A special site for exploring the outliner built into Radio UserLand.
Instant Outliner Beta Notes
8/27/02 JES: Today, we added the ability to send and receive notification via AIM or Jabber, which eliminates the need for polling. See this page for more information.
Heads-up: On 5/12/02 we updated the Instant Outliner, to require that the user enable polling, and to change the polling strategy so that when an outline is not updating frequently the people who have subscribed poll less frequently. A couple of reasons for doing this. First, we were getting justified complaints from users that their bandwidth bills were going through the roof, and we got our bandwidth bill for April. Further, we had begun work on a much better way to do notification, using instant messaging software. In the interim, if you want to enable IO polling, visit user.radio.outliner.prefs.enabled, and set it true.
Introduction
Good morning Outliner fans.
Mark this day on your calendar, March 26, 2002. The day the bootstrap began.
First, let me apologize for inflicting such an unfinished and inadequate piece of software on such unsuspecting and good-natured people. It's totally confusing. It's ridiculous. If we had any idea what we were doing we would hang it up right now. We're such fools. We decided to go ahead anyway even though we know this software is very bad.
But it works. You can have an Instant Outlining Experience with this software. And with any luck we'll fix some of the bugs and add some features over the coming days weeks and months, so you and your friends can have even more fun.
Startup
Update Radio.root. The radio.outliner parts were released on 3/31/02.
Groundrules
There aren't many groundrules. This is not under a non-disclosure, formal or informal. You may talk about this on your weblog, or anywhere else. You may put an OPML Coffee Mug on your weblog. You may subscribe to other people's outlines.
What is the OPML Coffee Mug?
Remember the XML Coffee Mug?
A very useful trick. When a person running Radio clicks on the XML Coffee Mug, they can instantly subscribe to your XML feed in Radio's news aggregator.
The OPML Coffee Mug works the same way, except instead of subscribing to your feed in the aggregator, they subscribe to your outline in the Instant Outliner. It's analogous, but different.
How to add an OPML Coffee Mug to your weblog
Here's how to get your own OPML Coffee Mug on your Radio weblog.
1. Edit your Home Page Template.
2. Add a call to <%radio.outliner.macros.coffeeMug ()%>, as shown in this screen shot.
3. Click on Submit.
4. Post an item to your weblog. View your home page. You should see a beautiful coffee mug that says OPML. Click on it. Radio comes to the front. A dialog appears asking if you want to subscribe. Think about it. Then click on OK. You're now subscribed to your own instant outline.
Outlines you can subscribe to
Eventually there will be many outlines you can subscribe to. Right now there are just a few.
I have one. Please subscribe to it by clicking on the OPML Coffee Mug on my weblog home page.
Here's a list of other people who have OPML coffee mugs for you to click on:
1. John Robb
2. Lawrence Lee
3. Jake Savin
How the Instant Outliner works
There's a new window and a new sub-menu of the Radio menu.
The window is called Buddies. Here's a screen shot of my Buddies window.
In one window you can see all the outlines I've subscribed to.
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.
The outline represents a person
I don't think of the outline as a weblog, nor do I think of the outline as rendered in HTML, even though it can be. The outline represents a person, much as a name in your IM buddy list is a person. It could be an alter-ego, although with the software as-shipped by UserLand that would be hard to pull off.
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, and put a time-stamp in the headline (Control-4 on Windows, Cmd-4 on Macintosh). 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. We have been using this tool for five months at UserLand, everyone has their own style, but these seem to be elements that work.
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.
All the outlining commands are in Radio's Outline menu.
What's encoded in the coffee mug
Three pieces of information are encoded in the URL to the page that subscribes to a user's outline -- the author's name, the URL of his or her outline, and the URL of his or her weblog. The name is used in a confirmation prompt that verifies that you want to subscribe to the outline. The URL of the outline is the core piece of information, and the URL of the weblog gives us an easy way to link to everything else about the user that may already be on their weblog.
Note that all Radio users have a weblog, even if it's empty. At least you should put a picture of yourself (or your alter ego) and a bit of biographic and geographic information to help place you. That's always a good idea if you want to develop a bond with the readers.
The weblog is your gateway in and out. That's how people find your OPML Coffee Mug, and that's how readers of your instant outline find out more about you.
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 upstreamed just like any other file.
Every ten seconds (configurable on the Prefs page) Radio checks all the outlines you've subscribed to by requesting the "headers" from the server that its stored on. This happens very quickly if the server is fast. Headers are small.
The headers say how large the outline is. If the size changed, Radio marks the headline as bold, and pre-caches 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 brain-dead simple technology. It's designed so that other outlining software can easily fit into the network of Instant Outliners.
We're the nice kind of competitor -- the open kind.
Where to ask questions
Use either the mail list or the discussion group to ask questions.
Remember, it's OK to talk about this on your weblog.
Also remember, even if you're proficient with the outliner, most Radio users don't even know there's an outliner there. If someone seems confused, don't push too hard, it will make their heads spin.
Other pages
Other pages on this site that relate to the Instant Outliner:
1. Callbacks.
2. The Outliner Sub-menu.
3. Download.
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Last update: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 at 10:18:07 PM.
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