A Swiss Army Knife
By: Ted C. Howard on Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 8:28 PM
The other day I wrote a little about starting a new blog. I mentioned this blog wasn't so much about the content, that it was instead more about the technology powering it. 
For a blog with content, take a look at my wife's (relatively) new blog: Small Ways.
This whole experiment started when I made a feature request of the proprietor of these tools, Dave Winer. I discovered that this blog engine (scripting2) has built in support for live-blogging that publishes an rss feed with each update. Adam Curry chimed in that he uses this feature to collect links and notes that become the show notes for the No Agenda podcast. Once he's got everything in, he just changes it to a normal blog post. It's a pretty good workflow.
Back to my feature request. I use another of Dave's tools called Radio2. Radio2 is a microblogging tool (think Twitter without the corporate overlords). My thinking was that since Radio2 publishes a feed of links and notes, why couldn't that feed into the live-blog feature of Scripting2? So I made my request, and I got called out.
BTW: You can follow my radio2 feed here.
It was the classic, "You call yourself a hacker? Do it yourself!" Fair enouugh. Later, Dave provided some guidance and reference material on how I might go about this. After reading some more documentation and walking through some tutorials, I find myself very impressed with this piece of software.
Actually, I'm really surprised that I had never heard of Frontier before this.
Of course, I'm also the guy that had never heard of HyperCard until 2007 when I attempted to reverse engineer it.
I referred to the OPML editor before as a swiss army knife of an app. Now I know that it is. This is a technology that is very powerful and flexible. It's a hacker's tool. Had I known about this in the 90s, I wouldn't have been as hard on the Mac as I was. (I was a PC guy until 5 or so years ago.)
Anyway, I'm sitting down here now ready to start hacking something together, but first I felt like I should post something. I am very impressed with the core technology of the OPML editor. There are some annoyances about it. For one, it feels like an old piece of software. I believe it's open source, so maybe one day I'll feel adventurous enough to delve in and do some kernel hacking.
But first, I have a tool to write.