SkaroffBlog

When I was 12 I’d already determined that I was a big nerd. And when a big nerd often flies cross country to visit family in California, he looks for the geekiest magazine he can find to pass the time. In 1993, that was quite clearly Wired Magazine. One only needed to scan across the covers of the row of computer magazines (always the bottom row it seemed) to see that Wired was in a different world from publications like PC Mag. 

From the start I was completely captivated, not only by the writing and ideas, but by the radical design and layout. If you remember the earlier days of Wired, it could be nearly unreadable at times. There were no columns or simple pie charts. Instead it was a seeming hodge podge of color and type set at oblique angles. Just picking apart the levels of detail in a single print page could be quite a challenge. But it was interesting and wild and completely different. 

A few months ago I started subscribing and regularly reading Dave Winer’s Scripting News. Yesterday while reading the transcript of his interview with Robert X. Cringely for NerdTV I realized Dave was one of the original contributing editors to Wired. And so it made sense that I enjoyed his current writing so much. I think there is something about the way his mind works that matches up well with my own thought processes. 

With some time to kill yesterday, I invested a few hours into learning the OPML Editor, Dave’s tool for creating outlines (and quite a bit more). It’s an interesting piece of software because it’s not immediately intuitive. But after a bit of exploration, it starts to just click. And with a built in blogging tool, it seemed natural to give it a try. So here’s my first (real) entry. This was composed in the Editor and then manually mirrored to WordPress on skaroff.com. The original exists at my OPML blog at http://blogs.opml.org/jskaroff/. 

My thoughts on the OPML Editor so far: 

While I certainly recognize the power of outlining (I’m already a big fan of outlining in the OPML editor’s scripting environment - hierarchical outlines make so much sense than curly brackets for code blocks) I’m not sure it makes quite as much sense for blogging. Not to say it doesn’t make sense either.

Now whether that is because the OPML editor itself has such a poor UI, or whether I’m simply not accustomed to it yet, or whether it’s just not how my brain works, I’m not sure.

But I’m willing to give it a try. I can already see the way that posts and paragraphs become a time stamped stream makes a ton of sense.

I think there are ways to integrate the editor into WordPress. That’s a project for another day.

As an aside, I desperately need to upgrade my WP install. 

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 12:50 pm and is tagged as Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.