There might be two or three people who can use this tool. I'm one of them, that's why I developed it. :-)
Prerequisites
- The OPML Editor. It should work fine with either the Mac or Windows version.
- An Amazon Web Services account. It may look like something only a geek can do, but it's actually easy to sign up and use. If you use Firefox you may want to get the S3Fox plugin, very useful. It works more or less like an FTP server.
How to install
- Download twitterOutliner.root. Save it into the Guest Databases/apps/Tools sub-folder of the OPML folder.
- Quit the OPML Editor if it's running. Relaunch.
- Choose Open prefs table from the TwitterOutliner sub-menu of the Tools table.
- Jump to user.s3 and enter AWSAccessKeyId and SecretAccessKey as provided by the Amazon site. Screen shot.
- This is the tricky part (but it's not really that tricky). There are just 3 things you have to set up in this table, the rest are optional, or taken care of for you by the app. They are: s3pathArchive, s3pathOpml and s3pathRss and they are very much related. They are the paths in S3 for your archive, the OPML file and the RSS file. They are completely up to you.
Suppose you have a top-level bucket on S3 called myTwits. Then you could make the path to your archive be: /myTwits/archive/ and the path to your OPML could be /myTwits/mancuso.opml and to your RSS /myTwits/mancuso.xml. Or whatever you like.
The URL to your files will be automatically stored in opmlUrl and rssUrl in the prefs sub-table.
How to use
When you want to twit something using the outliner:
- Choose Open Outline from the TwitterOutliner sub-menu of the Tools menu. Screen shot.
- Type something pithy into the first headline. (If there's already something in the outline, press Return to create a new empty headline.)
- If you want to check the character count, click the Count button. If you want to link to something from the twit, right click on the wedge to the left of the headline and choose Add Link, enter the URL and click OK.
- When you're ready to post the tweet, click the Twit-It button.
- Then save the outline by clicking the Save button. This uploads the OPML file and stores it in the archive folder on S3.
- To generate the RSS click the Build RSS button. This uploads the RSS file and stores it in the archive folder on S3.
