I used to use Drupal's built in RSS aggregator on iaslash a lot. I used the "blog it" links to move stuff from the aggregator into the blog. But for my own news watching I've been relying on NetNewsWire Lite on the Mac and recently on SharpReader on the PC. SharpReader has a nice threaded feature that I wish NNW had. I remembered that the paid version of NNW came with a built in weblog editor and note taking tool, so I decided to have a look at it again.

I installed the demo version and tried the built in weblog editor. It uses XML RPC to post entries -- make sure you have the blogapi enabled. You can view recent entries and post new entries to your Drupal site from this desktop application. This is not new, but I haven't tried using it with a Drupal site. NNW makes dashing off quick notes on urlgrehot very easy. The one down side, however, is that the categories function doesn't seem to work with my Drupal site. I don't know why that is, but it would be nice if someone helped NNW figure that one out. (Update: According to Boris Mann, this works in 4.4RC) One thought I had was to create a different user and post entries from NNW using that user login so I could separate blog entries into those formally entered via the web site and those entered from NNW. Since you can't see and apply categories for entries you have to edit via the web site after the fact. Separating the blogs entries might make my process of post-entry categorization go a little more smoothly. I could also change my home page module to show the real blog entries in one column, and the thought wanders (from NNW) in a separate column. Not sure if this will work for me yet.

Another con is that rather than entering your title in a form, you have to wrap your title in a title tag. Not a biggie, but am sure that can be fixed. (Update: Tried using the Other/MetaWeblogAPI after the suggestion was made by Boris and Brent from Rachero -- the Internet is cool like that -- and Title field works.)

Have a look below to see how this works:

This is nice for dashing off thoughts. Adding taxonomy terms later is maybe not such a big deal, but this investigation is driven by my need to keep track of thoughts in an easy to use tool. The real thing that is drawing me to NNW is the built in Notepad, which is an outliner that lets you drag headlines over from the aggregator. This works for me as a quick and easy way to capture the headlines I want to look at later, categorized by topic. When I read the full post, I can enter a few notes in the Notepad, then perhaps blog it in the Weblog Editor when I have some fully formed ideas to write about. This might be ideal. I know it takes my link capturing away from the link log on urlgreyhot, but I'm not sure that's a bad idea.

Another thought I had was that NNW could add threading to show which entries referred to each other. SharpReader for Windows does this very nicely, which is why I use that on my work PC. [See this screenshot of SharpReaders' threading in action.] Then I could drag an entire thread to my notepad for later reading and note taking. What would be really fun is if I could then take a bunch of headlines and their attached threads and drag it into OmniGraffle to play at showing relationships between posts. This is the kind of thing Anacubis would excel at. If their tool allowed you to view a set of RSS headlines and relate them (by the reffering URLs in the entries) then you could visualize the connections and perhaps arrange them by dimensions such as date of entry. Would be an interesting experiment probably to get something approaching HP Labs' Blog Epidemic Analyzer.

Anyway, current scenario I have to work with seems serviceable for now. One thing that would be really nice, and probably not hard to achieve, is if this could be better integrated with OmniOutliner. The advantage of using OO is that it allows you to use multiple columns in your outline (sort of like a spreadsheet) and you can enter lengthy notes per outline entry. Right now I can drag headlines to OO and it creates a new item with only the URL of the headline. This is not ideal because it again forces me to take the extra step of typing. Using the NNW notepad lets me organize and arrange the recent items I want to look at, then view and read them later. But at some point, I will want to annotate what I view. Perhaps what it needs is an export function that will work with OO. Or, I suppose, I could try to automate some of this with an AppleScript -- I dread having to learn another scripting language, though. (Update: Brent from Ranchero tells me that the notepad is very well documented and suggested I make a feature request of OmniGroup for the drag and drop functionality. I'm going to play at it a bit more before I do, but I think that's a great idea.)

Upon writing and thinking about this, I think a well-integrated NNW and OO environment would be a wonderful way to do personal information management. I don't see why this can't work better for me than a wiki. Well, except that wikis still have the advantage of being wickedly flexible and easy to use if you give it enough time. OK. I will have to ruminate on this for a while.

Later that day...

Upon further investigation I find that the notepad is actually an OPML file saved in ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Notepad/Notepad.opml. When you
import the OPML file into OmniOutliner, it gives you a multi-column formmated outline, retaining the folders (main outline branches) you created in NNW. Very cool. There are separate fields for the feed title, site URL, RSS item URL, RSS item description, rss item title, and notes. Not sure how to enter notes in NNW, though. The output looks like this:

This is really excellent. XML makes integration with OO a no-brain activity. Just import and go. Synchronization would be hard if you modified the OO file, though. What would be really excellent is if you could modify the OPML file via OO and the changes got reflected live in NNW. Also nice would be the ability to create multiple notepad (OPML) files in NNW. All in all I'm really pleased with what you can do without much effort.

[P.S. this entry was created in NNW, and post-categorized and post-edited in Drupal.]