This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Lektora third pass

I have been enjoying using Lektora for reading web feeds for the last week or so.  As I've said, the metaphor they use is the idea of the newspaper.  You pick up the paper every so often, and toss it in the recycling when done.  There will be times when you want to clip specific sections for your friends and family, of course.  Lee Lefever wrote about this nicely, Missing RSS Doesn't Hurt:

I've written before that I love reading my RSS feeds, but I often get behind and end up missing a lot. The more I think about it, it's like the morning newspaper. It appears in the morning and is packed with interesting information that could benefit me during the day. But, if the newspaper goes straight to recycle bin, I experience no pain.  The big point here is that reading RSS feeds can be a positive, but missing them doesn't create a negative, for me at least. Yesterday's news is yesterday's news. I wonder if this will be the role of RSS in the future, or if it will start to move to more into the realm of the mailed letter, where it hurts to miss it?

In this light, I am seeing a couple additional features that Lektora could use, particularly when I take the "newspaper" with me on the airplane.

  • I want to be able to "clip" articles either for later reference or to send to my friends. This feature almost exists in the "copy to clipboard" or "email" buttons on each article, but they need to be enhanced. The biggest issue for me is that the copy is plain-text and formatted at 50 characters a line. Why not clip it in the same format in which it is displayed?
  • Of course, I'd also like this to interact with my blog, so I can post directly without having to open the item in its own web page and then fire off my post composer (BlogJet or MovableType directly).
  • To stay in the "newspaper" metaphor, is there a way to highlight an article for myself? If a post makes reference to other information and I am offline, I would like to clip the item as a "reminder" for myself. Today, I have to copy to clipboard and paste it into a reminder note of some sort. I can't even right-click on url's to copy because of the way Lektora extends url's for the "open under" feature.
  • It would be really cool if Lektora would let you know that a reference in one article was already available in your current "newspaper" - or in a newspaper that you have already seen. In other words, provide an easy way to find those cross-references within my newspaper. This might be a note after the url, or a specific icon next to the url that might even take me to that item. Even better, it might open a window/tab with the content of that item in it.
  • What happens if I load a newspaper while online (to get any embedded pictures), go offline, close the newspaper in some way, then re-open the same newspaper? Will the pictures be cached on my machine and redisplayed, or is this completely dependent upon the settings in my browser (Firefox)?
  • I just noticed after a week of using Lektora that there are no categories listed in the posts. In general, I would like to know what category the author assigned to a given post. This is information available in the web feed, and I would like to see it.  Given that it took me this long to notice, maybe it's not so critical?

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