Tom Morris

Adam has an interesting post about coolness and how we distribute both software and the ideas which software sits in a symbiotic relationship with.

I have some thoughts. Firstly, I have bought more software since the Internet made it possible for me to test things out. I shelled out $69 a few months ago on Interarchy - the Macintosh FTP client. That's because I'd been trying it and it made my life a lot, lot easier. Then again, I'm a geek, and I am (a) willing to download software and try it out and (b) not scared of credit card fraud online (how exactly is my card more secure in the hands of a waiter in Real Life or some bored call center operator than it is at PayPal?).

There's no way that I would have been able to go and buy an FTP client in a box. It wouldn't be worth it. What's even cooler about Interarchy was that yesterday it told me on launch that a new version was available. I clicked "upgrade", and it automatically downloaded a new DMG file and opened it up. I just dragged the replacement application in to my Applications folder and restarted Interarchy. That is the most painless upgrade process imaginable.

The last time I bought software in a shop was when I bought Final Fantasy XI. I hate buying offline in about 90% of cases (second hand books are the exception).

Call me a soppy Hegelian, but I don't think that the blogosphere is less open than the old mainstream media was regarding software. Also, the "cool factor" for me significantly decreases the further away from the front end the people are. Back-end developers - sysadmins, DBAs, programmers and developers - have, in my experience, been far more immune to "cool" than the front-end folk. If I'm at a geek event, it's far more fun than if I'm at a designers event. (The reasons for that are obviously debatable, and I expect if I was a designer, I'd, you know, play the whole "cool" card a lot more...)

If Arrington and Scoble's email in-stream is full, this means that they need to delegate. This is exactly what they are doing - TechCrunch has spawned numerous Crunch spinoffs - TechCrunch UK, CrunchGear. Scoble has got involved with PodTech, whose audio and video programmes often show me lots of interesting little nuggets.

And this is an opportunity for a new digg or reddit type site to appear which links to new startups and product releases. I also think that ReviewMe will be a good way for people to get their products out.

I'm planning a new site at the moment - a cool feature that hit me the other day right in the middle of reading about neoconservatism. I'm not giving away anything at the moment, but I'm planning various ways to make it appeal to people I know. Because those are the people that I'm going to have to sell on future ideas.

How am I going to announce my new product? Well, I'm going to Le Web next month in Paris. I'm hoping to use the fact that I'll be sitting in a building for two days with the target audience as a perfect opportunity to launch my new site.

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I'm not there with the OPML directory renderer in PHP, but while Googling around today, I came across Cori Schlegel's point about inclusion and deeplinking:

In other words, from my standpoint, deep-linking to a point within an outline is not supported by - one of the biggest drawbacks of OPML from my standpoint, but an acceptable weakness rather than a structural flaw.

I've written a script that will do the job relatively amicably based on code I've already written - and I've called it Opath. This is based after Xpath - and the idea is that it's supposed to be a spark for someone to write an abstraction layer on top of Xpath just to do OPML (with inclusion).

Here's the situation. You want to include an OPML node inside your outline. The problem is that you want to get just one node from an outline and include it. Here's where Opath comes in.

It's a simple RESTful API to OPML. It simply pulls in an OPML file, extracts the bit that you specify and returns that piece to you.

Here's an example for you. Dave has an OPML file listing all the States in the US, sorted by region - called states.opml. But what if you just want to link to the New England chunk of it. You just need to specify the path to it - in this case, "United States/New England".

Then you produce a URL of the sort:

opath.opiumfield.com/url/--/path

So, in the case of the New England example, we'd have:

opath.opiumfield.com/http://hosting.opml.org/dave/states.opml/--/United States/New England (Graze it)

It's a bit of a monster URL, but it works.

What's really cool is I've also got caching sitting in there - so the hit to the owner of the outline is kept to a minimum. I've also made it so that the links are backwards compatible with OPML 1.0. This is achieved by simply adding "//opath.opml" on the end of the URL. This ensures that the file ends in the extension ".opml" and it'll work in pre-2.0 OPML documents. (Kind of a kludgey hack, but it works).

There are problems with this setup - you get some nasty output errors if you specify a node that doesn't exist. Also, if things move around, you are a little bit screwed. So keep checkin' your links.

I will be releasing this as an extension so that if you are using Apache, you can put it in a folder which will let you just put Opaths on the end of your outlines (so you can just put /--/opath after your file - eg. states.opml/--/United States in order to get the relevant Opath).

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