Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

As a writer, I've come home!

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:12/8/1998; 7:28:51 AM
Topic:Technography
Msg #:962 (In response to 960)
Prev/Next:961 / 963

>>Will the partition of Frontier into "workstation" and "server" parts address this?

Yes, that's the goal. Simplicity for writers, list-makers and organizers (technographers). Instead of outputting to paper, you output to a website. Once you can assume HTTP and XML behind the scenes in an outliner you can get to a very interesting place.

BTW, key point, the Frontier 6 outliner has wrapping headlines of indefinite length. The 255 character limit is gone. When you type past the right edge of the window it wraps around. I'm using this outliner now, and I recognize it, it feels like the outliner in MORE, with display glitches, of course. (It's pre-alpha software.)

I've come home

As a writer, I've come home! Except this time home is wired up to the Internet and the web. It's pretty trippy. If you want an idea of what my outliner-based writing looks like these days, check out this page:

http://developers.userland.com/configuration/discuss

When I re-read it a few hours after writing it I realized I had been in a zone, just purely writing, not struggling with the tool. That was the MORE effect.

I also, (surprisingly) get that fluid feeling typing into the web browser on the Discussion Group. A fluidity that works.

Here's the amazing thing, I'm living the vision that Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison are promoting. I'm almost at the point where I can take my laptop away from the LAN and continue writing for the web, and *only* use a web browser and a text editor, and have a great web presence, that's searchable, where it's easy to find the new stuff, and easy to find what was said 10 months ago, and where stuff is threaded into an hiearchy that can be escaped, and no one has to worry about where to store stuff.

It takes all that, I'm convinced, to really pull off the benefit of thin-client writing and groupwork, but once you get there it's thrilling.

Dave

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