The World Outline is like the World Wide Web, except instead of a web of linked pages, it's an array of outlines that include other outlines. The outlines can live anywhere on the Internet. They are accessed over HTTP.#
At UserLand, the company that pioneered blogging and RSS, we started working on this in the 1990s, and shipped it in a variety of forms. The OPML format was developed as the format for outlines. It plays the analogous role that HTML plays in the web.#
The World Outline helped glue together the early podcasting communities in 2004.#
In April 2011, we began a rewrite, step by step, to modernize it and make it better, and the result is worldOutline.root, a tool that runs in the OPML Editor environment.#
This document explains how to install a World Outline server in the OPML Editor environment, and configure your desktop outliner to communicate with it.#
1. Enter the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key for Amazon on this page. #
2. Go to the OPML Editor prefs page on the server, look for the World Outline section, click on the first item to choose the editorial domain for your server. It should be a CNAME or domain name pointing the server that's running the OPML Editor and worldOutline.root.#
3. On the next prefs page enter the name of an S3 bucket you want to use to store OPML documents created by users of your server. It can be a path to a bucket if you want to store them all in a section of a bucket you use for another application.#
4. On this page enter a password for the Admin account.#
5. Your server must have port 80 open. In the OPML Editor, you can open that port on this page. Be sure any firewall software you have installed has port 80 open. #
When you press Submit, we check out the parameters. If they work, we say so.#
Important: The links in this section point to the server. So you must be viewing the page in the browser on the server in order for them to work.#
Now, finally -- the reason for all this setting-up!#
In the OPML Editor on your desktop, choose Open Roots Page from the World Outline sub-menu of the Outliner menu. Click on the Edit icon in the same row as the outline you want to edit. #
The format exchanged between the server and workstation is simple OPML and the protocol is XML-RPC, so it should be relatively easy for any OPML-based editor to hook in, as well as other servers to hook in behind the editor. But for now the only way to do this is with the OPML Editor on both ends.#