Comments Workspace

A very uninteresting title
  Here's an obligatory test comment.
    I've added a comment under my obligatory test comment.
A very uninteresting title
  Anton, I think we can do that. If you have any other ideas like that, speak up.
    There's already a facility for saving an archive of your comments, as you save them, to S3 and to the local file system.
    I just added (on my own machine for now) code that saves your entire comment workspace in OPML to S3 and the local file system. So you can then "include" that OPML in any outline you want, on any web page.
    Here's the OPML for all my comments.
  Hey everybody -- looks like the corner was turned. The content and the comments are running on different servers. Using the magic of XML-RPC for creating distributed apps.
  This is a test. For the next sixty seconds this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  Chuck, the OPML Editor that you download from home.opml.org has all the bits you need for writing.
    Then you need the worldoutline server software.
      All the docs you need are at howtos.opml.org.
    You can store the outlines anywhere you want as static OPML. The worldoutline software just does rendering, and has very lightweight management of OPML in Amazon S3. But it's very easy to couple up an OPML file stored anywhere into a root managed by the worldoutline software.
    I didn't want to recreate the world of Manila, where we had a database of all the content. On the worldoutline, the data is supposed to be completely decoupled. And we're almost there. I keep adding features like this one, OPML Comments, that creep back toward tight coupling. Then I figure out how to get it loose, and do it. There's a new philosophy here that I'm sure you'll immediatley understand. We've only been talking about it for 20-plus years. :-)
  Another thing you can do is stay right here. Oddly enough this is a fairly generalized OPML environment, here in the comments. :-)
  Try clicking on your name to get an idea. And then try changing the nodetype of the top level headline in this branch. RIght-click to get the menu of choices. Remember to save.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  Thanks Ted. This is the kind of response I need to a feature-ship. Lets me move on with confidence! :-)
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  I'm glad you like it -- and thanks for including the "Your Own River" link -- that's the way to help spread the word.
  Also, that one-liner is pretty cute. A new way to do static rendering. :-)
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  Thanks for the kind words.
  The OPML is the static archive.
  Everything from the old scripting.com site is still there.
  With a very appropriate final image.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  I am testing a bug fix that has to do with the proper encoding of double-quotes when the appear in the title of a post that's got OPML Comments, such as the one I am commenting on right now.
  Adam, if you want theme and transition attributes you should do the presentation on your server. You can post a link to the presentation here, and please do.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  I am adding a comment here.
  And I am adding some more text, coming from the page with #daveWiner at the end of its URL.
  If this works, the new text should appear on the original page.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  Idea
    I have an idea of something that might work that would be worth trying.
    Let's see what happens.
  I like Steely Dan
    Oh no Guadalajara won't do.
    Well I did not think the girl could be so cruel.
    And I'm never going back to my old school.
  Oh shit this is cool
    Everyone can try presentations right now.
    I can do a little testing and refinement before subjecting other people's servers to these changes.
    Minimize chance of breakage.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  I love to share what I do Dody, and thanks for the thanks.
  I also like being appreciated. Good motivation.
  Also, this outline can be viewed as a presentation thanks to reveal.js.
I didn't want to recreate Manila
  Hey Doc, that is germane -- because if Twitter didn't make themselves indispensible it wouldn't matter if their tech were competent. The idea could still flourish.
    RSS is a good counter-example and cautionary tale. My software for RSS is no longer at the center of the RSS universe. It played an important role in getting it going. But whether it was any good or not wasn't a vital long-term question for RSS.
  And it might explain why some basic commands still aren't present.
    Why, if someone says something offensive with my handle in it, can't I just delete it from my Replies tab. Surely that isn't because Evan Williams saw some essential social function in me having to block the offender or just put up with the turd. I like to review my replies, and I don't get so many that they scroll off so fast that I don't end up seeing each insult a dozen or more times.
    It's the kind of design flaw that will become more and more of a weakness as they shut down the developers. It used to be you could appeal to a developer to add the feature, and if it was very valuable, you could switch to use their interface. Now that's no longer an option.
  Also thank you very much for using the OPML Comments. We're going to use them in some innovative ways, soon, but we can't without people actually using them. You get to be part of a software and intellectual bootstrap. Lots of mind bombs to come. :-)
  Update: as if to prove the point -- I got an error trying to save this comment. If I can't debug this software well enough (the equivalent of a Fail Whale) then someone else will be able to implement a server that doesn't do this. My contribution will have been a protocol. Of course I want my software to stay in the game, but I'll have to stay healthy to make that work. :-)
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  In the list of comments this appears as "Dave Winer."
  But when you look at it on its own page, you should see a different title.
  This is a feature of Frontier making a comeback.
  In the programming language C you specify compiler directives this way.
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  Dody, that's a very good point that I hadn't thought of. Probably because I don't expect his term to really end. But it's a good point for another reason. He was caught on tape saying to Putin that they should talk again after the election. Everyone would be watching for things like that. In fact, I bet that's what Netanyahu would say -- that he threatened him with retribution after the election. It's always fun to try to guess what evil plots Karl Rove is hatching up. I bet he funnels money to Bibi too.
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  Jake, just make sure to keep a list of all the changes you make. The more you can adopt the style of the Worknotes site, the better. That way if anyone picks up the project later they'll have something to look at.
    1. You can and should leave features in that are harmless. It takes work to get rid of them, and it introduces chances of bugs. Let's get to something working and usable as quickly as possible, and stay goal-oriented. The goal here is to be able to have OPML take over running Manila sites asap. I have a bunch of them, so do you. It's costing me a lot of money to keep a copy of Frontier running just for those sites.
    2. I'm still using tools exactly as they were as the basis for programming. River2, Radio2 etc are all tools. That's how I recommend getting the website to work, if it all possible. Just make it the website of a tool. If you can. If it's easier just to hook into the WSF tree, then do it that way. You're easily as knowledgable as I am on this, probably much more so.
    3. Certain things will happen automatically -- like backups of open files, periodic saving. I'll generate a list of things to look at when I get a chance to use what you're producing. I'll review it and take notes.
    4. mainResponder.respond has gotten some new features, but it should still work as it did before. I was careful (I hope) to not break previous apps. But we'll find out now how good I was.
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  Pensato -- okay -- I sort of suspected it would.
    Just let me know if it starts happening again, as soon as it starts happening. Via email. :-)
  Pensato -- It makes sense that for a while no updates were going to Twitter. What matters is the behavior now.
    It would help if you could try to post something when I can watch the logs.
  Are you all sure the messages aren't making it to Twitter a few minutes after you post them?
    That was the behavior I was seeing. The problem was the realtime notification wasn't working, but it was picking up the update at fifteen minute intervals, which is how often it polls the feeds (as a backup in case realtime stops working).
  I know I always say this but maybe some of you haven't heard it -- it's important to report problems when they happen. Rex, before you start working around it, let me know what's going on. You might think it's polite not to do so, but actually it works against the process. Sooner or later the problem is going to have to be addressed. If I hear about it when it happens, I'm more likely to figure out the cause.
  Adam, I think the problem is on my cloud server, so it would make sense that you're not seeing it because you're running your own cloud server, right?
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  I'm wondering if I shouldn't get a Samsung Galaxy S3?
  "Yeah but they make the coolest adapters."
  "What does that even mean?"
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  Ted, I want to develop a system where the stuff we enter into the comments here flows everywhere we want it to. And then of course the other way -- if you post something in OPML somewhere else that should be related to something here, that should be possible as well.
    I'm looking for low-hanging fruit. For example, WordPress blogs because they have an API that we understand very well and have full, mature support for. Anything that works with WordPress is good.
    I'd also like to see rivers running in WordPress, for example.
  Michael, I don't need my podcasts to be loaded into Dropbox. I have that part nailed using Radio2. In fact the other part is nailed too. Basically the whole process works.
    I think the reason I lost the podcast this morning is that I plugged the power into the iPhone while I was recording, and that kicked off a synch, which as a side-effect tossed the current voice memo I was recording. To be fair to the voice memo devs, they probably weren't thinking people would be using it to record a podcast.
  Adam, there used to be a command in iTunes that converts an M4A file to MP3. It's actually still there, but it's perpetually gray. Insert the obligatory iTunes Sux! expletives. :-)
  I'm really excited about the next steps. But for now the OPML Comments are pretty stable and will remain largely as-is, while the other side of the bridge gets built.
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  Ted, that struck me too. I wonder how many journalists in the room were able to extrapolate that, while today's Twitter sounds friendly to them, in two years it might be going in a completely different, less friendly direction.
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  Doc, thanks for accepting the invitation to blog with the outliner.
  BTW, this is where the OPML source is for your comment. You could link that into any OPML-aware app, and it would render it in-place as if you wrote it there. Unfortunately, at this time, there are no such places. That's what this bootstrap is going to change, and I really hope you sign on to be a leader of the crusade. It won't take much to turn it into something real. But it will take patience. You and I have been around long enough to know how to do that. :-)
  We have a bunch of stuff still to do:
    1. That OPML has to be in space you control, not space I control.
    2. The URL needs to be easy to discover.
    3. We need to be able to identify it as having come from you.
  Luckily none of these problems are very challenging. Just needs to be a step-by-step process with real users such as yourself.
  Thanks again! :-)
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  Now I'm testing...
    1. 2.
  To James Burgos -- I'm headed to a different place with "comments" here. At some point we'll probably have to change the name so it's not seen as something that close to what we think of as blogging comments. It's kind of like improv. They say Dick Costolo does it (in the NYT) but I really do it. :-)
  Adam, if you do a view source on that page you'll see the Disqus code is there. Is your account adamc1999? That's what it says in the code. The problem is on the Disqus end, the worldoutline side of it appears to be working.
  Changed the order of the list
    It's now reverse-chronologic by save order. If it worked, this comment will now be the first item in the list. It worked. So now the new stuff shows up a little better, and the old stuff falls to the end of the list.
  About notification
    I want to take some small steps here and I'm not quite sure how to do it. One thing that's relatively straightforward is to give people a way to have the Disqus comments attached to their comments be routed to their Disqus accounts. There's no good reason that notification of your comments should come via email to me. I don't really want them, and you need to see them.
  To Adam's questions
    I've slowed things down in terms of shipping, because the fast-shipping method had run its course. The immediate thing is getting a steady community of people using this stuff, so I get feedback, and help thinking about this stuff. This stuff is no fun without lots of users. :-)
      We also need certain people to start using this. Doc Searls is my first "volunteer." I've decided he has to use the OPML Comments now. We need his participation. I also wanted to get David Weinberger. For some reason people are shy, or scared, or busy or whatever. I think I'm offering them something pretty cool. But I'll keep making the offers.
    Until we had a feed, there was no point having lots of green buttons, cause you'd never be able to find the new stuff. That's a place we've been to before. We also needed comments.scripting.com to tie it together. And then the bugs need to shake out.
    The big question is how to deal with many levels. Right now I've got it working solidly, I think, for two levels. But as soon as there are N levels, some of the systems won't work. I don't have answers about how to structure the data on the server for that. I need to approach that slowly. Otherwise we'll end up with something that goes nowhere.
  Next step -- identity
    The big next step, what I'm thinking about most right now, is identity.
    How do I know it's really you that posted that comment? I don't. In comment software there's a tradition of loose identity, and it works for comments. But now we're in the territory of blogging, where identity is a little tighter, again by tradition.
    So before we can go much further, I want us to have user names and be able to get profile data from those names. As I've said many times before we will use DNS for this. That's how we will achieve loose-coupling.
  Previous comments
    I am able to leave a comment on my own post! :-)
    And I am able to update the comment as well.
    I think I fixed the links. I got too fancy and forgot that things were hard-coded. Undid the change.
    The links are in two places -- In the feed and in the OPML index.
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  Kyle, yes "free" has led to a really crazy system where SoundCloud tries to hide the MP3, but has buttons that lets you share the podcast with Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter -- etc.
  Presumably they get kickbacks of some kind from those companies, and probably have deals with them that say they can't show you the MP3 either, otherwise people would share the podcast with one of those services to get around the federation of silos.
  I think free stopped being the attraction to the core users, the types of people who thought Here's to the Crazy Ones had great appeal. We pay Apple huge amounts of money for the right to be a member of the club. Money isn't the problem they think it is, but as long as VCs are willing to write the checks, it's more fun to just make software and go to Web 2.0 conferences and go public without ever having to make a customer happy.
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  I don't have anything further to say about class warfare. I just needed a place to post a test message.
    It's funny I usually have an opinion, but not this time.
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  Sometimes when you put something together for the first time, you don't arrange things in an optimal way. When you try to extend it, you learn that you should have gone in a different direction.
  That's when you're glad you haven't distributed the code yet. Because you would have to make the transition work for all the users too. And it's hard enough doing it on my own server! :-)
  I'm interested in seeing if this comment shows up on the "Day of Construction" page.
    I'm interested in seeing if this additional line shows up.
      I'm fairly sure this line will now show up.
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  BTW, if you want to browse my threads outline in the OPML Editor:
    1. Copy this URL to the clipboard.
    2. Launch the OPML Editor or bring it to the front.
    3. Choose Open URL... from the File menu.
    4. Paste.
    It's opened read-only since it's my outline, not yours. :-)
  Maybe it's time to get greenbuttonpeople.org.
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  We lost a comment here. Not sure what happened.
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  I'm still a newbie to most of the debugging tools in Chrome. I can fumble around enough to find problems and am getting better. I thought I'd go looking through http://mediahackers.org to see if I could find the DOM data its displaying. I want to see if the OPML actually makes it all the way through. Any tips would be much appreciated.
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  I believe I have the feature working, but I need a fresh comment to test it out.
  If this works, the river produced by Houston that includes this item will also have the JSON conversion of the OPML text you are reading right now.
  If it works, I expect my brain to explode! :-)
    It worked. As the comment item flows through River2, it is picked up and flows out through the river.js file in JSON. If the river software were looking for an item named source on the item it would find it, and it would already be loaded in the DOM ready to be displayed.
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  Cori, I think that feature already exists in a more convenient form.
    Follow-up: I see. What you want goes in the other direction. You're looking at a comment and would like to go to the page. I would do that with a View button on the window, to be consistent with other contexts. I've put it on my short to-do list (if it's easy, and I think it is,).
    If you click the green OPML button, we check if there already is a comment on that post in the Comments Workspace, and if there is we seek to that instead of creating a new one.
    About comments in comments not being rendered, that's a standard feature of the CMS. Unless a type specifically turns it on, comments are not rendered.
      An example of a type where you would want comments rendered are code types.
      Here's an example of one of those.
  Kyle, glad you found the Microblog namespace.
    Also I have to get that information to flow through to the comments server.
    Still a lot of loose-ends, plumbing-wise. Always are.
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  It's good to think of this in terms of pipes, esp for software like this, where there are little pools, and bathtubs and sinks and water fountains spread all over the place, and you have to move the ideas fluidly between all of them. Sometimes you forget something, and then every pipe has to get the feature, and then you realize how many there are. There are many! :-)
  This is what I'm good at. Holding all that pipery in my head and forgetting the complexity and just working on one small bit of plumbing at a time.
  Stan Krute who has been reading my blog a long time always comes along and notes when there's new plumbing. I wonder where he is. Been expecting a checkin from him.
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  I'm trying an interesting experiment, nesting a comment underneath a comment of my own. Let's see if this mofo works. It fucking worked. Now I want to see if it shows up in the feed.
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  Amy, I disallowed embeds here yesterday as well as a bunch of other possibly problematic HTML elements, like tables. Some people were pushing the limits, and I don't really want to do that right now here in comments. These outlines are going to expand into bigger things probably pretty soon, so there will be plenty of time to discuss what's wise. Glad you're participating! :-)
  Making a change here so I can test some new code.
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  I need another place to leave a test comment. Sorry. :-)
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  Thanks James! Everyone's been so positive. Loving the energy. :-)
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  Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends we're so glad you could attend come inside come inside.
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  I see one myself. :-)
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  I'm making a test of outline comments here on TechCrunch.
  Now in theory I should be able to embolden some text without it getting neutered.
    Sure enough I can.
  And if I try to put in a object that will be neutered.
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  I'm testing something.
    This is some bold text.
    This is a and it should not be here.
    This is an and it will be neutered as well.
    Still testing.
    More tests.
  How do I make certain headlines collapse?
    Actually it's not rules. There's an attribute called "collapse" -- if it's present and true, the node is initially collapsed.
    Though apparently you can do it with rules too. :-)
  Do includes not work?
    Here's an outline I included.
    Includes do work, but you have to actually use the include type, not a link to a file whose name ends with .opml. We took out that little hack in new places. It's still supported in the old places where it used to be. (Sort of a half-deprecation.)
  Pointers
    If you look in the Guest Databases/ops folder you'll see a sub-folder called OPML comments that contains a calendar-structured archive of every version of every comment outline you save.
    You can also edit user.opmleditor.comments to enable mirroring to S3 (you also have to set your S3 prefs).
    In a future evolution of this it will be possible link your OPML documents to other services that support the feature, so you can edit content for other sites using this mechanism. I've been talking about this idea on Scripting News. Now it's time to start implementing the idea.
    Some pretty interesting plans also in re DNS. :-)
  Anton & Kyle
    Glad to see you here.
    This is a gateway to all that the worldoutline has to offer. It's a super-easy on-ramp. From here all the features can be introduced one at a time.
    I'm glad that you guys are here now. This feels like a place. :-)
    Very excited about what we can start doing next.
    PS: Anton, it would probably be good to get Bora started here.
  Earlier comments
    Adam, it seems like you are the first adventurous user, as always. :-)
    I've been busy working on another little mind bomb.
    Ted, yes, this is an evolution, refinement, second implementation.
    It's the core of what was unique about the "pocalypse" project, and almost all the code in this came straight from that. These things, when new, make my head blow up. I've learned not to necessarily ship my first implementation, to let it season, sink in, seem more normal, and then re-approach. I always get further the second time, and have more confidence that I've hit on the right way to do it. At this point I'm fairly sure this is the right way.
    Think of it also as a refinement of Instant Outlining.
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