A couple of weeks ago, Mikel remarked that browser bookmarks have an 'outlinish' quality. This got me thinking (again) about our vision of outlines as web linked resource directories.

The result is activeBookmarks, a new feature for activeRenderer 1.1. Take a look at this screenshot, then at s l a m's right sidebar in the home page.

activeBookmarks keeps track of your browser's bookmarks file (or folder), and automatically translates it to an OPML outline format file.

You can then render that outline as an activeRoll on your site's pages (as I did for s l a m), or in a dedicated bookmarks page.

To update aR to version 1.1, bring the Radio application to the front, then select the Tools / activeRenderer / Update menu option. You can check the number of downloaded parts in Radio's Events Log (Radio / Local Pages / Events Log menu).

After downloading the new parts, quit and restart Radio.

The bookmarks settings page should now be accessible. You can also try Tools / activeRenderer / Bookmarks... in Radio.

This activeBookmarks page has active outline wedges for online help.

aR does its best to figure out the location of your browser's bookmarks file or folder. Both Browse buttons, as well as the Update Now button call UserTalk code without redrawing the Web page.

I've tested this trick with MSIE and Mozilla on both MacOS X and Windows 98 systems. Thanks to Brent Ashley for providing the concept of ultra-light remote scripting in JavaScript (sort of barebone-RPC :-).

After updating a bookmarks.opml file in Radio's gems folder, I've added the following to s l a m's home template :

<% activeRoll ( "http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/gems/bookmarks.opml", title:"bookmarks" ) %>

It's getting late in NYC, so I'll leave the publication of a full activeBookmarks tutorial for later.

Version 1.2 of activeRenderer will finally feature outline transclusion, the last touch necessary to answer Dave's and Mikel's wishes, as well as Matt's growth problems with liveTopics indexes.