I'm still playing with the use of News Items in my blog.  But I was wondering this morning whether I should switch back to a non-news item based site.  One problem is that there is no way to sort the items for a given day (other than in reverse chronological order)  (correct me if I'm wrong).  Another problem is the rather rigid department structure (though combining the Metadata plugin with news items might help a lot.)

I suppose the biggest reason I was starting to think that I made a mistake in switching over is that integration with Radio and News Items seems pretty weak.  And I just started playing with Radio Instant Outlining (which I'll write more about in another News Item).  There seems to be a big tension between the two fundamental XML formats that Userland is pushing forward:  RSS 0.92 and OPML.  

The view of the world embodied by RSS 0.92 is that of a list of HTML chunks.  No hierarchical -- just a list.  OPML, on the other hand, is about hierarchies (which are wll expressed by outlines).  The two don't totally sit well together at times, IMHO.  For instance, news items are naturals for RSS.  The basic Radio weblog is made up of HTML chunks, syndicatable by RSS.   (Using News items in Manila gets one closer to this Radio functionality; my hope is that Radio categories will be reconciled with Manila News Item departments -- and that one can place a given news item in more than one department/category.)

Now there's lot of play with Instant Outlining.  But these outlines hang out somewhere else, in another space, not that well integrated with the blog of chunks.  Certainly one can transform OPML into RSS by flattening out the hierarchy (that's what outline renderers do in Frontier/Radio, right?)  But I'm looking for a better blend....

This note might sound quite confusing (and confused) -- but these are my thoughts about all this experimentation.