Frank McPherson: Ideas for Radio Userland

How come Radio Userland weblog pages don't have an "Edit This Page With Radio" button like Manilla sites?

I wish the Radio Userland news agregator provided an easy way to delete all news all at once.

Templates for Categories

I think this emphasizes the need for Radio Userland to provide separate templates for weblog categories. We can already make the categories look different by assigning themese to each category, but the template preferences are only for all web pages (including the desktop web site), the home page, and posts.

What I did was put a google search box in the home page template. That puts searchs for "Pocket PC" and places the results in a box on the right side of the page. That works ok for the top level Radio weblog page, and my Handheld Commentary page, but then on the music category pages I would like a different google search returning the results of the music I am currently listening to. On the sports page I would like a google search box for the Cubs. The closest that I can do is on the music category page, but that looks cluttered.

Now that we are well on our way to being able to do offline blogging from Pocket PCs, (way to go Bryce!) my next wish is an offline RSS news aggregator for Pocket PCs. One of the features of Radio Userland is that it downloads RSS newsfeeds to my PC, and provides me a way to browse them in what is called the News Aggregator. What I would like to be able to do is synchronize those feeds down to my Pocket PC, so that I could read through them at my leisure.

Without doing a lot of snooping around, I figure that the RSS feeds are stored in an XML file somewhere on my PC. So, I would think that all I would need is a way to get that file down to the Pocket PC, and then have an app that is capable of opening that file and displaying it's contents. The app should be able to work with Internet Explorer on the Pocket PC so that if I tap a link it would try to open the page, in case I am online.

Bonus points would be integration with Pocket Blog so that I could post blog entries from the RSS feeds in the same manner as Radio Userland. More extra points would be to provide the ability for the Pocket PC to directly retrieve RSS feeds if the Pocket PC has an internet connection.

As I see it, this offline RSS news aggregator would be an alternative to AvantGo and Mazingo for distributing content to Pocket PCs, and be an open and standard method to boot.

So, what do you think Bryce? Can it be done?

I believe Dave is going to release Radio Shortcuts on Monday. Shortcuts is one of the features that I really like about Manila, so I am glad that it will appear in Radio. Since I like it so much, I have a number of shortcuts already built into my Manila site. It would be really cool if there was a way to port my Manila shortcuts to Radio.

Cool. Dave is bringing shortcuts to Radio. Shortcuts is one of my favorite Manila features.

Ok, how do I use any of these to subscribe to these instant outlines?

Dave is spoiling me. I asked for control over the font size in the viewFavoriteWeblogs macro that he wrote, and he made the change. Thank you, Dave, that works perfectly. I've been trying to think of something creative to ask for next, just to see if it works three nights in a row. Something witty. So far I haven't thought of anything, but I am still mulling it over. :)

I just discovered strange behavior in the Radio Userland application. If numlock is on you can not add an item to the outline by pressing Enter, instead the current outline item is highlighted. If numlock is off it works as I expect it to work.

Ok, I now have my favorite weblogs listed on my desktop Radio site on the right hand side below the calendar. Question: how do I make the font smaller so that it is more like the cloud links information below it?

I should be basking in my moments of fame, thanks to a link on Scripting News yesterday. Dave has written a macro for viewing your favorite weblogs based on an idea that I had.

Advanced CSS Layout tutorial

I figured out a way to push the desktop weblogs.com page up to the community server. What I would like to do is figure out the weblogs macro to see if I can just push up the favorites portion.

Simon Fell has a new Radio tool that keeps you updated on Weblogs.Com without having to go there. [Scripting News] From what I gather, this tool makes a call to another server. I don't understand that. I have my weblog favorites right here on my PC, why should I have to go anywhere to get that?

Pondering... how do I make my desktop Radio page look more like Adam's?

Oh, I see, the CSS theme is listed in the Themes section of my Manilla sites. Time to play.

Good morning fellow coffee drinkers. Got a big white mug of steamin coffee. It's yummy. (I hate the word yummy, that was an experiment. I survived. I also hate cat pictures, yesterday I ran one. I think the CSS zealots are out to lunch, but yesterday we shipped a CSS theme for Manila. I see a trend.) [Scripting News] It would sure be nice if they would provide a clue or two about how the heck one uses this CSS theme. I copied the file to the Themes folder in Radio Userland and it does nothing. I guess I need to do some more digging about themes in Manilla.

Idea: Print friendly/handheld friendly support in Radio Userland.

There is nothing wrong with your set. I am playing with the new Radio Userland feature that allows me to apply different themes to each category. I selected the woodlands theme for my Picture category, and that forced a change in the the appearance of the main Radio weblog, which I don't think should happen. I see that it has already been posted on the discussion form as a bug. We'll see how quickly the folks at Userland fix this bug.

You know those little orange XML buttons that you see on some weblogs, such as this? You can click on that button to load the RSS.XML version of that weblog, and use that URL to enter it into a news syndication aggregator, such as the one in Radio Userland.

The news aggregator in Radio Userland is cool, but I find that I prefer using the Weblogs monitor. That monitor simply lists sites that have been updated at www.weblogs.com in the last hour, and provides a way for one to monitor their favorite weblogs. The problem is, the only way to add a site to the weblog favorites is by when it appears in the updated weblogs list.

I think it would be cool if there was another orange button that could be put on sites to simplify the process of adding a weblog to my favorites list. My vision is a button that you could push that took the URL, checked to see if it is entered in www.weblogs.com, and if it is add it to my favorites.

Pondering: if my hard drive crashed and I lost everything on it, could I recover my Radio weblog off the community server? I posted this question in the discussion group.

A while back I wrote about the fact that I was in the process of making Barney, my Dell Inspiron 2500 notebook, my main workstation here in the Cave. One of the decisions I had to make was whether to install Radio Userland on the notebook. If I kept Radio on my Dell desktop I would be forced to spend a considerable amount of my time on the desktop, and that would prevent me from making the notebook my main machine. On the gripping hand, the news aggregator feature of Radio works best on a machine that is constantly running, and I don't plan on keeping this notebook constantly running.

I decided to go ahead and move Radio over to Barney. I can live without the aggregator not always connected, and I realized that I can still use the mail-to-weblog feature, it would just mean that items I mailed to my weblog would not be published right away.

I am working towards making my Dell notebook my main PC. Right now I am mulling over in my mind whether I want to install Radio Userland on that notebook. The thing is, I am not planning on keep the notebook constantly on, like my desktop is. So, I guess I need to decide whether I really will use the mail-to-weblog feature. I sure wish there was an easy way to keep Radio Userland in sync with two computers. Or, I could even live with just running Radio application on the notebook and not doing any of the Radio desktop website stuff, but I am not sure if I can easily segregate the two.

In the My Pictures folder is a sub-folder called My Web Pictures. We create this folder automatically when Radio starts up. When you save a picture into that folder, it is moved from that folder to the images sub-folder of your www folder, where it is upstreamed to your public folder. (It actually goes into a calendar folder structure in the images folder.) [Scripting News] This sounds good. I've been thinking about using Radio to create a Photo weblog, and this might make that process easier.

Question: Why do the local Radio desktop pages take so long to load? Particularly the news aggregator. I would think that since these pages are on my hard drive, and I am running a 500 Mhz PC with 512 MB of RAM, that these guys would just pop into my web browser. I am wondering if this is an IE thing or a Radio web server thing.