OPML Editor

I downloaded and played around a bit with Dave’s OPML Editor last night because I thought I might have use for an online outliner. You can see the result here.

I think it’s a decent tool, and useful for a lot of things, but I’m not sure it’s the right tool for what I want to do. You see, what I want, is to be able to display outlines in progress for the feature articles I’m writing for 2Guys2Cities, and give the IT folks who read this site the opportunity to chime in. I see it as giving the tech blogging community a chance to have some say over what they would write if given the chance to write about technology to a website that caters to a different audience then they normally have. In this case, I have been given a bit of a platform to write for a site catering to young, urban males. I want to be able to share not just my own knowledge, but the collective knowledge of the tech blogging community. I thought having working outlines of stories would maybe be a useful way to illicit feedback from other tech-bloggers before the articles get published. Sort of my own little team of fact-checkers or editors.

Unfortunately, while I can create great outlines using the Instant Outliner tool, you would need to be using the OPML Editor software to ever see those. Putting an outline up as a blog post on that page, only goes one level deep. I was hoping for a way to render deep outlines in HTML that everyone could see and comment on, even if the commenting had to be done by email.

At the end of the day, maybe a Wiki would be a better tool for this?

Update: DB left a comment about uploading the raw HTML files, which I totally didn’t get until I realized that having the instant outline open and choosing the “view in browser” feature does actually produced HTML files. I can then move those into the www directory and publish them up to the server, like so. Perhaps this will work out yet…

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