OWL Server

OWL now has a simple Python server that saves OPML files to your local machine.

More here.

Dave open-sources his Outliner

Concord is Fargo open-sourced.

Dave is, of course, awesome.

Winer's Back!

This is really good news.

Dave Winer finally comes out with a decent outliner in the browser.

I've been looking for one for a long time. (Thought of trying to write it too, but it's not my speciality. Now you get one from the world's biggest Outlining evangelist.)

This is also great news for Winer himself, I think. As always, he has a lot of crucial ideas for where the web should be going. But for a while it's seemed like the main thing holding him back has been a code-base that's a Windows desktop application. (Which is NOT where either users or developers want to party these days.) The few times I've thought I'd like to look into the open-sourced Frontier / OPML Editor I've been put off by that.

A new browser-based UI (and Javascript-based server?) hopefully means that he'll be able to get more people involved in his code, interacting with his services, and start to have an impact via technology as well as evangelism.

And me, I'm holding on for the OPML export / import ... ahem ... cough ...  GeekWeaver ... cough. ;-)

Programming With A Mind Map

Using a MindMap to store documentation.

Actually it sounds like Freemind is much like an outliner, in that you can drive it with the keyboard and collapse / expand etc.

I wonder how using this compares to LEO.

(Hat-tip Other Michael)

ThinkLinkr, another pretty slick web-based outliner.

The Smart Disorganized reboot is still in progress ....

Today, a sad story about GeekWeaver.

A couple of weeks ago I needed to revamp Gbloink!'s web presence. Quickly. And, I was in no position to do it in GW. So I fired up a copy of WordPress and made : Gbloink!

I also needed a new OPTIMAES site. And one for Gisel.

You spot the trend? The answer to "how do I knock up a decent-looking site? fast?" is to use WordPress. I'm seriously thinking of doing it for my own homepage too.

Obviously, these are the kinds of scenarios for which I envisaged GeekWeaver. So what's gone wrong?

Several things :

- I got over-ambitious. The basic GeekWeaver as templating language, worked great. But I wanted to make it into a full sophisticated Lispish sort of a functional programming language. That side-tracked me into several attempted rewrites before I shelved it with other unfinished projects.

- The OPML Editor worked great in Windows XP. But was horrible in Vista. And now I'm using Linux most of the time. I can run it under Wine, but it feels clunky to do so. So I don't have a decent OPML editor. There are still, surprisingly few outliners in Linux, and still no convenient outline editing widget for the browser.

- Great templates are the real win. An earlier version of GeekWeaver shipped with decent free template I got from somewhere or other. But I'm not a good HTML / CSS designer and I could neither adapt it to my changing requirements nor really design another. I guess the answer is to work with a designer. But as one of the proposals for GW was to make web-design more "programmer-friendly" (by introducing the programmer's favourite tool, abstraction, to HTML) that's rather a contradictory point. Chalk one up to web-designers and one against GeekWeaver.[1]

- Moreover, it's hard to compete against a rich ecosystem like WordPress. Among thousands of templates and plug-ins from dozens of contributors, are some pretty damned good ones.

- Also, while GW had a couple of sprinkles of syntactic sugar to make authoring XHTML / XML in the outliner a rather pleasant experience, the outliner is merely OK for CSS and not really all that good for javascript. (For a real programming language, it's useful to have the standard syntax checking, bracket counting, line numbering etc.) As web-pages are increasingly made of CSS and javascript over and above the HTML, GW is decreasingly useful. To do GW properly, the editor needs to be both a good code-editor AND a good outliner.

So is GeekWeaver a failure? Am I abandoning it?

Well, it's not yet a success, I'll agree. :-)

I still *believe* that there's a niche for a GeekWeaver-like language : something with the quick and dirty characteristics of early Perl or PHP; that let's you get a lot done quickly; and who's philosophy is "templating" at a granularity above the individual page or file. There's no reason that, if I had time and another burst of interest, I might not make further progress taking GeekWeaver in that direction.

But I now have a (more than) full-time day-job writing social software in Python[2] which leaves little time (or inclination) for a lot more experiments in python for web-site making. So GW is definitely on hiatus while I pursue other projects.

Nevertheless, I'm always coming back and thinking what I should do with it. You never know when inspiration might strike again.

[1] This raises another sceptical doubt. Allowing you to define abstractions is meant to make things easier. If it doesn't make "web-design" easier, am I barking up the wrong tree?

[2] In fact, I'm working with Django. Which brings a lot of other concerns and ideas. It was easy to see how GW could compile down to PHP. But would it make sense to try to compile it down to Django?

I think TidyLines is the best browser-based outliner I've seen. At least in terms of how it feels at the keyboard.

Dynamic List is a browser-based outliner.

Dave Winer back on Instant Outlining.

Would certainly be interesting if there was some movement on this. And some development of the OPML outliner in this direction.

It's the 40th anniversary of the original Engelbart demo.

Dave Winer's back on the Windows OPML Editor ... which is great for me and for GeekWeaver ('cos I don't have a Mac and there's no Linux port yet.)

Meanwhile ... anyone know other decent OPML editors? I'd be particularly interested in ones that run in the browser.

Listen everyone, I gotta come out to you all ...

I am now officially an outliner.

For a long time I thought that outlines, like all hierarchical documents, were limited and inferior to graph-shaped wikis.

Now I get it.

The point of the outliner is not the hierarachical structure as a navigation aid - free-form hypertext is still superior.

No, the point of the outliner is the collapse which lets you manage and manipulate bundles of items at the same time. That's something I never managed to get right in SdiDesk. Although I perceived the need for a "PageSet" to create a bundle that could be used for, say, exporting etc. I a) never got that working technically, which was partly because b) I never really made sense of it "conceptually" to myself.

What's great about the outliner is its "scale-free" / "fractal" / "recursive" / "self-similar" nature - which means the same operations (collapse, copy, move, publish) can work on anything from a short list, to a chapter to a volume composed of multiple chapters. I've really started to realize this over the last few months as I've used the OPML editor for more things that I'd have once used SdiDesk for.

Now, don't get me wrong. I still love wiki. It's still my favouritest type of software in the world, ever. And I still use SdiDesk every day. But now, I'm starting to appreciate that there's a need to manage a hierarchy of scales, and until I find out how to combine that with wiki-nature (and into SdiDesk), I'll probably be outlining most days too.

(In my day-job I also spend a whole lot of time with spreadsheets, but that's another story. SdiDesk was always meant to handle grid-shaped data, it just wasn't developed enough to be really usable.)

Q : Phil! Why have you put a Grazr widget in your gutter?

A : Something's happening. And it's about OPML, Grazr, and widgets ...

;-)

Q : Oh, and I noticed you changed the template.

A : Er ... yeah. The look didn't go with the widget. I wanted something that was more, I dunno, evolvable.

Q : What are you up to, exactly?

A : You know, general house-keeping, wanting to learn about new things. The truth is I've been using the OPML Editor a lot recently. Even tried to write a several thousand word essay in it.

And it's good. Perhaps I'm getting the outlining religion ...