OPML Editor support:

Server-side enhancement for blog items with links

Jim Roepcke asks on his new OPML blog a question that Staci Kramer posted when the blogging tool was first introduced to the testers. Why isn't anything done with outline nodes that are links? The answer is -- there's no good reason, we should display an icon that points to the item that's being linked to.

Then I think I saw a few other people link to content this way and get puzzled why it doesn't work the way they think it should, so I decided today must be the day to make it work the way people want it to.

First, you don't have to update anything to get the enhancement, it's all in server-side code.

To test it out, link to something from an item in your blog outline, and save it. You might want to make it a podcast, like I did. (If you do, it will automatically generate the enclosure element in your RSS feed.)

Look at your blog. You should see a small picture of a speaker next to your post, just before the permalink icon. If you click it, the browser opens the object you point to. That's about it.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/25/05; 4:27:13 PM - --

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls...

If you got Windows...

http://support.opml.org/download

The Mac version is Real Soon Now.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/25/05; 12:30:02 PM - --

Version 0.53 pings when you update your blog

Okay, I didn't like the way the thing I did last night handled changes. I want easy to read changes, just like the ones weblogs.com produces. So I changed the way changes are propogated, and had the OPML Editor ping a special ping-center just for OPML Editor users. This way we can easily monitor updates to blogs from this point on, Murphy-willing of course.

How to

Just choose Get Latest Code from the Community menu and your blog updates will start pinging.

As before, watch for changes on http://changes.opml.org/.

And as a bonus, we now have a changes.xml, for Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, IceRocket, and all the other groovy blog search engines, baby. (Sorry, I just saw Austin Powers a couple of days ago.)

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/25/05; 7:33:33 AM - --