Mike, thanks for picking up the ball with the OPML version of Scripting
News, and thanks for the suggestions, they come at a good time, when I can
think about them, and possibly implement them as the new stuff we're working
on develops and then deploys. Permalinks is now one of the things I'm
thinking about. I have to do it in a way that scales, and that makes sense
for the authors.

Re: "The sample file you produce has no sub-items" -- Today [1] I've made a
point to use hierarchy in Scripting News, so you now have a good sample file
that shows how that works (there are others in the archive folder, this is
not a new art). Some days I use structure, other days, esp ones where
there's lots of news, it's flat. Doc Searls [2] appears to use structure
every day. There's no static OPML version of his home page yet.

Re the complaints and problems -- it's a matter of having very few spare
cycles for programming these days. This is what I've been able to accomplish
so far. I've written at length over a couple of years on the problems of RSS
modeling weblog content. I think that if we do a bootstrap [3] here, we may
get to a better place in a reasonable period of time.

BTW, I've gotten a few emails from other engineers working in similar areas.
Thank you. Right now my focus is on outlines and directories, but I am also
interested in distributed prefs [4], and other topics, again, in the small
amount of time I have while doing other things.

Also, I'm not going to respond to orders or challenges to my ethics on this
list. Assume that when someone does this I would like to defend myself, but
am trusting the people on this list to figure that out for themselves.

Thanks again, and let's do some interesting bootstraps.

Dave

[1] http://www.scripting.com/xml/outlineArchive/2001/09/19.xml
[2] http://doc.weblogs.com/
[3] http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/09/19#bootstrapping
[4] http://www.drop.org/node.php?id=531