I had this short post from a couple of years ago, where Dave Winer showed how he could blog from an outliner in a video. Basically, he edits an OPML file that gets synced to his blog—the website also looks like an outline.

I still like this outline-based blogging approach. It is so easy to change and publish. I wanted to have this for myself too.

Jesse Grosjean (the guy who did TaskPaper) recently released an outliner app called Bike, which I often use. Since Bike is just using HTML behind the scenes, it occurred to me that if I feed that into a Ruby script, I could create something similar to what Dave has.

So, I created two scripts.

• One is called publish_from_bike.rb, which accepts a Bike file and pushes changes to my blog.

• The other is a simple AppleScript which starts the Ruby part, saves post permalinks into the Bike outline, and does some general housekeeping.

I have a small system to publish from my blogging outline. I use the following format.

• 2022-12-23

  • 10:40

    • Posts with a timestamp are a published.

  • DRAFT

    • I can create drafts by marking them as DRAFT (or IDEA).

  • SKIP

    • I can also add notes or just bullets which will be skipped with the publishing script.

Here’s a video in action.

Plans

• I want to have a proper toggles for these outline type posts, like Bike does.

• It would be nice to mark them with a custom icon, like my other post formats has.

• I may release these scripts if there is a need and they are well tested.