Tag: opml

OPML 2.0

I try to write specs in plain English, for intelligent people using common sense.

Peeking into reading habits

The purpose of feeds.scripting.com is to gather a community of subscription lists, in OPML format, and aggregate them in interesting ways.

from my observations of dave over the years, he is happiest when he does what he is best at, quickly iterating fresh ideas with working code. the subscription sharing site is neat, and piques my curiosity. well done.

Mindmap to outline

continuing with my mindmanager x5 experiments, i wrote XSLT that converts the native mindmanager xml format to OPML. as it turns out,
if you disregard the presentational information that mindmanager stores for each node, the 2 formats are quite alike. it was very easy to convert from one to the other.
i have yet to do the inverse, opml2mindmanager. i guess i could figure out the minimal requirements for the mindmanager xml representation, but i will probably wait until mindjet releases their mindmanager x5 developer docs. you’d want to round trip to make this useful beyond satisfying your inner geek.
i always liked outlines, being very much a list person, but when i discovered mind mapping software, something clicked. i realized that i could harness latent visualization skills to help with retention of ideas. my clumsiness with analog media had prevented me from experimenting with mind maps earlier. not so with mindmanager.
the biggest improvement of mind maps over outlines is the ability to relate nodes in a mind map to each other. also of interest, embellishing a mind map with visual clues. i know that some outliner let you attach links to a node, but unless i am missing something, there can only be one link per node.
i am not yet sure what i will use this XSLT for. here are some ideas:

export mind maps as outlines (obvious)
annotate imported OPML blogrolls
prototype sitemaps (though i am not sure if any CMS besides the userland products uses OPML for that)
aggregate with other XML data (RSS, FOAF etc)

mindmanager ships with some XML aggregation samples, such as the ability to associate RSS feeds with certain nodes in the mind map. upon first glance, it struck me as a toy, but i am sure they are only scratching the surface there. mac users have had software to correlate feeds, contacts, bookmarks, pictures etc for a while, but i am not sure if these products hit a sweet spot just yet. then again, they exude cool, and that is reason enough 🙂
i am pretty confident that interesting stuff like XTM support will fall into place quickly once mindjet builds upon it’s quite active community and encourages it to innovate. being of the geek tribe, i am not very often prepared to pay for software (with all the open source solutions out there), but i gladly pay for mindmanager.
anyway, let me know if you think this is hot area, or have ideas for exploration.

fixing opml, or bootstrapping?

danny ayers asks what i think of oml, an attempt to fix opml.
i would agree that opml is not the best format ever, but its what we have to work with imo. i have seen many attempts to fix opml, but i’m personally more interested in leveraging formats than creating new ones. if you have to extend opml, i would personally go for namespaces, and not just add arbitrary elements. kinda the rss 2.0 approach.

danny is working on ideagraph, a mindmap meets outliner meets semantic web application. it supports weblogs, rdf, foaf and a couple other niceties. very cool. danny should definitely attend oscom 3.

OPML sitemaps

With the recent interest in OPML, I decided to play around a bit to find out if it could be used as an input format for the forrest site.xml. I wrote a quick & dirty XSLT to convert OPML to site.xml It should now be possible to use an outliner to design the forrest site structure. Let me know if you find this useful.

Mapping the mind for fun and profit

I have played with OPML numerous times over the past few years. (my proto blog was actually hosted at userland, back in 2000). Dave is trying to get more momentum behind OPML, and Paul and myself are willing to help. I learned to love outlining when I wrote my thesis, and am still looking for ways to marry it with mind maps. Interesting times ahead.

Getting results

Dave has started work on the keynote for OSCOM 3:

I accepted the keynote offer because I wanted to see if we could get some work done. I’d like to open a discussion about that. Should we find a common module that we could implement across all CMSes, whether they be commercial or open source? I know I’d love to see a Yahoo-like OPML browser in all CMS’s. We already have one in Manila and in Radio.

Getting work done is the spirit we want, too. Maybe practical interop with twingle could be something to build on? Add OPML to the mix, and you got a powerful feature set.