activeRenderer News

Monday, February 2, 2004

The new URL for activeRenderer is http://www.activerenderer.com/. The RSS feed is now found at http://www.activerenderer.com/rss.xml.

This is the last update at this URL.

2:40:25 PM

activeRenderer version 2.0 released

If you are currently using the 1.x version, you should download the new version from http://download.activerenderer.com/. activeRenderer 2.0 comes with a full load of new features:

The re-styled browser page displays regular outlines, outlined RSS feeds and even an outlined view of Radio's news aggregator. Take a look at http://demo.activerenderer.com/ Check out the 'world' and 'search' tabs in the selector for tons of RSS news feeds to explore. The browser page is now accessible through the desktop web site's top menu bar: there is a Browser option between the Home and News links.
activeRenderer comes with a complete set of APIs, both RESTful and XML-RPC. I hope developers will create extension modules in different programming languages (Perl, Python, PHP and Java come to mind) so that it becomes easy to publish outlines from non Radio Userland systems, such as Movable Type for instance.
activeRenderer now delivers enhanced RSS rendering, translating more RSS tags into the published outlines, even including ENT 1.0 topics, linked to the W4 k-collector service. You can now include outlined RSS feeds in your Web pages with the new rssBox macro. Check out the rssBox demo and tutorial.
It is now possible to publish outlined documents to public sites hosted on different servers, by using Radio categories. More information in the updated FAQ. This feature has been requested by several power users for quite a while, and I needed it in a hurry to update the new activeRenderer site :-)

The HTML generated by activeRenderer is now cleaner and shorter output, thanks to a new CSS based, table-less rendering technique. There is now a CSS powered preview mode for collapsed outline nodes, which can be turned on and off, together with wedge hiding, using a new page widget generated by the activeRendererFunctions Usertalk macro.

I've overhauled the activeRenderer web site at http://www.activerenderer.com/, upgrading the activeRenderer presentation and transclusion pages. I intend to post regularly to the activeRenderer RSS feed, providing more detailed information for some of activeRenderer's newer features, and upcoming new functions.

In addition, you may subscribe to 2 Yahoo based mailing lists:

ar-announce - subscribe to ar-announce-subscribe at yahoogroups.com - for updates / new features / bug correction announcements.
ar-support - subscribe to ar-support-subscribe at yahoogroups.com - contribute to ar-support at yahoogroups.com - to discuss activeRenderer use and solve installation / publishing issues.

A third, moderated, mailing list, ar-devel, is available for developers interested in creating activeRenderer API based modules, or expanding activeRenderer Usertalk functions.

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Experimenting with topics

This is a test post about activeRenderer, webOutliner and k-collector to get a feel of how topics work on the local side. I'm also working on Topic Exchange integration these days.

Steady publication will resume in a while at other URLs. Stay tuned.

8:27:13 AM - See Also: k-collector | Topic Exchange | WebOutliner

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Gallery: Katy and Bruce Loebrich

Katy and Bruce's weblog makes use of activeRenderer both for outlining blog dates and post titles, and for displaying an 'active' blogroll in the right sidebar.

Bruce's activeRoll displays some cleverly crafted entries. The first one has a regular HTML link, plus a link to its RSS version around a tiny xml logo.

The second one is even more complex: The outline node in the original OPML version has a link attached to Katy's blogroll - clicking the up arrow wedge will expand Katy's blogroll into the activeRoll, plus a regular HTML link to the same OPML blogroll around 'Katy', a link to Katy's weblog page around 'Link', and a link around the RSS version of Katy's weblog around RSS.

6:26:56 PM

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Gallery: David Soul

David shows another fine example of activeRenderer's 'extreme' or advanced weblog outline style.

Posts for the latest day are fully expanded, whereas only post titles are listed for the previous days. Expanding any of the collapsed titles reveals the complete post.

5:51:01 PM

Monday, March 10, 2003

Is This Site Misbehaving ?

If the pages on the activeRenderer site seem to behave a little oddly these days, don't panic, your copy of activeRenderer is Ok, I've just been slightly over optimistic with the next 1.5 version :-)

Everything should be back in Ordnung by tomorrow night.

10:23:55 PM

Friday, March 7, 2003

Gallery: David Buchan

David Buchan publishes a directory of knowledge management Web resources, with the same crisp layout than in his thought?horizon weblog.

The main menu for his weblog is an activeRoll. Links are symbolized by 'page' wedges instead of regular HTML hypertext, since David has the #flDisplayHTMLWedge directive set to true in the #prefs.txt preferences file that applies to his directory (the one located in his outlines folder).

10:25:20 PM

Thursday, March 6, 2003

activeRenderer's Rendering Service

With version 1.4 of activeRenderer, its rendering engine becomes reachable over HTTP, by sending a GET request to either 127.0.0.1:5335/activeRenderer/render - the local URL if you have both Radio Userland and activeRenderer installed - or services.activerenderer.com/activerenderer/render - the new public URL for the activeRenderer web service.

In both case, you need to add a ? after the web address, and specify at least 2 parameters.

src is the local or remote URL of the source OPML outline or RSS feed
action is the operation you want to perform. The only legal value currently is render.

First example: http://services.activerenderer.com/activeRenderer/render/?src=http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml&action=render

Second example: http://127.0.0.1:5335/activeRenderer/render/?src=http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/gems/aR/activeRenderer.opml&action=render - works only if you have Radio and activeRenderer installed.

There are a bunch of parameters one may specify to modify the way outlines are rendered with activeRendererer. I guess I'll have to come up with a tutorial VIII in a not too distant future. In the meantime, you may try several by clicking settings in the outline browser.

I'm planning to add XML-RPC and SOAP support to the activeRenderer service in a coming update version.

8:34:13 PM

activeRoll

February 2004
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29
Dec Mar