I have finally released activeRenderer vs 1.4.

The new version packs 3 new features:

• activeRenderer now renders RSS format files (news feeds) in active outlined form,
• with activeRenderer installed in Radio, you can now visualize both OPML and RSS local or remote files in the new outline browser,
• activeRenderer's rendering engine is now accessible as a web service, via both a local URL and a public one at services.activeRenderer.com/activerenderer/render.

To access the outline browser after installing or updating to version 1.4, click on the activeRenderer link in the Status Center section of Radio's local Home page, or in Radio's Tools page.

You may type a remote (http://) or local (file://) URL to an RSS news feed or OPML outline, click browse, and display the result in the viewer pane.

If you have the mySubscriptions.opml option checked in your Radio preferences, you may click tnews to display a list of your currently subscribed RSS feeds in the right pane. Clicking a feed in the list will display its outlined content in the viewer pane.

Clicking outlines will list the content of your www/outlines folder in the right pane, in outlined form of course. Clicking an outline name will display the OPML file in the viewer pane.

There are several parameters to the rendering that you may modify by clicking settings, then save. For instance, checking create headers will modify the outlining of news posts so that a header node (the first sentence) is created for each post under the title node, the rest of the post being rendered as a child node of the header, recreating my favorite title/header/story hierarchy. More on parameters, and accessing the rendering engine later.

The outline browser is a simple browser. It is not a full featured outliner: no modifying or re-ordering the nodes. Neither is it a full news aggregator: no marking of previously read posts, no archiving of previous posts. Wouldn't be too difficult to create an aggregator from this interface though...

Here is the second preview of RSS news feeds rendered as outlines with Radio Userland and the ever closer to release 1.4 version of activeRenderer.

I think I have achieved all of my rendering goals. Outlining provides a quick, synthetic way of browsing through RSS feeds. If you have any suggestions, do send them my way by clicking the feedback link on this page.

The nodes in the first level of the outline are RSS channel titles (the 'IncludeChannelTitle' option in the rendering code was set to true). Clicking on a first level node opens the HTML version of the weblog or news site in a new window.

The nodes in the second level of the outline are titles. Titles are either provided by the feed authors, or created by activeRenderer out of the first sentence of each post. If titles are longer than a modifiable maximum length (the 'titleWordCnt' parameter defaults to 8 words), they are truncated and an ellipsis symbol (...) is appended. If the post comes with a permalink, the last word in the title opens the original HTML post in a new window.

The nodes in the third level of the outline are headers. They were created automatically by activeRenderer since I requested it by setting the 'flCreateHeader' parameter to true. Each header encapsultates the rest of the post if the entry is longer than one sentence. As opposed to titles, headers may include HTML tags if those were inserted by the post authors. Embedded images are replaced by the [img] marker.

The nodes in the fourth and last level are the remaining of the story (the original post less its header), followed by a node that specifies the publication date, and available links, if provided by the feed.

Here is a taste of the new activeRenderer 1.4 with RSS rendering: I've rendered Dave Winer's, Jon Udell's and my own RSS feeds as a proof of concept.

I'm building the new rendering code into a Usertalk macro, to be placed into Radio templates. This way, a Radio weblog will be able to display several different newsfeeds in addition to the blog itself on the public site.

In the examples above, the macros would look like:

<%activeNews ( rss:DaveStr, flDisplayChannelTitle:true, itemCnt:6, expandedCnt:3 )%>
<%activeNews ( rss:JonStr, flDisplayChannelTitle:true, itemCnt:4, flCreateHeader:true )%>
<%activeNews ( rss:MarcStr, flDisplayChannelTitle:true, flCollapseChannelTitle:true, itemCnt:6, flCreateHeader:true )%>

The rendering code will also be reachable via XML-RPC, SOAP, and straight URL parsing. This way, I intend to at last provide RSS inclusion in OPML outline rendering.

Mikel Maron: "activeRenderer View for News Aggregation. This is very cool. I've been using the aggregator in an outline, for a couple months now, and I wouldn't go back. Do check out the screenshot and I hope this update is enjoyed."

Wow, cool indeed :-). With Mikel's myRadio tool, you can use Radio's aggregator, and get a better organized view of your feeds.

If you're like John Robb, browsing through 116 subscribed feeds, the new version of myRadio sounds like a winning proposition.

The coming version 1.4 of activeRenderer will feature RSS rendering in addition to OPML. More on that subject soon...

Russel Beattie: "I think in outlines. I live in outlines actually".

Bill Seitz: "Hmm, what if you built a wiki inside Radio (or UserlandManila or UserlandFrontier)? The WikiName approach is not too far from the Userland glossary... I wonder (a) how much new work you'd have to do to get basic wiki functionality, and (b) in that approach how much cool Userland stuff (e.g. upstreaming, RSS) you'd still get for free..."

John Robb: This makes me wish my e-mail system was a self-organizing outliner ...

Multimedia conversation anyone ? Who knows what 2003 will bring...