Grazr

Grazr is a product/service that lets you make an OPML file operational — which may not tell you very much. OPML stands for outline processor markup language, and it’s essentially a dialect of XML that, when opened in a sympathetic outliner program, displays your outline with collapse and expand functionality.

One of the main things it’s used for currently is the export and exchange of your RSS subscriptions. Feed readers “eat” (or should) OPML files, so I could bundle up all of my feed subscriptions and ship them to Steve or Connie or you, and you could plug them into your reader and thereafter know everything that I know.

Grazr, thanks to the magic of Javascript, allows you to place a window on a web page in your site and have the OPML file of your choice appear in that window. I’ve created a couple of test Grazr windows so you can see what I’m on about. The first is simply a plain outline file, to show you the potential for using OPML etc. with text: if you’ve got a hierarchical structure you can lay it out this way and let people go through it branch by branch, item by item. (A better illustration of this is the Dewey Decimal OPML file that someone has put into Grazr: go to the Grazr home page and find the link — unbookmarkable — in the Grazr window there.)

The second file is a mockup of some feeds of mine. What’s really rather cool about this is that if you pursue the feeds, you’ll get the latest items and then the actual items themselves, because Grazr can operate as a feed reader.

What I suggest is that when Steve Matthews is finished with his project of gathering all the Canadian law feeds we put them on a Grazr window in Slaw (along with the downloadable OPML file) so that folks can benefit from collective efforts to keep the thing up-to-date. What say?