World Outline FAQs

I'd start with World Outline for Poets.

Once you've watched the screencast and read the tutorial, there are pointers to more docs near the end of the page.

Yes. To set it up, launch the OPML Editor, choose Set startup outline from the World Outline sub-menu of the Outliner menu.

That takes you to a web page where you can enter the title of one of your root outlines.

Next time you launch the OPML Editor that outline will open automatically.

I got tired of manually opening my Worknotes outline every time. :-)

Go to your Roots page and flip down the blue wedge at the top of the page to reveal the menu, if it's hidden.

Click on Prefs. Then Comments. You can change the "shortname" to the name of your Disqus account.

You can also do this on a per-root basis. Click on the gear icon in the same row as the root. Then click on the Comments tab.

You don't have to store your outlines in Amazon's storage system. Here's a step by step process that shows how to store them anywhere you like.

1. In the OPML Editor, choose the New command from the File menu. A new outline document window opens.

2. Add some text to it, say a blogpost type. Do it exactly the same way you'd do it in one of the tutorials or screencasts.

3. Save it to your local computer (choose Save from the File menu), and then upload it to a publicly accessible web server. I like to use the Dropbox "public" folder for this purpose, but you can use any server. Copy the URL of the outline to the clipboard.

4. Open one of your outlines from your Roots page. Enter a headline that says Stories from my other server. Then right-click on the wedge next to the headline. Choose "Add inclusion" from the popup menu. A dialog appears asking for the URL. Paste the one you copied to the clibpard in step 3. Save.

5. Click the View button. You should see an item entitled Stories from my other server. Click on it. You should see your story. If you click on it again, you'll be reading it.

An "inclusion" allows you to hop from one document to the other, as if the other were part of the first one. The only difference is that you can't put domains on headlines inside inclusions. And you just have to set this up once, and you can go on editing on your other server, as much as you want, without storing your content on Amazon.

On the other hand, Amazon has been pretty reliable, and except for their censoring of WikiLeaks, an event that caused me to lose a lot of trust in them, they've been pretty good (i.e. neutral) about hosting content. On the other hand, I am aware that we need alternatives. But as a developer, I have to prioritize. I've been working on this software on my own for a long time. Maybe if a supportive community develops, we can spread out onto lots of platforms.

One more thing, I'm running all of my servers except for Tulsa, on Rackspace. I like their service, and I like the idea of having multiple vendors, in case one goes bad. It's easy to set up an OPML server on your own hardware.

Finally, I do not recommend using the World Outline this way, but I wanted people to see that it can be done. In case of an emergency, if Amazon gets seriously bad about censorship, we will not find ourselves locked in.

Good news, we already are keeping a local backup of your outlines.

Here's how to find them.

1. Find the OPML folder on your local computer, open it.

2. Look in Guest Databases/ops/worldOutline/archive.

3. You'll see a calendar-structure hierarchy of folders. When you Save an outline it not only goes up to the server, but it's also saved in this folder.

The organization of the folder is a little tricky -- the date is the date when the outline was created. So you end up with the latest copy of every outline on the server.

I like to re-locate this folder in my Dropbox folder, because they maintain a backup of versions of the file.

You can change the location of the folder by running this one-line script:

Obviously, you'd change the folder location to the one you want to use.

The OPML Editor is a scripting environment as well as an outliner, so there are many ways to run scripts.

1. You can enter the code into the Quick Script window, and click on the Run button. There's a command in the Misc menu that opens the Quick Script window.

2. You can enter the code into a headline in an outline and press Cmd-/ on Mac or Control-/ on Windows. The value returned by the script is entered as a sub-head. I keep an outline called Oneliners specifically for this purpose, that way if I want to remember how I did something, it's still there. But sometimes the Quick Script window is the fastest way to do it, hence its name. :-)

3. You can also put one-line scripts into opmlStartupCommands.txt in the OPML folder. These scripts will run every time the OPML Editor starts up. Be sure to put a semi-colon at the end of every line there, because it's needed in text files (not in outlines).

The code nodetype is used to display bits of code from the object databases that make up the OPML Editor environment. Each code node must have a url attribute that points to an exported script, which in this context, is just an OPML file.

The listings site, which is automatically kept up to date, is almost entirely made of up code nodes. Here are a few examples of exported scripts you can try out in your own examples.