Friday July 29, 2022; 10:32 AM EDT
- What if there were a RSS feed just for an article/essay like the one I wrote here? Imagine that each paragraph in the second then was a RSS item. I think then you would want the RSS content to persist in a reader but be updated whenever a change was detected in any of the items. I think the result would be a "living" document updated on one's computer whenever the author made a change. Hold on.... it just occurred to me we already have this with OPML, Drummer, and opmlBrowser! Time to pull together a demo.#
- Ok, here is a demo of what I was describing, all doable in OPML using Drummer and renderable using either pagePark or opmlBrowser. I created a new OPML file in Drummer with all of the parent nodes as you see. I collapsed my contributions to the document. I then asked Andy Sylvester to create a public OPML file containing his original post and provide me the URL, which I then included in to the outline that you can now see. #
- I think there are a couple of downsides to using Drummer and Dave's pagePark installation for hosting and rendering the OPML file. One is that in order for Andy's outline to be included it needs to be expanded in Drummer, as soon as I collapse it from Drummer the content included from his OPML file disappears. Consequently, I suspect that any updates Andy makes might not appear unless i have the file open in Drummer. Not sure if it has to be the active tab before the upgrades take affect. #
- I therefore think Andy's implementation of the opmlPackage might be better as it doesn't need Drummer to facilitate the updates. To test that theory I probably need to provision another server. In the mean time, I hope that you see how people could collaborate on a document that represents a body of knowledge on a particular topic. #