Drummer is a new outliner (with companion blogging system) from Dave Winer. As I’ve watched some folks on Micro.blog play with Drummer, I thought I’d take a look at how we could make it easier to use an outline in Drummer to write new blog posts for Micro.blog.
The result is an experimental feature in Micro.blog that adds support for creating or updating posts automatically from OPML files on the web. Write in Drummer, publish to a blog hosted on Micro.blog. There are a few moving pieces, so the best way to explain how it works is this screencast video I made (also available on YouTube).
I was fascinated to discover that when you look under the surface of Drummer, there’s the start of a Frontier-inspired scripting system too. I’m not sure where OPML support in Micro.blog will go from here, but this was fun to work on, and there may be more we can do with other outliners in the future.
Maurice Parker has a blog post exploring the differences between Drummer and his outliner Zavala. Over the years, outliners have gotten more feature-rich but also complicated. There seems to be a lot of potential for more lightweight outliners like Drummer and Zavala that can potentially talk to each other and to the web.
