According to Phil Rignalda:
... we need to not lose sight of the fact that reading in an aggregator isn't the only use for RSS.While Dave Winer argues, with maybe a trace of regret, that:
... the word syndication originally comes from the idea of including the content of a syndicated news source in another publication. But that really has fallen off. That's the "dark side" of syndication...Well, it's a fact that RSS syndicated content these days is mainly fed into news readers and aggregators. But has the publishing side turned dark forever ? I'm not sure...
We may just be lacking the proper non nerdy tools to make better use of RSS in publication, and those tools may be right around the corner, considering what is already available.
Here is a first example: I'm publishing in RSS format a collection of quotes, s l a m:shorts, that I gather while reading my subscribed feeds in Radio Userland's aggregator.
I then auto-syndicate this content into other pages published with Radio, such as this one, by placing activeRenderer's rssbox macro into my pages' template, producing the column on the right if you are reading the HTML version of this story. For an alternate, non outlined result, I could have used Userland's xml.rss.viewRssBox macro.
Since the s l a m:shorts feed is available on the Web, there's nothing preventing other like-minded publishers to do the same.
Like-minded publishers... Hmmm... I've recently seen a service published by Dave Winer at Harvard, Share Your Opml, that let me find out other bloggers sharing my interests by comparing our aggregator subscription lists.
What if those like-minded publishers were doing the same thing as I am, publishing their quick links to a dedicated RSS feed ? Then, with Userland's multi-author tool, I could aggregate all these feeds into a common 'shorts' feed which would be richer than any of its single sources, and we could all syndicate it in our weblog pages, providing our readers with more interesting and varied content.
What's missing right now is a single, easy to use software tool that would make the above scenario accessible to another audience than computer scientists and software engineers.
Second example: let's look at the blogosphere from a distance - it's not only made of teenage girl diary entries; as a matter of fact, it's bursting with original content in all conceivable disciplines. Better yet, most of this content is available in RSS (ok maybe Atom :-) format for a while, and we have more and more sophisticated tools, from trackbacks to RSS search engines, to locate it efficiently.
I would argue that weblogging is not only an author's dream, it is (or will soon become) an editor's dream. Most people associate journalism with writing. I've spent enough time in daily newspapers to know that it's only part of the job. Papers would not exist without people whose job it is to organise the available writing material, decide on sequences, hierarchy of information, association with photo or graphic material, and so on.
Now suppose you're a new kind of web publisher. You're not interested in publishing an online diary: you may not have that much to say in the first place, or maybe you find the diary format boring.
Anyway, after spending more and more time in your news aggregator, you've become interested in bringing several different pieces of information together, and produce an original web paper, on a more or less regular basis. The selection of textual and graphic content from the RSS pool, the page layout and styles, will convey your contribution and increase the readership of the original pieces.
The only desktop tool I know which is somewhere on the path of making this vision possible, with considerable hacks, is Radio Userland, because it has most of the necessary components: a news aggregator, a publishing mechanism, and an extensible scripting environment. It is missing an advanced, edition oriented aggregator interface (I've started working on that with activeRenderer's browser) and an easy to use, CSS enabled, layout design tool (I'll work on that next).
If I - and other interested parties - can make a prototype work, then we'll be on our way to creating the next generation Web publishing system, bringing the dark side of syndication back to light.
[image] Gwénaël Le Dréan demonstrates the first level of localisation achieved in activeRenderer version 2.1 and later (as well he should since he's behind a large part of our common effort towards a fully localised tool :-).
Even if you don't speak French, you will notice his outline carries correctly accented vowels like é è à. Gwénaël also localised the output of the activeRendererFunctions macro with its latest parameters, to display the French mentions 'tout déplier', 'tout replier' instead of the default 'expand all', 'collapse all' in the right side bar.
This version features a new twist in weblog outlining: you can now select outlined styles for each weblog category that has HTML rendering turned on in its settings, separately from the style given to the main home page.
[image]
Category selection comes handy when publishing several web sites from the same Radio installation. For instance, I'm publishing s l a m as the 'main' site of my Radio installation, with no outlined style at all, whereas activeRenderer News is publihed from the 'activeRenderer' category with both day headers and post titles outlined.
To turn categories on, check Radio's categories preferences. Click category names in Radio's categories page to turn HTML rendering on or off. Check out the updated preferences page to experiment with weblog outlining.
I've also fixed a number of bugs in the tool's uninstallation code, and upgraded it to my latest understanding of Frontier's tools suite.
When you uncheck activeRenderer from Radio's Tools page, if you had the activeMenu or any of the weblog outlining preferences checked, all original templates are restored, so that the Radio's desktop website menu no longer includes the 'Browser' option, and the next publishing session will occur without applying any outlined style. Rechecking activeRenderer in the Tools page will restore it, complete with its preferences, to the state it was at the time of its last de-activation.
When you remove activeRenderer.root from Radio's Tools folder and restart Radio, all components of activeRenderer, including its serial number and preferences, are removed from Radio's object database, leaving no trace behind.
The 'activeRenderer', 'opml' and 'outlines' folders created by activeRenderer in Radio's www file structure are left in place though, since removing them has consequences on the public sites contents. Think twice before removing them manually.
activeRenderer modifies Radio templates. The 'activeMenu' option (checked by default) modifies '#desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt' and '#template.txt' in the www folder. Weblog outlining modifies '#homeTemplate.txt', "#dayTemplate.txt', and '#itemTemplate.txt', either in the www folder or in all relevant subfolders of the www/categories folder.
Before making any modification, activeRenderer backups the original files in 'activeRenderer/local/backup'. Before restoring any original template, it copies all modified versions to 'activeRenderer/local/custom'. 'activeRenderer' folders can be found in www and in each category folder for which an outlined style was selected. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, you should always be able to restore the proper templates from the 'backup' or 'custom' subfolders.
To update your version, click on the update link in the activeRenderer section of the status center in Radio's desktop website home page, or select the Tools / activeRenderer / Update... Menu in the Radio application.
You may also choose to set your activeRenderer preferences to auto update the tool every time you launch Radio: this is the way to ensure you are running the latest available code.
I'm now switching to other projects (replacing the registration service for one), while Gwénaël tries to keep up with the localization effort.
I've run into unexpected problems when readying the next 2.1.1 minor update of activeRenderer: I'm overhauling the installation / uninstallation process to go along with the newly implemented outlining styles for weblog categories, and it's an even worse nightmare than I thought it would be :-)
I should have finished the testing by Friday though, Murphy willing...
[image] [image] This week's featured publisher, Gerald Gleason, doesn't use Radio Userland to publish his weblog. He doesn't use Movable Type either. Yet, look at the navigation lighthouse that forms the left side of the page: you'll recognize a familiar outline structure, with a nautical twist :-)
[image] Gerald has put activeRenderer's javascript code to work, and produced wonderful looking 'nautical' replacements for the 'standard' outline wedges.
[image] With his authorisation, I'll soon include those picts as part of a 'nautical' style for outline wedges. Alternate sets of wedges with specific styles are scheduled to show up in the next 2.2 version of activeRenderer.
There are currently 3 mailing lists / Yahoo groups devoted to the activeRenderer Radio tool, quite a lot really :-)
I didn't realize until Monday that Gwénaël - can't think of a worst firstname to type into an HTML editor, Gwénaël :-), went through the trouble of translating all of activeRenderer's documentation into French.
Wow, that certainly took some work, I'm really grateful, and so should all French, Canadian and Belgian activeUsers. I didn't find any Swiss in activeRenderer's registration database :-)
Auf Deutsch Übersetzer herzlich willkommen... Apply within.