OPML Editor support:

Improvements to outline rendering on the hosting server

I've been watching as people have been trying to figure out the logic to outlines in blogs, and they have been bumping up against two limits, that are the result of the blogging tool having been written in two days in a rush just before we brought on a bunch of new testers back in June just before Gnomedex. Believe me, it was never my intention that it be so feature-constrained for so many for so long. So I took care of the biggest problems first.

1. It used to be that it would only look at the top two levels of an outline, and ignore everything else. Now it displays every bit of text in the outline, indenting everything at level three and greater and putting a permalink on the top-level headlines that have subs, and boldening them. I think this is what people want. If not, well then the back-end will be released in source soon enough and people can start servers that work exactly the way they want them to work.

2. It used to be that it only paid attention to items with links if they were childless and and the top level. No more. It will pay attention all links no matter what level they are at, and generate an enclosure icon for them. It will not walk into the item if it's an OPML ling, I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do. We have directories for that. But I have to give this some more thought. For now we have enclosures for podcasting at all levels, so that should be pretty good.

You can see these changes in action on my blog for today.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/29/05; 1:11:12 PM - --

Version 0.58 reads SharpReader subscription lists

Sam Ruby provided an example of a SharpReader subscription list (actually a way to find dozens of them) and that was all I needed to write a converter that lets the OPML Editor open SharpReader lists, edit them, and combine them with scription lists from NetNewsWire, Radio UserLand, BlogLines, RSS Bandit, and any other aggregator whose subscription list format we master in the future.

To get the latest bits, 1. Choose Get Latest Code from the Community menu. Then, to convert a SharpReader file, 2. Choose "Convert SharpReader file" from the OPML Conversions sub-menu of the Community menu.

PS: If the OPML Editor has trouble opening the subscription list of your favorite feed reader or aggregator, simply upload the list and post a pointer to it here, and I'll have a look as soon as I can. Vague reports like "it doesn't work" don't help, I need an actual file to look at and test against. Thanks!

PPS: Believe it or not, this version also contains the bits needed to make the OPML Editor work on the Mac, all that's missing now is the Macintosh app, which should be coming sooooon. We're getting close.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/29/05; 10:34:19 AM - --