Introducing iJot

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Introducing iJot

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Next generation Web publishing

Wikis and weblogs make publishing on the Web a snap these days. Or do they ? Weblogs are somewhat constrained by their native chronological journal form, and most wikis could be a lot easier to set-up and update.

What if your content is more complex and structured than a few blog entries ? What if you want to provide richer presentation and a more advanced reading interface ?

Enter iJot:

write your notes directly into your web browser

organize them using the built-in outliner

save & publish them, all at once.

That's it - you've published a web site, complete with weblog and updates feeds.

Publishing outlines

Outlines are structured documents, primarily texts, organized in a tree-like hierarchy of paragraphs.

Their most distinctive advantage over plain text is the small wedge - usually a triangular symbol - that appears at the left of most paragraphs (or nodes) : clicking it reveals (expands) or hides (collapses) the underlying content of the paragraph.

With iJot, bringing the cursor over a collapsed wedge provides a sneak preview of the underlying hidden content, making browsing through documents a faster experience: no need to click if you do not plan on exploring that topic further.

Thanks to outline inclusion, an interesting property pioneered - like most outliner features - by the amazing Dave Winer, the embedded content does not need to reside in the same document as the containing paragraph.

Inclusion further provides the reader with an enriched kind of hypertext link: the linked content is embedded into the current document, preserving its surrounding context.

Once retrieved, the linked content behaves like regular outline nodes, and can be hidden or revealed, in part of as a whole, at the reader's convenience.

Adapting this property to the web browser, we extended it to link to non textual content, such as digital pictures, sound bites or movies, as well as non natively outlined texts, such as RSS news feeds.

Learn more about outline inclusion by clicking the up-arrow wedge at the left of this paragraph.

Outlining gives the author a way of providing readers with several layers of relevance in the same document: the initial display usually gives a synthetic view, drilling down by 'expanding' or 'including' relevant paragraphs progressively reveals more detailed information.

An outliner in your browser

To create outlines, the best tool is an outliner: a text editor that allows you to control the level of detail that's visible, and allows you to reorganize text according to its structure. Outliners as desktop applications have been around for quite a while.

I remember discovering with wonder the outliner built into what I think was an early version of Emacs, on a Symbolics Lisp Machine, in early 1981. By that time, Dave Winer probably had already released his first desktop outliner, Visitext.

Software history buffs should both visit outliners.com and read Ted Goranson's excellent outliner series.

iJot is the demo service for webOutliner, a new breed of outliner that lives right into your web browser page, thanks to all kinds of not so recent programming techniques now fashionably designated AJAX.

webOutliner development started in Fall 2002 though, way before AJAX became a buzz word.

So how does publication work ?

iJot is about creating whole Web sites out of outlines.

Each page on your iJot site, as well as each day in its attached weblog, is an outline, which you create and edit through iJot's authoring interface.

Thus each page has a DHTML version for regular Web browsing - http://docs.ijot.net/Home/ for this one, and an OPML version for editing and inclusion - http://docs.ijot.net/Home/Home.opml in this case.

The former is automatically created out of the latter by a process called rendering. The rendered DHTML code is then inserted in a template to form the final published version.

At this time, you cannot modify publishing templates. This feature will soon be available.

Enough said... The next step is to play with the iJot demonstration site. When you're ready to jump in, create your own site.

Modify its home page.

Create additional pages.

Add weblog entries.

Update the bookmarks navigation widget.

We'd like to think you'll find it easy. Try following these steps.

At all times, keep your cool. Remember iJot is still in development. Before it drives you crazy, try joining the ijot-support group/mailing list to hopefully get answers or report bugs.

The support group has its own RSS feed.

So has the iJot Demo Weblog, which reports development progress.

There is even a weblog to post documentation updates.

opml 1.0

last modified:
11/19/07 15:50:55 EST.

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