Radio.active

Radio's Outliner is not for the feint-of-heart, it's got quirks and it really seems geared more to programmers than writers, but I think it's worth learning. Besides, the MSWord outline feature -- ostensibly for writers -- has it's own flaws, just different ones. And while I've used other outline programs, none make it easy to render the outline to HTML or presentation format. Dave's Outliner, for whatever flaws it has for low-level users like me, is an outliner plus publishing tool -- a worthy combination.

I've just really begun toying with Andy's Print Outline Tool, which gives me a handy way to generate HTML in different formats and see how they look. I still have to learn about rules and using templates.

Updating Print Outline Tool. I'm in the process of updating my Print Outline tool. That's where the preceding tidbit about fixing the scripts to make the "View in Browser" and "Save As HTML" File menu items work correctly. The default rendering now uses these commands. Alternatively stated you can use these commands instead of my new Default Renderer command.
Please give me feedback. I'm doing away with the Extra Templates option. You'll just have to render the same outline twice and specify the template using a #template statement at the beginning of the outline. I also see no easy way to copy the text to the clipboard and still use the built-in scripts in an unmodified way.
If any of these changes are too extreme or you really want the former functionality let me know. [Surgical Diversions]

Phoenix Browser Test

10:44:48 AM

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Prying Opera from my cold, dead fingers. Mark Pilgrim has turned me on to Phoenix, an Open Source project to take the Mozilla browser engine and strip out all the foo-foo crap that makes it slow, buggy, and generally useless. Phoenix is in an early beta, but it's already faster, more efficient, and far more stable than Mozilla 1.0 or 1.1 proved to be on my machines. And it has a decent approximation of the Opera Tab interface.

Why do this? Opera's failure to support DOM in versions through 6.x and their delay in releasing version 7 with DOM support. I want to use the Radio Outliner more in my weblog maintenance, and I want to begin using Matt Mower's liveTopics which requires Marc Barrot's activeRenderer.

aR needs DOM support in the browser. I have mixed feelings about forcing this requirement on either of my regular readers, but since I control their computers I can coerce both my wife and son to view using Phoenix as well.

So far Phoenix looks pretty good. I'm curious to see how it shakes out over the next few months.