OPML Editor support: Tips for Success with Instant Outlining

Tips for Success with Instant Outlining

Posted by Dave Winer, 6/13/05 at 12:28:26 PM.

How the Instant Outliner works

In one window you can see all the outlines you're subscribed to. This is called the Buddies window.

When one goes bold, that means it's been updated since the last time it was expanded. To see the changes, double-click on the bold line.

To edit your instant outline, click on the My Outline button. A window opens. Type something. Save. In a few seconds it will go bold in the Buddies window of anyone who has subscribed to it.

It's like Instant Messaging, but instead of just a little phrase or sentence, you're swinging whole outlines around the Internet.

It turns out to be a big deal if you're working with a group of people on a complex project.

Getting started

All the Instant Outlining commands are in a sub-menu of the Community menu in the OPML Editor.

1. To subscribe to an outline, copy the URL of the outline on the clipboard then choose Subscribe from the Instant Outliner sub-menu of the Community menu. Paste the URL into the dialog, and click on OK. If all goes well, the Buddies window comes to the front with the person's name highlighted.

2. The next step is to create your Instant Outline. Choose Open My Outline from the Instant Outliner sub-menu of the Community menu. Type something like Hello World. Save. Type. Save. Anyone who is subscribed to it will see the changes.

3. When you hear a bell ring that means one of the people you're subscribed to has updated. The Buddies outline is automatically opened, but you have to collapse and re-expand to see the changes. It works this way because you might be reading the outline when your buddy updates and would lose your place. The buddy who updated is shown in bold.

4. You should advertise the URL of your instant outline to the members of your workgroup. You should all subscribe to each others' outlines.

5. If you have questions please post them in the discussion group here or on the opmlsupport list.

The outline represents a person

An outline represents a person, much as a name in your IM buddy list is a person. When you subscribe to someone's outline, expect to see time-based notes on what they're doing right now. I like to start each session with a top-level headline. Then from that point, I narrate what I'm doing. When I start a new session, I start a new top-level timestamped headline. Sometimes I carry forward notes from previous sessions.

At the end of my outline I keep static notes. How-to's for me and my team mates. Everyone has their own style, but these seem to be elements that work, and it's often a good idea for team members to adopt a common style.

Remember the reader

If your goal is to communicate what you're doing, remember that the reader, like the reader of a weblog, wants to quickly find out what's new. Use expand and collapse to focus their attention. Use labels on the top-level timestamps with a very brief summary of what's below.

The most successful I/Oers are ones who are constantly trying to improve communication, to guide the reader to what's important, but still provide enough context to be informative.

A quick refresher in outlining

The most important operations are done with the mouse.

Double-click on a headline to expand it. 2click again to collapse.

To move a headline, point the mouse at the wedge to the left of the headline and drag it to its new location. Watch the arrows in the target headlines for an indication to where the dragged sub-outline will land if you let up the mouse there. Control-U, D, R and L are essential for reorganizing.

See the tutorial on outlining for more ideas.

The technology

It's so low-tech, it's almost all user interface.

Your instant outline is stored in a sub-folder of your www folder.

When you save it, it's uploaded just like any other file.

Every minute the software checks all the outlines you've subscribed to by requesting the "headers" from the server that it's stored on. This happens very quickly if the server is fast. Headers are small.

If the outline changed, it marks the headline as bold, and loads the OPML text of the full outline. When you double-click on the bold headline, it process the OPML text, turning it into an outline, and then fills it in in the Buddies outline.

We can and probably will implement fancier notification routines, we're ready to do it, but first we want to bootstrap with this simple technology. It's designed so that other outlining software can easily fit into the network of Instant Outliners.

Where to ask questions

Use either the mail list or the discussion group to ask questions.