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Just as a program has source code, so does the writing on this blog.

It’s always been this way, but I’ve accepted the limits of other blogging tools, and the limits of RSS, and not exposed the richer writing environment behind scripting.com. That is changing, gradually, with the new software.

The small initial changes have caused some consternation. Some people are concerned that they’re not getting all the content in the RSS feeds. Some people feel the plus sign is too small, and others don’t want to click on it, they think it should be expanded by default.

So here are some responses to these concerns.

I want to include all the content in the feeds, and with a change I made last night, I now am. I’m just not providing it in the old “flat” way. There’s a link to the source code behind the HTML rendering. The source has all the text. Of course there aren’t any apps that read this format, yet. It’s always that way. When I first came out with the predecessor to RSS, no one read it. But eventually someone did, and then a lot of people, etc etc. That may not happen here, but then again, it might. Don’t count it out.

There are actually now two ways to get the source behind the HTML rendering: 1. You can get it from a link element in the HTML. This would be useful for a bookmarklet that wanted to try alternate rendering of the text, as Readability does, for example. 2. It’s in the RSS feed for scripting.com. Each item links to the source in a new element called <scripting2:source>. This would be used by a news reader app like Google Reader, if they wanted to do something special with content coming from advanced blogs like Scripting News. Do I believe that eventually the other blogging tools will offer this? Yes, in fact, I do. Do I think Google will support it now? No, as long as it’s just my blog, they won’t support it (probably). But when others do it, they hopefully will decide to support it, and help us add some cool features to the web. I would, of course, like to see them do that.

I also made a small change to the rendering of the site. There’s now a small XML icon below the blogroll, in the right margin of every page. It links to the OPML for the blogroll. I expect there will be some interesting things doen with that. There are features already implemented in the blogroll that aren’t yet visible in the UI. I think the blogroll will eventually bust out of the right margin and become something itneresting on its own. “;->”

There have been some excellent suggestions about the sub-text feature: 1. Make the icon larger. (Will do.) 2. Move the icon so it’s at the right and bottom. (Makes sense, but isn’t the way outliners work. I’m going to stick with the current placement for now.) 3. Make it so clicking in the text makes it expand. (Good idea, but doesn’t that break selection? What if you want to copy a bit of text from the post?)

Finally, I’m really glad this discussion is taking place here now. I wanted to draw intelligent thoughtful technical people back to Scripting News, to participate in what I hope will be a bootstrap of some new technology. Keep discussing, share your ideas, even if you don’t like what I’m doing. There’s more to come. Sometimes the first few chapters of a story don’t make you happy, then you see where the plot is going, and it starts to make sense. “;->”

Jay wrote a blog post this evening whose title is a lyric from an old Stealer’s Wheel song. Got me humming and it eventually became the title of this post. “Only steal from the best!”

I’m getting a lot of inquiries about sub-text in Scripting2. People still seem to love it, but they want to know how it will work with RSS apps like NetNewsWire, River2 and the omnibus Google Reader. (I first wrote ominous, for its sheer dominance, but then thought they probably don’t feel dominant, just like they’re carrying all kinds of passengers.) I don’t have the source code to the other apps, and River2 is not a full-text affair (I strip markup and cut the text off at 250 characters, based on its design as a skimmer rather than a reader). But we should get on the road to making it possible for reader apps to do something nice with the collapsed sub-text.

So, today I did two things that should help, but probably aren’t the last word in publishing the material that backs up a Scripting2 post.

1. There’s now a <link> element at the top of each story that points to the OPML source for the story. View Source in the browser to see it.

2. There’s a link to the OPML source in the RSS feed. It’s in a new namespace called scripting2.

These are probably not the last word in linkage to the full source behind my blog posts, and if there’s little or no uptake, I’m not guaranteeing I’ll support them for perpetuity. If you use them — please let me know, preferably in a public comment or post, so others can see.

Onward!

An Emergency Broadcast System for Twitter might look like this.

When everything is working at Twitter, all the clients communicate through Twitter. A client is an app like Tweetdeck, UberTwitter, Seesmic, Brizzly, Tweedroid, etc.

However, when Twitter is down, each client sends your tweets to a “safe place” and the clients your friends use hear about your status updates from there.

There’s still a lot of disruption, but some messages get through. Over time the EBS will get better, as we learn better how to make the best of a Twitter outage.

Reality: We still need to communicate even when Twitter is down.

Bottom-line: The client vendors are key.