts are displayed depends on how the user created the post in Drummer. If a user clicks on the plus sign to start a post, and does not have any sub-headings (all the text is in one headline), then that headline will be displayed (up to 500 characters). If a user uses that headline to create a title, and then creates sub-headlines under that headline, then the app will show the title headline with a triangle to the left. To read the post, click on the triangle to open the post (similar to if you had an outline collapsed in Drummer and then opened it). Another "feature" is that the text in the news river comes from the RSS feed. If you edit a post multiple times, sometimes that text does not get updated in the feed, or the post time remains the same, so new material might not show up in the river, because River5 did not detect any change. Finally, for every post or group of posts from a site, there is a link to the site and to the RSS feed of the site. For more information on the display of items, see the riverBrowser toolkit page.
      So why have an app like this? I think there are several reasons. First, it makes it easier to follow what Old School bloggers are posting. Otherwise, you would have to go to all of the sites to see what the latest content is. Duh! This is the primary use case for RSS readers - keeping up with multiple web sites, seeing the most recent material at the top of the list, and older material further down the list. When most people use RSS readers, they are reading privately, whereas the Old School Drummers News River is a public resource.
      A second reason is that this type of app can help foster a community. There are 36 feeds currently flowing into the news river. Some people are active, some are not. It is a way to gauge activity within the blogging community. By reading the other Old School bloggers, you are learning about them - their interests, likes/dislikes, and so on.
      A third reason for this app is that it can function as a social network. If an Old School blogger wanted to let the other Old School bloggers know about something, they can post to their blog, and it will show up in the river within minutes. Of the 36 bloggers, I am guessing at least half of them are watching posts on the river, to stay up on what is happening. In this manner, the app is like a Twitter list, showing you content of people you are interested in, which might spur you to post something as well, or interact in some way.
      I hope this is helpful to other Old School bloggers who are watching the site. As always, you can reach out to me on Twitter at @AndySylvester99 if you have questions.
  December 9
    Looks like Mahu has noticed that the Old School Drummers news river is functioning as a kind of social network...I will post more later on how it works.
    Mahu, if there is something you want to talk about on the awesome-drummer conversations area - please jump in!
  December 6
    Added several troubleshooting tips to the awesome-drummer resource list (forcing a reload of Drummer, opening the Javascript console, fixing issues with blank menu items).
  December 5
    Gary Teter has posted two neat videos on Twitter of Drumkit code he has written (utility script and turning a set of tweets into a blog post). Gary, please post these scripts on Github so we can all learn from you!
  December 4
    Just saw some weirdness with adding a script to the Scripts menu (saw the name of script as the menu name, some other menus now not being displayed), will write a longer post after I collect more information.
    My wife and I watched Annie Live on NBC this week, we both thought it was excellent. The child actors from the orphanage scenes were amazing in their singing and their dancing. NBC has come a long way since their initial start in live drama with "The Sound of Music" several years ago. Several reviews: Deadline, People Magazine, and Yahoo News.
November 2021
  November 26
    Just tried some instructions from the November 25 Change Notes, was able to close a weird tab caused by a problem opening an OPML file, created issue 126 to document this success. I also created a Troubleshooting section in awesome-drummer to capture this.
    Added three more OPML rendering options to the awesome-drummer resource list.
  November 24
    I am collaborating with Alex Johnstone on a new Drummer resource site (awesome-drummer on Github) - check it out! Feel free to submit items to add, and ask questions in the discussion area.
  November 23
    Outline rendering update
      With help from Frank McPherson, I made two updates to my outline renderer to correct a bug and fix URL link text. If anyone has ideas for other renderers, please create an issue on the Github repo.
    Announcing the Drummer Outline Rendering Project
      I have been collaborating with Ken Smith on creating a script to render a two level outline into a web page, and we now have something to show. You can see an example output here (based on this OPML file from Ken Smith). To find out how to get this script and use it, see this Github repo. Enjoy!
    This blog was at http://oldschool.scripting.com/AndySylvester99/
      Earlier this month, I had a problem while I was testing a script update. As a result, my original Drummer setup got hosed up. I filed an issue, but did not get any suggestions/help with the problem. I decided to reuse a Twitter handle I created for another project to restart my experiments with Drummer.
      This blog has all the previous content except for two posts, I will restore them shortly to this blog.
    Test post for new blog
      This is a test, this is only a test.
  November 1
    First post of the month
      Here we go!
October 2021
  October 26
    The Old School Drummers news river just reached 25 feeds being following - woohoo! If any other Drummer blogger wants to be added, send me a tweet at @AndySylvester99!
  October 24
    Episode 009 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - describing my first steps in using Logseq - check it out!
  October 21
    Summary of ways I know to view OPML files
      One - Concord Reader
      Two - Instant Outlines demo
      Three - My first attempt at outline rendering (see post for more info)
      Four - Small Picture Reader
      Five - DocServer
      Are there any others?
  October 19
    I did not see this in my river yesterday - episode 8 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - interview with Jack Baty.
    I saw Jack Baty's post about using Pandoc to convert OPML to Org Mode format and then output from Org Mode. I think I will keep looking into other rendering option, but will remember Pandoc for the future.
  October 18
    Episode 008 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - an excellent interview with Ton Zijlstra, talking about his use of Obsidian for personal knowledge management, note taking, and more - check it out!
    Creating and working with rivers of news
      Dave Winer has created several "river of news" RSS aggregators (the latest is River5, available on Github). As part of this effort, Dave also created some tools for display of a river of news in a single-page application, using the output from River5. I have created one of these river applications (Old School Bloggers Reading List) to keep up with the Drummer users who are using Old School for blogging. If you want to have your Old School blog added to the river, send me a tweet at @AndySylvester99. Let's keep blogging!
    Tiptoeing into outline rendering
      Ken Smith sent me an idea via email - if Drummer had a print-ready template for an outline, and a button or a menu item to click to call it up, then young people still in school could do their homework in Drummer, save a nice-looking pdf for their teacher, and start doing all their writing in Drummer for the foreseeable future. I told him I thought this was a good idea and to send me an example. He then sent two pages, a blog post, and the print-ready form of the blog post.
      As a proof-of-concept, I wrote several iterations of a short script and came up with the following simple rendering of the print-ready form of the post. I copied the text of the post into an outline (one paragraph per heading), selected that tab, then ran my script from the Scripts menu. It certainly isn't a finished product, but definitely shows some promise.
      Prior to starting this effort, I took a look at some pages about outline rendering in Frontier (since I am a Frontier user since 1999....) and also looked at a table in the OPML Editor (user.html.renderers for you Frontier types). I will look into rehosting some of that content into Drummer, but I am going to complete my collaboration with Ken Smith on this example first.
      References:
        Shared scripts outline - testRendererC is the applicable script, copy to your Scripts menu outline
        parktest.opml - Outline text that was rendered
        render03.html - The result
  October 12
    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.
  October 10
    Welcome to the world, Drummer!
      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!
  October 6
    Episode 007 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - an interview with Jack Baty, talking about tools like TiddlyWiki, Org-Roam, and more - check it out!
September 2021
  September 30
    Trying out Concord Reader
      I used Dave Winer's new OPML display app for the shared outline Ken Smith and I are working on, see the result here.
  September 28
    Playing with outline inclusion again
      NOTE: This is not a bug report, but narrating/describing some interaction with outlines.
      Ken Smith and I looked at his test outline, we each could see the two included outlines (one belonging to Ken, the other to me) in the test outline. We then experimented adding text to both of the included outlines. Eventually, it appeared (had to collapse and unroll the outlines in the test outline to see the changes).
      We also experimented with looking at the test outline in the Instant Outline viewer app. At first, it did not show the unrolled included outlines, but again after a while it did. I am not sure if this is a "web sockets" thing, but considering it as a possible reason for the delay (maybe something loses a connection and then gets it back?).
      Some ways I would like things to work:
        In Drummer, I would like to be able to see the included outlines when I open the file (I realize that may not be possible)
        In the Instant Outline viewer app, I would like to see the same content as the current state of the outline
      I will continue to look at outline collaboration with Ken Smith
  September 26
    appServer stuff
      Did a little playing around with appServer, set up an instance of a demo app here.
    Outline inclusion
      Ken Smith has been writing about outline inclusion recently, he created a test outline that includes one of his outlines and one of my outlines. We are going to try doing some interactive outlining soon....
  September 25
    Episode 006 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - talking about how to find the things we write - check it out!
  September 17
    Debugged my own Drummer problem
      I was having a problem - I would close tabs in Drummer, but they would open again when I did a refresh. I got some tips on how to investigate the problem. The root cause was my browser (Brave), when it has "shields up" for a site, it can interfere with operations from that site. After I set "Shields" to "Down", Drummer tab closing worked as expected - whew!
  September 13
    Episode 005 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - an interview with Chris Aldrich, talking about his use of Obsidian, memory tools, and more - check it out!
  September 8
    Episode 004 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is out - Experiments with OPML, following up on conversations in Episode 003 - check it out!
  September 6
    More on inter-outline inclusion
      Ken Smith created his own public outline and added content from one of my outlines to it! Here is an expanded view of the outline using the Instant Outline viewer.
    An interesting mistake
      While I was writing the first post of the day, I accidently clicked on the Plus icon again. It created another headline like the one that appears when the new date is added to the outline. Let's see what this looks like...
    An experiment in organizing information for use
      I have created a public outline on election information. I spent about 15 minutes collecting some links on election information/resources at the federal level and some info at the state level. Here is a view using the Instant Outline viewer. I will work to spend 10-15 minutes a day on this topic, will see how things go...
  September 5
    Experimenting with inter-outline inclusion
      Today I worked some with inter-outline inclusion. Here is how I did it...
        In an outline that I had already made public, I added a headline.
        I created a link to another public outline using the Link icon
        I then used the Suitcase icon to change the type attribute from "link" to "include"
        I refreshed Drummer, then double-clicked on the headline, and saw the headlines from the other public outline.
      Other observations
        http://scripting.com/states.opml did not work, but http://drummer.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/states.opml
        Could it be that Drummer knows the second outline is public, but the first outline is not? Just documenting this here as a possible issue.
  September 3
    Experimenting with Instant Outlines
      I created an outline as part of episode 3 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast (called "activism"). I have created a second outline called "elections" and made it public, will post more later.
  September 1
    Episode 3 of the Thinking About Tools For Thought podcast is now out – interview with Ken Smith, talking about Drummer software and other tools – check it out!
August 2021
  August 31
    Had a great interview with Ken Smith
      Ken Smith and I recorded an interview for the next episode of my podcast "Thinking About Tools For Thought". Zoom works great for interviews! The new episode should be up tomorrow, we talked a fair amount about Drummer and using Old School. Should be a great episode!
  August 30
    Whose list is it?
      I make "to-do" lists all the time. I try to do them electronically, but the most successful ones are just written on a pad with a pen, and completed items get struck off the list.
      My wife also makes lists of things to do, but when she does that, I tend to think of it as "her list", not my list. If there was something on her list that I was going to do, I would add it to "my list".
      So, it is important when making a list to consider "Am I doing the things on this list, or do I think someone else is going to do things on this list?". It would be good to have direct communication with anyone you have an expectation of doing something on "your list".
    Dipping a toe in Federated Wiki again
      I added some content to my Federated Wiki instance today (some links to articles on pizza, and a link to the University of Kansas Community Tool Box). It was fun, and did not take too much effort to remember how to add new content. I should play around with Federated Wiki some more...
  August 29
    A conversation starts
      Anton is commenting on Ken Smith's post "Organizing Information for Use". I followed the links Anton provided to Beck Tench (a previous conversation and a tweet about workflows in Roam). I love this sharing of information.
      Dave Winer pointed to a piece about the "rule of writing", and the big takeaway - clear writing leads to clear thinking. Awesome. I am going to add this to my list of future topics for my Thinking about Tools for Thought podcast.
    Drummer observations
      I decided to use the prompt/note card icon headline that is provided by clicking the plus sign for my first post of the day to see if that has an effect on the RSS feed. I saw again today the situation I mentioned in an earlier post (RSS feed issue in River5 river), will continue to monitor this behavior.
      Another RSS feed problem I have noticed is that in the link tag in the RSS feeds for myself, Anton Zuiker, and Ken Smith, there is an extra slash at the end of the URL. I noticed this when I clicked on the link text for the blog from a River5 river. I am going to post on this on the Blogging issue on Github to see if anyone else has noticed this.
      UPDATE: Dave Winer made an update, the extra slash item is fixed!
  August 28
    New episode of "Thinking about Tools for Thought" podcast
      I recorded episode 2 today, and also have a site for the podcast (and a feed to subscribe from ) - check it out!
  August 25
    Getting back into the podcasting game
      Today, on my main blog, I started a new podcast called "Thinking about Tools for Thought" - check it out!
  August 22
    Update on Drummer RSS feed
      When I left that initial headline created when a new day's post is started, that seemed to clear up the problem that River5 was having in displaying the title and text of posts from the RSS feed ( first mentioned here). I am not going to spend time looking into that now, but wanted to capture this behavior for future reference.
    Recovering from data loss
      I completed re-entering the text from my previous Drummer posts back into blog.opml. When I regenerated the blog, I saw that the old content is still present on the Old School blog page. I would not have guessed that would happen.
      I also had to update a link within my post on the Jeopardy host discussion. The link from Jeopardy.com had gone 404, as Mike Richards had stepped down a few days ago, so I went to archive.org and get a link from there - awesome!
    Having problems with reading my Drummer RSS feed
      In my Old School Drummers river, the text of posts is now not appearing.
      I had tried deleting that initial icon that gets created and adding posts, but maybe that is a problem. I am creating this new post, leaving the icon, and added some text to it as an experiment.
    An observation about editing outlines in Drummer
      When I have enough outlines open so that the top line is full and they roll over to another line of tabs, sometimes the display shifts up and down as I click on headlines or try to enter new headlines. Is anyone else seeing this? When I reduce the number of outlines, this problem tends to go away.
      Of course, as I write this, I have two lines of tabs, and yet I am not seeing this problem. I tried opening Developer tools in Brave web browser, but still not seeing it.
    Experimenting with listicles in Drummer
      I decided to make my first Drummer scripting project to be getting the Listicle function in Little Outliner to work in Drummer. The following description is how to install and run the script.
      Setup
        What is a listicle? In Little Outliner, it is a way to create a presentation from an outline. The original tool was documented/discussed here.
        First, create a new outline to use for the listicle and make it public
          Select File -> Make Outline Public, then copy the public URL for the outline and save it somewhere
      Installation
        Next, you will need to get a copy of the script. The script is available in this public outline, the title of the script is Make A Listicle
        Open the public outline mentioned above, copy the top-level summit Make A Listicle, then copy it to the Scripts menu
          To get to the Scripts menu outline, select File -> Special files... -> Scripts menu... This will open an outline for the content in the Scripts menu
        Paste the headline at the end of the list of scripts, then double-click the headline triangle to open the script for editing
        Change the text string for urlOpml from "http://drummer.scripting.com/AndySylvester99/listicleTest.opml" to the URL for your public outline that contains the text for the listicle.
        Do a reload of Drummer in the browser to get the script to take effect.
      Creating a listicle
        Go to your public outline, add text to the outline (add several top level and sub-level headlines)
        Select Scripts -> Make A Listicle. Another tab in the browser should open with the contents of the listicle/presentation.
      Demo listicle
        Here is my demo listicle.
      Navigating a listicle
        Since this is a presentation, each headline is a page, with the sub-heads as bullets on the page. There are arrows at the top of the page that you can use to scroll through the presentation.
      Improvements/Next Steps
        You can create multiple listicles, but the script will have to be edited to change the public outline used for the listicle and to change the file that the listicle output is written to (demo.html in the next to last and next to next to last lines in the script. Again, make sure to reload Drummer after editing the script. If you do not, the web page created may show some other error text (like "[Object object]" instead of the listicle.
        If you have problems, you can DM me on Twitter or email at sylvester.andy@gmail.com
    My thoughts on Old School and Drummer
      I like using Old School (editing in an outliner is fun, the selecting "Build Your Blog" is quick, result looks good), but once again I am using someone else's tool that is not mine (my own install) and the pages are hosted somewhere else that I don't control. Sure, you could set up PagePark to read the OPML file/files you are creating and "host them there", but I am still using a web service from someone else. Even though Dave said he would provide instructions for setting up your own Drummer server, it hasn't happened yet.
    The Jeopardy host discussion
      My wife and I are big fans of Jeopardy. We were sad to see Alex Trebek pass away, and the series of guest hosts this past year have been interesting and fun. We enjoying critiquing their efforts and had some favorites, but we knew a decision on the hosting job would be made sometime.
      With the decision by Sony Pictures to choose Mike Richards and Mayim Bialik as the new hosts, it looks like the new direction was set. However, there has been an amazing amount of "protest" of the decision by fans of other guest hosts. How did these people think they were going to influence the decision? No one ever said this was a popularity contest or reality show where the audience (or a large group online) chooses the new host. It is both amusing and sad, but it was said best by a number of guest hosts: the contestants are the stars of the show. Let's try to keep that in mind as the new season begins.
    Rivers are old and new
      I have created a new newsriver for Old School Drummer bloggers, it should be up and running soon!
    Drummer feature request
      I seem to remember that at some point, users could run their own Drummer server. I am still interested in doing that, will be watching...
    Some comments on scripting in Drummer
      I am trying to reuse some of the test scripts in the DW menu, specifically the dialog verb scripts, but I am having a problem.
      When I copy the outline of the dialog.confirm script (which has a if statement), and try to run it using File -> Run Selection, I get an error dialog with the message "Error in script: Unexpected token (1:30)"
      When I copy the headline "dialog.confirm" and its subs, then try to run the script from the headline using File -> Run Selection, I get an error dialog with the message "0", and the script subs have been replaced with " "comment sign" [object Promise] "
      When I run the script by selecting dialog.confirm from the DW, the script appears to work correctly (displays one dialog box, then displays another dialog box).
      Any ideas why this does not work in a standalone OPML file?
      I decided to do a little more research and reviewed the Scripting in Drummer page. After a few re-reads, I formed the hypothesis that I could run a one-line script using the "Run Selection" menu item, but not a multiline script. To have a script with more than one line, I would need to add it to the Scripts menu. I tried that, and it worked - whew!
      My question - will all Drummer scripts have to be run from a menu, or will there be alternate ways of running a script?
    The power tools of the culture
      Ken Smith has written about this on Twitter, and I commented on it in 2020 and captured some of his references in this wiki page. I think that Drummer has the potential to be a powerful tool - for writing, for communicating, for scripting. I am looking forward to seeing what Drummer can become.
    This is my first blog post in Drummer!
      I am adding a little more text to see if this comes up as a story - it did! By that, I mean it created a title (like Dave Winer uses) and then added this text below.
      I was pleased to see that Ken Smith is now participating - and is elegant and erudite as ever!
  August 19
    I had a problem while editing (drug my hand across the track pad) and accidently deleted all the text in my Drummer blog.opml file. My backup copy was a few days old, so I decided to just recreate the entries by copying from the HTML version.