Drummer FAQs

How to backup your files
  It's easy to back up all your work in Drummer. And it's really fast and doesn't take up a lot of disk space.
  This is how you do it...
    Choose Download my files from the Tools menu.
  The download takes a few seconds.
  When you open the archive you'll see two folders one for public files and the other for your private files.
  Do it often. Better safe than sorry.
Bookmarks in Drummer are important
  I know Bookmarks seem like a ho-hum feature, but in Drummer they are amazing.
  I couldn't get any work done in Drummer without bookmarks.
  Why? Drummer's file system is far away in the cloud. There's no hierarchy, it's a flat space, and that's deliberate, because Drummer has the Bookmarks menu which is way better than a hierarchic file system. Because the outliner is far more flexible and fluid than a hierarchic file system. If outlines are text on rails, then Bookmarks are files on rails.
  I am doing a number of different projects in Drummer. Each one gets a sub-menu in my Bookmarks menu. I have one for DocServer, where the files are the source outlines for the DocServer collection. I have one for all the topics of Drummer docs. There's a sub-menu for Scripting News. I hope to have sub-menus for development projects, once I get a chance to do serious dev work in Drummer.
  I started a Bookmarks sub-menu today for the work I'm doing to bring opml.org up to date, and unbreak it. It's like all of my long-term tech projects, suffering from lack of focus, but no lack of experimentation! I've been going through them projects one by one, and now it's opml.org's turn. (See notes below.)
  With bookmarks, I have hierarchy to work with, in a much more congenial form -- using the outliner. A file system, esp one in the cloud , is cumbersome to work with, but the Bookmarks menu is just an outline, and I know how to organize with outlines. That's what the outliner is for.
  I use the tabs to keep the files I always need to have open -- my blog, my worknotes outline, change notes for Drummer -- easily accessible. And then a couple of tabs for the project I'm focused on at the moment. Everything else is almost as easy for me to access in the Bookmarks menu.
  Groom it as if it were your personal outline garden. It's a key to being a power Drummer user.
  So think in terms of Bookmarks. They are power-expanders.
  PS: Bookmarks point into the outline, at the place where the bar cursor was when you made the bookmark. If you move the item, the bookmark still works, because moving items in an outline is very important.
Searching Drummer docs
  As of December 2021 we have a new way to search all the Drummer docs, change notes, and DocServer verb pages.
  It's really useful when you can't find the thing you're looking for.
  Here for example is a search of the Drummer docs for a term we use a lot.
Copy/paste and outlines
  Try not to copy/paste headlines you think might get bookmarked.
  This is a general note for all people who create outlines that might be shared with others.
  The bookmarks key off the created attribute for the headline.
  When you're writing in Drummer, it takes care of adding the created atts automatically.
  Unless you create two headlines in the same second, they will all have different created atts.
  But if you were to copy a headline and paste it, that would create two headlines with the same created att.
  If someone bookmarks one of those headlines, they might not get back to it when they use the bookmark.
The support forum
  We have a support forum for Drummer users. It's part of GitHub. We use it because it's familiar, a good system for communication about software, but it's not perfect.
  The basic rule of the support forum is that it's just for support. It's there for people who have questions about how the software works, or if they think there's a bug, to help us fix it. It's the interface between developers and users. Like the interface between a driver and a mechanic, or a patient and a doctor. We're here to make it work for you. And you're helping us make it work better for future people who use the software.
  Emphatically, it's not a social network, it's not a place for you to advertise or become an influencer. It's really pragmatic.
  Following up a support request. If I help you get a problem solved, please...
    Let me know if it worked. I'm going to keep thinking it might be a problem, esp for others, until I hear back from you that it cured your problem. I'm not just helping you to help you, it's to help others too.
    Pay it back. If I helped you solve the problem, then when someone else pops up with the same problem, help them. It's how we build a community here. Otherwise it just burns itself out.
Remember to look for errors in JavaScript console
  When reporting a problem it's important to look in the JavaScript console to see if there was a program error that might have been the source of the problem.
    In Chrome on the desktop, the command is in the Developer sub-menu of the View menu. From there, click on Console.
    In Electric Drummer, look in the Mac menubar, Window menu.
  Errors usually appear in red, but sometimes in black if they are code I put in the app to help diagnose problems. Usually it's pretty obvious when an error is being reported.
Twitter account
  There is a Twitter account for Drummer.
  Not much going on there yet.
Why we use Twitter identity
  We use Twitter for identity because they have a nice API that scales, and they have kept it open for this kind of use for many years. In all that time, they didn't change their mind because of new management, didn't deprecate anything, it just keeps running reliably.
  Are you sharing some information with Twitter? Yes, a little, but not as much as you might think. They certainly never see your outlines. They don't know how many times you log in, that information doesn't pass through to them.
  We don't keep any information on that ourselves. I don't care. I'm not in any business at all, and certainly not in the business of knowing how much you do whatever you do.
  They don't know your location, btw -- if they know a location, it's the location of the server, which is at Digital Ocean. I'm not even sure where they keep their servers. That information it seems to me is of no value.
  If you don't want them to know anything about you -- just create a fake account for this purpose.
  Also I want to build features around Twitter. It's a fact of life. It's there. It ain't going anywhere. If I chose not to use it for identity it wouldn't hurt them one bit. I'd have to write an identity server myself and I already have plenty of things to do trying to keep Drummer users happy.
The Drummer blog
  There is a Drummer blog, which is a web version of the Change Notes outline, which you can open in Drummer with the command in the Docs menu. When there's a new feature, or a bug fix, or something else every Drummer user should know, it will appear in the outline and on the blog.
  It has an RSS feed, of course, and you can subscribe to it in your favorite reader.
Technography
  Anton did a bit of technography on a Zoom call the other day.
  Someone has an outline open during a meeting, and while other people talk, takes notes, which are visible to everyone in the meeting.
  We did this in the 80s at Living Videotext, back when meetings were held in conference rooms.
  I've written about technography a few times on my blog.
  There was a session on it, at BloggerCon IV.
  Anton, this is something you could run with, I'm sure you'd be great at it.
  I bet this is something our resident English professor, Ken Smith, might have some ideas about.
  Expect this thread to go somewhere, because visual outlines in group settings are real, they work, even for people who don't use outliners.
Return from Dark mode
  Frequently asked question about Dark Mode.
  How to turn back to light mode?
  Reload.
  This even works in Electric Drummer.
  All the way at the top of the screen, there's a menu Window menu, with a Reload command.
  It has the same effect.
  BTW, for CSS designers, you can do your own style sheet for Drummer, and if it's good, I hope you share it. To make it easy to apply your stylesheet, there's a scripting verb that installs your style sheet.
Web clips & the bookmarklet
  A bookmarklet for Drummer that makes it easy to remember a web page in your Notes outline.
  Here's how it works:
    Install the bookmarklet by dragging the text below into your browser's chrome.
      <a href="javascript: (function () { function encode (s) { s = s.toString (); s = s.replace (new RegExp (" %",="" "g"),="" "="" percent");="" return="" (encodeuricomponent="" (s));="" }="" var="" url="http://drummer.scripting.com/?" ;="" what="what=bookmarklet" link="&link=" +="" encode="" (location.href);="" title="&title=" (document.title);="" desc="&description=" (document.getselection="" ());="" window.open="" (url="" desc);="" })="" ();="">Drummer
    When you come across a page you want to remember, click the bookmarklet in your browser's chrome.
    Drummer will open with your Notes outline active, and a new calendar entry added with a link to the page your were on in the browser when you clicked the bookmarklet.
    Any text you selected in the page will be inserted under the link headline.
  From there you can open the page by double-clicking on the headline, or you can copy the headline and paste it into another outline.
  Think of it as a way to save a link to something on the web without leaving a tab open in the browser.
Getting OPML from PagePark-displayed outlines
  The docs for Drummer are outlines that are served by PagePark, my web server, which knows a fair amount about OPML files.
  When it displays an OPML file, it makes it look pretty and readable, but sometimes you want to get the OPML source code behind the pretty display. This is how you do it.
  For example, if you visit the states.opml file you'll actually see HTML.
    http://opml.org/examples/states.opml
  If you want the OPML source behind the HTML, add ?format=opml at the end of the URL.
    http://opml.org/examples/states.opml?format=opml
  If you forget how to do it, click on the orange XML icon in the upper right corner of the page.
opml.org
  As part of the process of shipping Drummer, I did a restoration of the opml.org website.
  It goes back to the early 2000s and over the years a bunch of things had broken, and the site had become fairly disorganized.
  Now if you go to the home page, you should get to a current site, with a spec, examples, and links to developer resources for OPML, and hopefully it will get better over time.
  The site is of course edited with Drummer. ;-)
Drummer image browser
  The Image browser command in the Tools menu brings up a window with all the images that have appeared in the right margin of Scripting News since May 2017.
  They're all less than 200 pixels wide. Transparent background.
  Scroll through the list. When you see an image you want to use, click it. A dialog appears with the URL of the image.
  You can set the image attribute of a blog post with that URL and it'll show up in the right margin when the blog is published.
  The images add a little color and whimsy (perhaps) to an otherwise black and white stream of prose.
  Anton Zuiker suggested this as a feature, and I needed a palate cleanser before returning to fixing Drummer bugs.
  Screen shot.
How to set up a Unix system for Node apps that write to S3
  This comes up a lot in running software that works with Drummer and wants to store stuff in an account you own on Amazon's S3 storage service. This is something Amazon could make very easy, as easy as setting up an account on Twitter, or Amazon's store, but they make it hard, for some reason.
  Here's how you can set up your system so that Node apps can read and write to S3 via Amazon's API.
    At the command line type this:
      cd ~/.aws
      nano credentials
    Paste this text, replacing the dummy values with the ones from your AWS account:

      [default]
      aws_access_key_id=tz4nhbttfvll76gb9ej7
      aws_secret_access_key=cedx5jixadnwca1e3fnopkg8ji6cvynx4nlhgpy8

    Type this:
      Control-O
      Return
      Control-X
    Make sure the file was correctly created.
      cat credentials
  Having done all that, the app that tried to write to S3 should now be able to do it without error.
How to force a reload in Chrome
  When testing a new version of Drummer, using Chrome, this is how to force all the bits to reload, to be sure you're using all the current code.
    In Chrome, choose Developer tools from the Developer sub-menu of the View menu.
    In Chrome's toolbar, to the left of the address bar, as you click on the Reload icon, hold the mouse button down until a popup menu appears.
    Choose Hard Reload from the menu.
  At that point, theoretically you have all the most recent bits that make up Drummer.
Your own DocServer
  DocServer is actually a platform for DocServer-like docs.
  An example, two pages one for making hot dogs and another for making potato salad.
  And here's that outline rendered through DocServer.
  The magic of OPML as a standard. Open formats for the win! 😀
  Note that DocServer doesn't care what you call your sections, that's why the same system that works for verbs also works for food recipes.
  Screen shot