My Radio Story

Three years ago, my wife and I were trying to figure out how to get DSL into our living room. It's a queer room - no phone jacks and the architecture is just so that you can't drop a wire from the ceilng or up from beneath, nor are there any shared walls to punch through. It's not going to be easy.

So I come home from work one day and tell her about what Steve Jobs announced at Macworld NY.

Airport.

Wireless networking. And it's as fast as the DSL. She comments: "Wow, I love how all we have to do is wait a bit and Apple will solve our problems for us." (So, yeah, we drink the cool-aid)

Now, two and a half years later, my dad - recently retired - asks me for a way to build web pages on his mac.com account. He wants to put up family recipies, dirty jokes, the usual stuff. I imagine most family sites have Aunt Elenor's Soda Bread recipe next to "A CEO, a rabbi, and a longshoreman go into a bar..." Ok, he's retired, I'll let him have his fun.

My wife again, apparent den mother for a large pack of online moms wants to gussy up her numerous web sites beyond what Apple's iTools will permit.

So today, I get to dig into Radio 8.0 and I can't help but think "Wow, I love how all we have to do is wait a bit and Userland will solve our problems for us." Ok, ok, this is the first problem that Userland has solved for my wife or my dad, but it's at least the fourth that they've solved for me.

I've been using Frontier for a few years to manage my office's website. It's really four websites now, and Frontier talks to my databases and flows xml hither-and-yon and does all kinds of clever things that I often marvel at. And I even used Radio 7 to edit those sites.

Now I get to dig in to a new version of Radio, and even better I get to run it on OS X. I'm going to buy copies for my wife and dad, and probably up to a dozen copies for the office so I can turn all of them into compulsive webloggers as well. I can start writing python scripts and hooking in databases and XML feeds and Applescripts that suck pictures from iPhoto to Radio and heavens knows what else. Quite honestly, I don't know where to begin.

When was the last time you got a toy so cool, you just didn't quite know how to start playing with it?

Last update: 1/11/02; 11:04:09 PM.