So, what are some other things I like about Radio 8.0?
#12: it's easy to get new features and bug fixes. If you're a Windows user, just right-click on the Radio icon in the system tray (down by the clock). Choose "upgrade Radio.root." And away we go. Oh, you can set it to automatically update too if you want. We'll be releasing new stuff often.
#13: Radio shows me what it's doing. Click on the "Events" link and you'll see what Radio's been doing recently. What files it's been upstreaming. If it's had any troubles.
#14: It works with other tools. Shhh, don't tell Dave, but I still use Microsoft's FrontPage occassionally. Guess what? I made the WWW folder a FrontPage folder and now anytime I save a file in FrontPage Radio 8.0 automatically publishes it! Think about that for a while. Radio makes FrontPage (or Macromedia's Dreamweaver or Adobe's GoLive) more useful. Yes, Jeffrey Zeldman, if you hand code HTML it'll push up those files for you too.
#15: I can have different looks for each weblog. Yesterday I talked about how I use categories to publish three different weblogs. Did you know that you can have different templates for each of those weblogs with completely a different look and feel? You can. Just find the folder for each of those categories, put a template file in there (copy them from the www folder) and edit away.
#16: It works through firewalls and NATs. One of the problems if you have a true peer-to-peer desktop website is that no one will be able to get to your weblog if you have a firewall or a NAT. Well, that's one reason we decided to combine the peer-to-peer approach with a centralized approach. That way your friends can see your weblog but you have all the advantages of a desktop website (which I talked about yesterday).
#17: It's low cost. It costs $3.33 per month (you pay $39.95 per year). That's about the cost of a latte at Starbucks. That includes the software, the hosting and URL, all updates during that year, and peer support on the mailing list.
#18: It automatically builds a nice calendar interface. I don't need to do anything but type and post. It knows when to switch yesterday's stuff into an archive and builds links from the calandar. No hard-to-figure out settings or HTML code.
#19: Google and Daypop and Blogdex index your weblog. Some website services like MSN Communities are great, but those three services can't get into MSN to index your sites. That means you get far less traffic than you will with a Radio UserLand site.
#20: No advertising and you can make your own themes. You might think that you are stuck with the UserLand theme. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can make your own theme and are in complete control of the look and feel of your website/weblog. Compare that to other free services like MSN Communities which force you to use their theme and force you to put advertising on your site.
#21: You can add in tools. For developers the tools interface gives you the ability to build useful additions to Radio. You're already seeing some appear on this weblog and other places. For instance, Doug Kaye built an "news-to-email" tool that'll email you your news from Radio's news aggregator. There'll be more, too, since the tools interface is easier to figure out than other development platforms.
#22: It's a community. Remember yesterday when I said Radio was a community of users? That's really becoming true because Radio helps you watch other Radio users. It's a subtle thing, but something a lot of other tools forget. For instance, let's say you find another Radio user that you really like reading. Add them to your news aggregator! It's easy to do. Just click on their orange XML button, copy the URL of that page, and paste it into Radio's news/subscription page. Every hour from then on Radio will check with that site for news updates. Also, check out our "popularity page." This will help you find the most popular webloggers. Oh, and Radio automatically reports to http://www.weblogs.com when your site changes so everyone will know when you update. Radio is one tool that gets more useful as more people use it.
#23: It shows you referer sites. A common thing about weblogs is understanding who is pointing to your site. You might not know this, but everytime you click on a link your web browser reports to the servers you are visiting where it came from. Hence it builds "referer logs." Yes, that's misspelled. Someone misspelled referrer in the original W3C spec and that mispelling has stuck ever since. Don't blame me. Anyway, Radio builds a page automatically so you can see who is linking to your site. Be nice, link back to them, even if they are calling you names.
#24: The Radio Application. Do you realize that everything I've been talking about so far is just referering to the Desktop Website that Radio builds? There's also an entire application hiding in the background waiting for you to become an advanced user and find it. Why is the application for advanced users? Well, that lets you get into the guts of Radio's databases. Hence, it's a development tool for programmers. It also a Web server, a high-performance object database, an HTML rendering engine, a scripting engine, and more. Oh yeah, if you're a developer you can talk to the application via SOAP or XML-RPC calls. That means it is a real Web service too (and we shipped before Microsoft shipped .NET, so there!)
#25: You get 30 days for free to try it out. Why don't you? http://radio.userland.com. No obligations at all.
Anyway, that's enough for today. I wish I were more of a developer, because there's an entire scripting engine hanging out waiting for developers to write code to it, but I'll leave that to the big boys and just point to the best developer-focused resources. I guess that'd be my #25th favorite thing about Radio UserLand.
Have fun playing with Radio 8.0 over the weekend. I'll be at scoble@userland.com if you have anything you'd like me to see.
