Scripting News: Sunday, October 10, 2021
Today is the 27th anniversary of this blog. To celebrate, I’m opening up Drummer to the world. I hope you love it as much as I do. ❤️
Drummer is, as you would imagine a really interesting project. A quite different approach to blogging.
I’ve been lightly beta testing Drummer since 4th September. This is my Drummer blog: John’s tambourine.
I would not like to presume I can understand Drummer well enough to give anything like a complete description. These are some of the features that have interested me so far.
- Drummer is an outliner, like Dave’s Little Outliner 2 and the Fargo system. You could use it for outlining in all sorts of ways.
- Drummer can created a blog from an outline at post at the push of a button.
- Drummer is a scripting system in an outliner.
Each of these elements give you a lot to think about. It has made me think about how I blog, and how I’d like to blog. It is an opinionated system. Coming from one of the internet elders you would expect no less.
If you are interested in blogging, microblogging and the like I’d recommend you have a look at Drummer. Certainly read: About Drummer
@johnjohnston I tried it but didn’t like it. I love the idea; it’s the execution that doesn’t work for me.
@johnjohnston @canion I’ve never really got the point of outliners. Most of the things we write, blog posts etc, are too straightforward and short to need one. Also, OPML just seems too complex for most purposes — at least most of my purposes.
@artkavanagh @canion I’m not sold on outliners for blogging, but found it interesting. If I was fluid in using them I can see how they could help longer posts. The scripting element is fascinating. I could write a script to pull in a few different things, pinboard links for example, these could then become the basis for a list of links post. My favourite way of blogging is still TextMate, but it doesn’t support the post kinds stuff I’ve been using recently.
@johnjohnston @canion I can see how the scripting could be useful, as you describe.
@artkavanagh @johnjohnston Yeah, the benefits of using an outliner to create one blog post are unclear, but with Drummer, your entire blog is one big outline. It’s not a loose folder of markdown files, or a database of html, but one single text/OPML outline. That’s pretty cool. The benefit of using OPML is both that it’s well-documented and it emphasizes interop, which opens all sorts of neat possibilities (transclusion, etc).
@johnjohnston my preferred way of blogging is to write first and add links and images later.
@khurtwilliams I might have to try this, so far I’ve been adding them inline while writing. It works, but it’s distracting from my train of thought sometimes.
@khurtwilliams me too, in theory, practise is often messier.
@pimoore it helps that I write in a Markdown text editor using reference linking. When I am done writing I define the link labels.
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@jack @johnjohnston That all makes perfect sense, thanks. I still think Drummer/outlining is probably not for me.
@khurtwilliams I’m assuming that works with Micro.blog?
@pimoore yes. It does.
@jack glad to see you trying Drummer! I have also added you to the Old School Bloggers river of news at oldschooldrummers.andysylvester.com
@AndySylvester Thanks for adding me! Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to giving it a go. Smooth so far.
@johnjohnston sounds interesting am a little confused at the stools for though zero lock in but uses Twitter to login ? Will download today and check out.
@adamprocter Dave wrote an answer to your question.
@johnjohnston makes some sense to me. And I have a Twitter log in or 3 so I’ll have a play anyway