scripting
Comments on tweets.opml
New feature today -- tweets.opml.
Preliminary docs are in the Change Notes for today.
Did it work? Yes, straightaway! Grabbed tweets back till May. The way it adds the url attribute is powerful. interestingly l was just thinking of a similar idea, pulling from Twitter for expansion, thinking etc and was wondering about likes. I couldn’t see a Twitter verb for getting my likes, would that be on the cards?
@troutcolor -- I'm glad it worked -- and glad you noticed how it deals with links. I forgot to include that in the change notes.
Keep the ideas coming. This was actually pretty hard to get working, I'm mostly basking in the glory that it worked for one user. Let's see what the others say. :smile:
tweets.opml seems to be working for me. I opened the outline and it pulled in my past tweets. I closed tweets.ompl, went to Twitter.com and made a new tweet. I opened tweets.opml and waited a few seconds, and didn't see my new tweet show up (I just reread the Docs and understand it would have needed 5 minutes.) I reloaded the page and the tweet came through.
I have also used my new Tweet as a urlTweet for a new post in my blog. Tomorrow I will write the essay I noted in my tweet and the circle will be complete.
@mistersugar -- maybe it should check immediately when you re-open tweets.opml.
thanks for the thorough testing and report. this really helps.
I just tried entering a thread for the cluelessnewbie account, and Drummer loaded the first tweet but not any of the others in the thread. I'll check into this in the morning. If you want something to try out, this is a good thing to try to see if it's reproducible on your setup.
https://twitter.com/cluelessnewbie/status/1439768039457710080
I entered a thread for my Twitter account, and all of the thread items came into Drummer as expected an in hierarchy. Nice!
However, the final tweet in my thread ended with a link. Drummer has that tweet and displays the link icon as expected, but the text of the tweet is truncated and does not include the link.
What I tweeted: See my #turtles stream at https://smol.zuiker.com/categories/turtles/
What Drummer shows: See my #turtles stream at
Tried it and it works. 😄 And like @mistersugar, I also find it a bit confusing that URLs aren't shown in the text of the tweet, and also that images look exactly the same as a link (not shown, no URL shown, but open when the headline is clicked).
I've tried the new tweet outline feature in the web-based Drummer, so far so good. I like the clue, which I think was in the Change Notes, about integrating this feature with the Bookmark outline and with the text-on-rails toolkit of outlining in general. This seems like it will open up new writing-organizing-revising work habits that promise to help explode the limitations of timeline-only composing schemes and MS Word-type composing schemes.
thanks to -- @troutcolor, @mistersugar, @papascott, @akaKenSmith -- for verifying that the new feature works.
this is a crucial part of development, getting verification in a timely fashion, while the subject of the testing is still fresh in the developer's mind. later it's much harder to find problems. this means i can build on these features with a certain amount of confidence that i'm building on a solid foundation.
about the feedback -- basically comes down to how to deal with links and images, although there are other kinds of attachments.
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About links in the text, i find the links a distraction in the outliner, that's why I moved them into the attributes. I have a specific use model in mind, that's why I included the use-case section up front. I'm going to think about other ways of dealing with links, if you have ideas, speak up.
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Images are even more of a problem in the outline, who knows how big the image is.
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I also have to do some more testing with threads, I did see it fail.
problem with threads found, fixed
I found the problem with threads.
It only happens when tweets.opml is NOT the active tab.
it would miss threaded items. other items were fine.
i fixed this problem, it's released in web Drummer, not E/D yet.
another bug
at the same time, i saw but was not able to reproduce a weird problem. after a scan the title of the tab containing tweets.opml will change to Untitled. I have not been able to catch the software actually doing it, and therefore can't yet reproduce.
Roam handles images in the outliner fairly well.
It seems to pick a reasonable default size but they are resizable (via a grab handle in the bottom right). They use markdown syntax internally as you can see where I hit the edit button on one of them). I also like that I can tag images directly in the outline. This was me collecting some of my favourite Kandinsky's in anticipation of being able to script a gallery based on tags.
Thanks @mmower -- you can put images in drummer outlines, and we could add css to it easily.
I'll do a demo of it, and fix any glitches in that. I find images in outlines disturbing, personally. But if you like doing it, i'll support it.
Let's see what we can do...
@mmower -- it looks like the blocks are wholly images, that the images are not "inline." Is that just the way you're using it or is that how Roam works?
Next change in tweets.opml --
That's how I'm now handling tweets with links.
Tweets with more than one link are complete messes.
Getting two product like Twitter and Drummer that were not designed to work together, to work together is an art, and the edge cases are going to be rough, no avoiding it. I can only make changes to one side of the connection. And I'm very limited in what I can do in Drummer, because I'm trying to keep it pretty stable.
@mmower -- it looks like the blocks are wholly images, that the images are not "inline." Is that just the way you're using it or is that how Roam works?
If I am understanding your question correctly the block is the markdown image tag. However, Roam distinguishes between 'edit' mode and 'render' mode. In render mode, the block displays the corresponding image with resizing controls.
When you drag an image into Roam it gets stored in Firebase and automatically referenced from there.
If that's not answering your question can you try again, please?
@mmower -- let me try again, it's hard to describe in words.
Could you create a blog in Roam with text and an image?
Like --
Mary had a little [lamb](lamb.png) whose fleece was white as snow.
Is that how you do it?
I don't even know if their blocks can have attributes.
Okay, I think I understand what you are getting at:
The issue is knowing where lamb.png is in URL terms when you write the markup. You can search for blocks as you are typing but I couldn't find any of my images that way with a cursory attempt so you are probably dragging an image into Roam which creates a new child block. You can move that markup wherever you like, i.e. inline into another block, but it's not a very natural way to operate and you while you can resize the image within the block you do not, as far as I know, have any flow control so it looks like it looks.
See attached:
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@scripting, I also spotted that the web version of the program had switched the tab title of the tweets outline to 'Untitled' and I opened and closed a bunch of times trying to spot a pattern so as to be able to write a decent bug report and never spotted anything persuasively clear to report.
The only thing I can say, possibly a false clue, is that shortly before I noticed the problem I was trying to figure out from the docs and from trying things live on the screen whether an outline could appear twice in the bookmarks menu, once tagged to a particular location and once not tagged in that way.
But I can't get that to make the error happen again either.
@akaKenSmith -- thanks for trying -- I spent much yesterday trying to figure out what causes that to happen. I have been able to reproduce it, but I have no idea what about what I was doing caused it to happen.
I do have a basic theory about what's going on, and I am going to try to implement a fix that way. But usually in my experience this is not a good way to deal with a software problem. However in medicine they do stuff like this all the time.
In other words, no point trying to figure out cause-and-effect. But It totally appreciate the effort, and the fact that you understand what's needed in tracking down software problems.
@akaKenSmith -- the Untitled problem is fixed. There's a lengthy worknote about what the problem actually turned out to be, after taking a lot of wrong turns in debugging.
@mmower -- if you want an idea how images work in drummer, here's a blog post.
http://scripting.com/2021/09/21/181702.html?title=diegoRivera
It's done with attributes, the image itself doesn't appear in the outline, only in the rendering.
As a writer, that's the way I like it.
I imagine you could use an outliner to organize a set of images. I don't do that myself, but I could imagine it.
For the most part, I use the outliner as a communication tool, I tend to communicate through the rendering.
However I always have wanted to do the communicating in the outliner.
That's the origin of Instant Outlines.
BTW, a friend just posted a screen shot of an outliner with an image in it.
https://twitter.com/vincode_io/status/1440187054642503684/photo/1
I understand, I guess that's one of the great things about Outliners — they support a range of modalities.
I don't currently have a workflow for publishing from Roam (well, copy & paste) which is a pain as I am 14,000 words into a book that I am going to complete there. It's just too good of an authoring environment for me not to.
Lots of room for improvement.
@mmower -- two comments.
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If you see opportunities to make Drummer a better writing environment for you, feel free to comment.
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If Roam supported OPML you could use each product for its relative strengths.
You're absolutely right about OPML support in Roam. I'm not sure if it's been requested before. That said I'm not hopeful about the Roam team. I haven't a clue what makes them tick.
It's possible, given they support EDN exports, that I could write some kind of OPML transform. That said I'm already drowning in stuff todo.
@mmower — I’ve discussed it publicly with their CEO on Twitter.
I don’t see this market developing unless there’s lots of interop.
Trying to understand tTwitter and E/D tweets.opml. From the change notes : “The use case: You're out and about, and get an idea that belongs on the to-do list for your latest project. Open Twitter, post a note.”
Does that mean post a Tweet, post a DM to yourself, or something else?
If a Tweet, isn’t it public and therefore broadcast to the world in addition to “the note will already be in a Drummer outline, ready for you to act on it”.
And if it is a DM to yourself, are DM’s posted to tweets.opml? Thnx for clarifying.
