Wednesday, July 02, 2003


An Experiment — OmniOutliner and Blosxom


  • Why?
    • Prompted by the experimental application of Radio Userland as an outline posting tool for Movable Type, I decided to see if it were possible to do something similar using OmniOutliner and Blosxom. I would think that an outliner would be really useful for the long, omnibus-type posts (like the Drive-Bys) that I do sometimes.
    • Outliners are, so I’ve been told, excellent tools for organizing your thoughts, assuming you have thoughts to organize.
  • How?
    • Create the entry in OmniOutliner
    • Export as HTML
    • Clean up any garbage <FONT> tags, etc., if necessary added by the export process in Hydra.
    • Publish.

Postmortem: Well, it was a bit more work than that. First, OmniOutliner creates a complete HTML document upon export, which means I have to get rid of extraneous <BODY> tags and stuff as well as a bunch of other <HEAD> type stuff. Nothing too difficult, but as it’s a manual process there’s the potential for error. The other, more serious issue is that it also “helpfully” entity-escaped every single HTML tag I included in my post. This seemed like the more insurmountable issue, until I remembered that, since I was using a Cocoa editor, I could take advantage of Unicode Checker’s “HTML Entities -> Unicode” service to reverse that damage. Cool. I’d call it a success.


:: Dave Walker 12:20 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/administrivia/general]
:: tags:

:: Comments (4)

Comments:

ssp wrote:

Title:

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Response:

Doesn't that beg for a little bit of AppleScript magic to automate the whole process?

Two more things about your blog:

  • It still doesn't remember my name/address although I have the 'save my name' box checked every time I submit a comment
  • The links at the rigt will overlap the comment textarea in reasonably narrow browser windows. You can fix that by doing some CSS magic with the z-index (as seen on my blog) that'll make sure the textarea goes over the links if the window is too narrow.
Outline style...
d.w. wrote:

Title:

Date:

Response:
  • re: Applescripting it -- I probably will, eventually, if I do enough outline posts to make it worthwhile.
  • Ah... forgetting your name/address is my error. I'd disabled the cookie plugin while doing some troubleshooting and I'd forgotten to re-enable it. Fixed, thanks.
  • Fixing the overlapping columns looks like it'll be a bit more work. Looking up the z-index property, it looks like it only works for absolutely positioned elements. In my current layout, the left and right columns are absolutely positioned and the center column floats. I'll have to read up a bit more to see what my options are. The center column gets drawn before the left and right columns (for accessability reasons).
ssp wrote:

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Response:
Ok, just trying whether the cookie magic works now... Re: z-index My blog is about the same, content first, position: relative, z-index:3, sidebars after that with position:absolute and z-index:1. Seems to work.
Wes Meltzer wrote:

Title: You can do this better with AppleScript

Date:

Response:
I just ran across this, and I thought I'd throw in my two bits if you're still trying to do this. Sounded like a neat idea, although it's a shame that Blosxom doesn't have text-processing filters. (Ahh, Textile.) Someone's already done an OmniOutliner-to-HTML translator (http://www.redmonk.net/stories/omniOutlineRenderers), so this will help you in your quest, I suspect. All you have to know is how you want various outline levels to look in HTML. It's possible to use this script to do other things, too, as add-ins; I use it to create a digested email of announcements (in HTML, unfortunately) I have to send out every day, so I have it make a table of contents too. If only Mozilla were scriptable for what I need. Hope this is of help to you!



The person you rejected yesterday could make you happy, if you say yes.