0xDECAFBAD - Tag: xoxooutliner

rss feeds of bookmarklets?

2007-01-03T20:29:31+00:00

Hmm, a quick idea: Has anyone yet tried making an RSS feed of bookmarklets? I'd use it by dragging it to the Firefox bookmark toolbar to get a drop-down menu of usable bookmarklets, dynamically generated by an online app. In particular, say I had an outline in XoxoOutliner, and I wanted to treat the first level of items each as a loosely categorized inbox for ideas. The RSS feed would offer bookmarklets to append a new idea via quick pop-up to each of the top-level branches.

Archived Comments

Scytrin dai Kinthra
2007-01-03T23:30:42

I used to do this from my home page once browsers started integrating rss into bookmark thingies. These days I've been using the Firefox del.icio.us 1.3.x extention and store my bookmarklets and smart bookmarks (hello galeon) on my account. However, del.icio.us doesn't allow sharing of certain types of bookmarks and bookmarklets are one of them (being javascript and all), so sharing of them is not very well enabled. It'd be nice being able to peruse a del.icio.us/tag/bookmarklet and pickout nifties.
Chris Messina
2007-01-03T23:32:42

Not sure, but that's a great idea! The bookmarklets that load remote scripts and are therefore always up to date IMO are genius... this simply adds some depth to them I guess... and takes advantage of the Firefox UI.

Would you be able to execute Javascript loaded from feeds that aren't top level locations? That seems like a security issue, no?
James Robinson, III
2007-01-04T01:34:56

Haven't tried it in FF 2.0.0.1, but older versions filtered out bookmarklets from the feed due to the JS.
Shawn Medero
2007-01-04T05:03:17

James is right about Firefox - I wanted to have a feed of bookmarklets as a live bookmark that people at work would subscribe to for a certain project but Firefox 1.x filtered out any Javascript. Going back to unstable Firefox (it worked up until 0.9 or something) didn't seem like a great idea so I canned it. Kinda stinks because it would be really useful for internal usage where security shouldn't be an issue.

drag and drop and the missing mouseup

2006-12-19T16:21:40+00:00

With the draggable circles - click, drag, move the mouse outside the rectangle, release the mouse button. Now move the mouse back inside the rectangle, and it still thinks your dragging, even though you’ve mouse-up’d.

I guess this is because it’s not catching the onmouseup when you’re outside it’s “domain”. Perhaps make it automatically trigger the mouseup when the pointer leaves the area?

Source: Vitamin Features » Create cross browser vector graphics - Comment by Steve

So, that dojo.gfx thing is cool - but what caught my eye in the above-linked article is the above-quoted comment. Drag and drop and missed mouseups seem to be an issue everywhere. I can't seem to get around them in my XoxoOutliner drag code, YUI DnD examples seem to suffer from it, and hell - even Firefox itself doesn't seem immune: Try drag-selecting some text, wander off-window with the mouse, release the mouse button. For me at least, on my Mac, the drag-selection keeps doing its thing when I wander back on-window. No me gusta.

XoxoOutliner and further outline addressing adventures

2006-11-15T08:07:12+00:00

Revised the addressing code a bit, adding a few new kinds of addresses and getting ready to support sub-outline updates. That is, fetch a sub-branch of an outline and then later post a change to that sub-branch using the same address. Needs more thought - ie. what happens if things move between fetch and update? - but here are a few more samples:

First is a straight linear index counting down from the top of the outline:
- http://decafbad.com/2006/11/XoxoOutliner/outlines/README;index:4?format=xoxo
Second is a navigation of outline structure, alternating numbers and letters:
- http://decafbad.com/2006/11/XoxoOutliner/outlines/README;level:3c4?format=xoxo

That's all for now. In my next round of enthusiasm, I may try stealing Tom Morris' Opath idea...

Archived Comments

Vincent D Murphy
2006-11-18T20:52:07

I think (and said as much on Tom Morris' site) that a fragment identifier would be a better solution, in which case Opath would be a fragment identifier syntax for OPML and XOXO. At least it would be the best solution from a REST/web architecture point of view..
l.m.orchard
2006-11-18T21:40:41

One reason I didn't use the #identifier URI syntax for suboutlines is because some gymnastics need to be done to get the hash through to the server from a browser. Otherwise, it gets treated as an in-page anchor. The semicolon syntax seems to work well for a set of path-segment parameters, and follows the standard (if I've read it correctly).

In either case, it works for me, and should be just fine in a REST context - the suboutline syntax here should always identify a single parent outline node as a resource, and will eventually work for GET / PUT / POST / DELETE.

Now I just need to implement a solution for the Lost Update Problem.
Michael Poremba
2008-09-18T23:45:56

Wondering if you ever completed your online outliner? Check out dynamiclist.com, a functioning but incomlete project I launched back in 2001. The editor is rich and works well. Been thinking of reviving now that all major browsers support the contentEditable tag.

XoxoOutliner and suboutline addressing

2006-11-13T09:34:02+00:00

Here's a feature I just hacked together for XoxoOutliner and plan to refine further:

Not entirely sure that this is how I want this to work, but these three URLs demonstrate the ability to address and fetch subsets of outlines. I'm hoping this will be a basis for selective transclusion in other outlines, or maybe even in a sidebar of a blog. (Which, depending on the blog software, might be built from outlines anyway.)

XoxoOutliner shows some signs of life

2006-11-12T05:25:40+00:00

Remember when I started writing about XoxoOutliner around 8 months ago? Yeah, lots has happened with life in general between then and now - but lately I've been working on code for it again. As you might see from my Trac timeline, I've got lots of new code checked in. And I mean lots.

If I can keep up this bout of serial enthusiasm for the project, you'll be hearing lots more about it soon.

For now, check out the new static README.html and the live demo. It's extremely bugful, but it might do interesting things for Firefox and Safari users.

Archived Comments

Vincent D Murphy
2006-11-12T09:14:26

Wow!

This thing is such an improvement. I love that the README is an outline.

I think this is really powerful. I think an outliner should eliminate the need for a lot of rich text browser editors. Outlines inherently break text into small little chunks, which are stylable (and potentially URL addressable, for block-level comments). I think this thing would rock in a wiki.

Keep up the good work!
Shawn Medero
2006-11-13T12:59:18

Bravo! This is a great set of updates and works well in Safari (haven't had the time yet to test in Firefox.)

I've been thinking about using some portion of these tools in my wiki software to dress up outlines. I'm not sure yet... sometimes I feel like editing an outline (well a simple one I'd use on a wiki at least) is quicker manually with something like Markdown.
misuba
2006-11-14T00:15:01

Rad!

Keep this up and I won't have to finish mine. :-)

XoxoOutliner rewrite coming, now with event delegation

2006-11-06T18:14:26+00:00

For what it's worth: I've answered my own question about event delegation based drag and drop. It seems to work quite well on my machine, which is quite a bit beefier than my old machine. I should try it out on there soon. But, I'll hopefully be releasing it soon in the form of a mostly-rewritten XoxoOutliner that will feature drag and drop outline items as well as keyboard navigation/control and in-place editing. And, it should actually start to become useful, since I plan to also whip up a PHP-based server side bit that will handle loading and saving outlines, as well as possibly a client-side bit that can save outlines using local browser storage. I have the technology - we'll see how far my ambitious plans take me during this hobbling sprint of development.

Archived Comments

Shawn Medero
2006-11-07T11:01:11

Great news Les! I had checked out the souce of XoxoOutliner and was thinking about playing around myself. Let me know if you'd like an additional tester. :)
Jesse Andrews
2006-11-08T18:18:11

Is there a demo of the event delegation framework you are building posted?
l.m.orchard
2006-11-08T18:23:29

Nope, nothing available or posted yet. Soon, though - hoping to check the works in before the end of the week. It's a bit in pieces right now
Brad Neuberg
2006-11-29T09:57:04

Les, very exciting that you're jumping back into the XoXoOutliner code! I can't wait to try to hook it up to HyperScope and play with it some more. It's the best open source DHTMLly outliner out there.

Two things that might help you; for local storage, I just checked in a new storage provider for Dojo Storage that will use the native storage abilities in Firefox 2 if they are available, in an automagic way; if they aren't there, then it will revert to hidden Flash like it's worked in the past. This might be useful for you; don't know what you were thinking about for local storage. There's a page up with better docs on Dojo Storage now at http://manual.dojotoolkit.org/WikiHome/DojoDotBook/Book50

The second thing is I just finished an HTML to OPML outline transformer; right now it adds in the line for the HyperScope XSLT stylesheet, but it can be used by any OPML hackers who want to play with bringing HTML into the OPML world, including for things like experimenting with the kind of OPath, deep linking, and inclusion work you've hinted about in other blog entries. A blog post on it is here: http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/11/html-transformer-for-hyperscope-apply.html . Might be fun for you to use in your hacking.

We still need to grab drinks some time! How is your leg healing up? Hope you had a great thanksgiving.

Best, Brad