On the Mark: 3/26/2002

	Tuesday, March 26, 2002

I was bored last night and intrigued by the teasers at Scripting News of late. I decided to see what I could do with an outline that linked to outlines created by other people. So I did. I created an outline in Radio, then went digging around in the /gems folder of various Radio users (selected from weblogs.com based on who I thought might have anything interesting OPML wise). Everytime I found what looked like an interesting OPML file, I linked it to my outline (you do this be selecting the Outline/Add Link... menu item). If found some interesting stuff along the way:

Jenny Levine's To Do List
Dave Winer's To Do List (very old and out of date)
Various newsfeed subscription lists
Nice things said about Radio by its beta testers as gatherd by Robert Scoble
Adam Curry's changes to the drawLeftLinks macro

I felt a bit like a Peeping Tom gathering this stuff up. However, these items were placed in somewhat public folders, so I guess they are fair game.

When you do this, you end up with a cool looking outline. The nodes in it are dynamic. That is, when you open a node, Radio goes out and grabs the OPML file as specified in the link. So if Jenny changes her To Do list, the next time I open that node in the outline I will see her updated To Do list.

Here is a quick way for you to try this out. Create a new outline in Radio. On the first line enter "My Instant Outline". Now select the Add Link... menu item. Enter "http://radio.weblogs.com/0101039/gems/AnInstantOutline.opml". Now you have an Instant Outline. The purple Up Arrow icons represent hot links. Double-click and the link is resolved. If the link is to an OPML, the OPML is retrieved and displayed at that point in the outline. If it is an HTML doc, then a browser window is opened to that doc. Now check out the subscriptions. These have a nifty little newspaper icon. If you double-click one of these you get...I bet you guessed already...a newsfeed! It is not well formatted, but I think that can be easily addressed.

So, where do we go from here? It is easy to create and save OPML files (they are just outlines). It is also fairly easy for Radio developers to create new node types (like the purple link or newspaper); creating nodes with interesting double-click behaviors. Maybe an Instant Message node? Maybe well-formatted news items? Maybe outlines of newsfeeds from your favorite sites - updated in real time.
4:09:27 PM Google It!

Steve Loughran's "When Web Services Go Bad" DevCon slides are online. [From Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog]. A nice set of slides. I especially liked Steve's point about maintaining slow bug fix times, that is, mangaging expectations to a level we can consistently deliver on.
2:36:14 PM

Google It!

It's just a bit of fooling around, but I have manged to recreate the look and feel of this site within Eprise. If you are inside our company firewall, you can check out my test Eprise site, otherewise, here is a screenshot. It is not complete, but it is passingly fair - and it was not terribly hard to do. Make no mistake, Eprise does not make it easy to create a weblog. I will stick to Radio for that. However, Eprise does provide some OK features for creating large, corporate developed, websites. Watch this space for more info.
11:38:45 AM

Google It!