So, Dave has a nice template for showing essay-length writing.
And naturally, the way things are evolving in 2015, it’s a “single-page web-app” which can pull in the actual content from another URL.
Of course, I’d like to write essays using an outliner. And I’m using OWL which is really just the Concord editor that saves files in OPML. But myword.io has a new custom JSON format for its input (that also seems to allow Markdown).
So here’s the question : what’s the story for converting an outline to an essay? Is myword going to evolve to import OPML directly? Is the myword JSON format going to become a standard? How should OPML turn into myword documents?
In one sense it’s easy. You can always just flatten OPML and dump it to a raw text file. Perhaps with some indentation based on outline depth. (Although that might fight the Markdown.)
Or are there plans to represent any structure in the essay (sections, section headings etc.) with structure in the OPML? Is there a project to work on this? Or thoughts on a standard that I could start to support?
Obviously I have a couple of my own solutions in this area : GeekWeaver and bootdown. But if there are any emerging standards / conventions planned, then I’m up for supporting them. Both GeekWeaver and BootDown are useful, but they’re both rather old-skool command-line Python scripts which don’t necessarily fit into the workflow of many people in 2015.
Update : Dave replied :
It is what it is.
I have no plans at this time to do anything with it.
I might swing back around to this, or not.
MyWord is MIT Licensed, so if you really want it, you can do it.
OK. So right now, I’ll probably just do a flat export of text written in OPML and a quick JSON wrapper. And then think further. As this ties into questions about GeekWeaver, the future of some of my Python code base (as opposed to moving more into the browser)
Dave also points to his code :
Here’s the code I added to Fargo to generate the myword.io JSON.
https://gist.github.com/scripting/2a612b0e2cbb7077482a
As you can see, there ain’t much there! 🙂
Still. Very useful.