Sunday October 17, 2021; 9:48 AM EDT
- I’m not used to writing in public. I’m having little tiny panic attacks because editing and reorganizing is instant and straightforward. (I was going to say easy, but:, phone.) And it’s instant to see your changes. Except it’s not a preview, what’s there is there. #
- I’m assuming there’s a preview capability somewhere, but if not, I can work out a staging area or something. I know all the words are right here in front of me in the outline, but I absolutely depend on a preview. The reason I am going all in on Drummer is that it is scriptable: I can make it do what I want.#
- So the reason for the little panics isn’t that I can’t see what I’m doing or whatever. It just drives me nuts when something gets published, and then silently changed. I came up via newspapers, so if you put something out there and you need to change it, you publish a correction. And both the original and the update are out there to keep you honest.#
- If anyone is watching this get published live, I certainly don’t mind.#
- I doubt Dave��s OPML-to-blog converter-server-thingie, Old School, does this, but you could step through multiple versions of an OPML file at timestamped intervals. ie, schedule stuff in advance. #
- Of course this gives you one of my favorite things: a time machine.#
- I can also make a button that computes diffs and pushes them to someplace handy. Remember, scriptable. What’s handy? Probably Time Machine-like slices of the whole thing, so a series of cloned roots. But these little leaf node edits are an interesting conceptualization as well.#
- Now, I know nobody is reading this as I’m going, so it’s not like I need to be held accountable for these terrible things I’m saying and then cleaning up. Later, when I’ve hooked up all the pieces and this is part of an automatic money-generating publishing machine, and I’m performing for an audience, then it'll matter.#
- So, I hit the build blog thingie, pause.#
- Type something. Build it again. #
- There, now something’s Out There. But what about all the other obvious things I haven’t dealt with, the things that make me look stupid for omitting?#
- Will they know that���s not actually the final word, that there might be more to come? Is there more to come?#
- Maybe there isn’t more to come. Maybe I really am just that shortsighted, or biased, or wrong. Heck, that’s the entire point of this blog post and I haven’t gotten anywhere near it yet. The point. To quote my dearly missed friend again, “My point, and I do have one…”#
- At the end of the previous post, I wrote, “Let’s see what Drummer can do." What I’d intended to do next was see if I understand what OPML inclusion is capable of. But on the way there, before I even got started, I was compelled to write this blog post. Which is the sort of thing a blogger would do. And Drummer is for blogging, right? #
- Well, no, not really. Not for me, anyway. My interest in Drummer is building that automatic publishing machine. I’m not a blogger, that’s not me. Every ten years or so I send Dave Winer an email, and apparently, just last week, while congratulating him on Drummer’s launch and making various unreasonable requests, I felt compelled to tell him how I am just so not a blogger.#
- So, the entire point of this post is that I was wrong.#
- I love being wrong. That’s how I learn new things.#