John Abbe: WikiWeblogPIM

I'm ba-ack... Re-installed Radio on my new install of OS X and got myself pointed back to Userland's community server. Some random bits look broken but this may be stuff that was broken before. From the perspective of more months, it's really that i just don't want to learn Radio. I mean i'm sure i'll get sucked into it somewhere along the line as i help people out with the evolving new era of communications, but my heart is in wiki and free software, and that's just not exactly where Radio is (though it's oddly close). So i'm not sure what i'll do with this site. I would like to try the instant outlining (now that i'm back in the U.S.), i guess i'll do that some time, and otherwise let things steep... Otherwise, it's AbbeNormal for now. Glad Dave is still with us, this Radio story definitely doesn't seem over yet...

Mostly been posting to AbbeNormal:AbbeNormal lately. I would like to play with Radio's new Instant Outlining, etc., but i'm stuck behind a proxy server at the ISP i'm hooking my laptop up to, so it'll probably wait until May. (Nothing is upstreaming. I've updated Radio's root, but get this error when trying to subscribe to an Instant Outline: Can't serve /system/pages/outlinerSubscribe because the file wasn't found. I'm also getting a loop in Radio repeatedly receving 1K from 127.0.0.1. Not sure what that is, but things definitely seem broken. My troubles may be related to an earlier problem that i probably need to reinstall Radio to fix, but everything -- except Instant Outlining, which just wasn't out yet -- was working when last i dialed up to my account from California.) Meanwhile, my trial period for Tinderbox has expired. Phtheeah! Multitasking Lanka and technology exploration presents challenges. They're exactly the ones i want to overcome, as i would like to make some sort of tech contributions while i'm here. It's as much to do with my attention as anything else, but some local geeks to commune with would be helpful too. Anyone know of Lankans who are into technology, and will be around Colombo at the end of April, early May?

Not too surprisingly, nothing showed up on my cloud site at first. Oddly, this post didn't trigger it, but manually publishing from Radio did it. Five new categories suddenly appeared -- My Friends, My Hobbies, My Interests, My Organization, My Profession. Hm, does Radio Community Server come with a discussion group for us? Yo, Dave Berry, i'm here mainly to help you test this out, so let me know if there's anything i can do. ---- Hey, does this mean my old site is gone? or will it just not update? (the latter)

Dave points to a How to install RadioUserLand for non-techies.

In the "RadioSandBox" i try to figure out new features.

Bill Bumgarner has a RadioServices for OS X FAQ, and reports no big problems yet. It lets AbbeNormal:MacOsx users type one key combination (shift-command-R) to put any selected text into a ready-to-blog text box. Only Cocoa applications, mostly(?).

From details of a global brain i find out about a new Mac OS X Radio service by Bill Bumgarner.

Joe has produced a theme with no tables (it also has no calendar) that should please "CSS" fans. Geez, read that out loud and tell me we're not all just geeking out here!

ViewFromTheHeart has (i want the links here):

garret has these printed out and at hand for doing work in Radio. Good summary , and I think I'll put together something...
Also, he has a set of "skeletons" with the 'required' macros for each page as starters. Good hint, and thanks, g.

Required Macros
How to include images in your templates
CSS class names for calendar and tables
Built-in Macros

RadZilla is a Mozilla sidebar with handy links for Radio, from Radio X Neophyte. Got the link from View from the Heart. David Davies is filtering RSS feeds.

Stay tuned for a forthcoming story or two...

As you probably haven't noticed (i dont think anyone really reads here), i haven't posted in a few days. I think things are at the point where i've decided (as i expected) not to suddenly switch to a new weblogging system at this point. The main reasons are speed, lack of wikiness, less preferable license and language. That said, Radio is kinda neat, and i'm sure that more features will come along that will be tempting. I paid my $40 to express that there were things i liked, and i'll probably try to come up with some way to make use of it that wouldn't detract from AbbeNormal. If i could post multiple items at once from the RSS reader, i could use it just to store items that i found of some interest (but not enough to follow up on immediately) in different categories, that would be useful. If people could subscribe to my feeds by e-mail that would actually solve one of my problems. I am researching this sort of thing and will post about it to AbbeNormal.

Anyone who's been reading AbbeNormal knows i've been mucking about with RSS readers. I want one that is not web-based, so that it will be fast. This seems to be outside Radio's design philosophy -- that's okay, but if i don't use Radio's RSS reader then i miss out on some interoperability. So i wrote to the author of Plucky, an up-and-coming Mac RSS reader that will probably become my favorite for a while, about the possibility of implementing an auto-post feature that would connect to Radio like the Post button in Radio's own RSS reader. I looked at the URL in that Post button to see how it's done -- and discovered that unfortunately it refers to the item by an internal story id number, so they can't talk to it that way. People should be able to use whichever RSS reader and whichever weblogging tools best meet their needs. An externally accessible method for auto-posting would let people do that and still automate their workflow (or playflow as the case may be :-). I can see right away that this is not a simple problem to solve -- how does one pass the information of the entire item? -- but i offer it as another opportunity to improve interoperability. (maybe it is simple; XML-RPC?) (also posted on the Radio discussion) ---- Doh! I forgot i already knew that the feature i was requesting probably existed. Details in that Radio discussion thread until they're coherent enough to blog here.

Burning Bird asked for input on Radio for a review she's writing. I've been struggling to capture my overall response, and although it's not complete i liked some of what i wrote, so here: What features of Radio 8.0 have you used? Categories, RSS reading (and posting from there to my weblog), and others. What features are your favorite? The private server ('full peer') that i can access from anywhere, and from which (potentially only some!) things get posted to my public site, *and* any group public sites i'm involved in. I am certain that this arrangement is the wave of the future, and would love to have it for my wiki. Categories Extensibility through coding -- e.g. i put my other weblog in my Radio weblog's sidebar. If i actually learn some UserTalk i could do, well, anything, although i worry about doing something that UserLand's upgrades might break. But whether or not *i* add anything new, other people are adding new features all the time. This is good and bad, actually What features are missing or incomplete? Search!?, discussion, email alerts (they're in the docs but not implemented!) Have you used any external interface into or out of the product? If so, what and how? Not sure what you mean by 'external interface' -- i haven't blogged with SMS, if that's the sort of thing you mean. How was your installation experience? And on what OS? Piece of cake. MacOS X. Will you continue to use it? If so, why? If not, why not? Unsure. Why? It's out-of-the-box prettier than PikiePikie, it automates Categories now, and UserLand actively supports and develops cool, open standards (RSS, XML-RPC), and shares different pieces of my vision of what i really want than wikis do, e.g. see my first favorite feature above. Why not? 1) it's missing a lot of what i like in wiki -- e.g. minimal-typing markup... [http://ourpla.net/ name] vs. <a href="http://ourpla.net/">name</a> ''italic'' vs. <i>italic</i> etc. ...easy linking among separate pages on related ideas (stories exist, but are a pain in the butt to link among), easy linking among wikis (e.g. OtherWiki:PageName), reverse link lookups, site-global RecentChanges list, etc. There's a difficult-to-describe gestalt to wiki that's really beautiful. I worry that even tacking a weblog on it loses some of that, but moving to Radio would lose it completely. 2) license -- i try to support open/free code, and i although i mostly trust Dave to be open anyway, he won't live forever (knock on wood). What then? 3) usefulness of what i learn -- wikis (the ones i find most attractive for other reasons) push me to learn Perl and Python, which are for more widely used than UserTalk. If you had a weblog before, what software did you use to maintain it? PikiePikie -- see http://pikie.darktech.org/ What's your technical background? I was a teenage programmer (really!) in the late 70s/early 80s. Haven't coded significantly since then (a mere power user now :), but i have a pretty good picture of what's possible, and muck about freely with HTML, find things like XML and CSS pretty straightforward when i take the time to look at them, etc.

Digging into Radio/Frontier code.

A bunch of links i picked up recently, from Dan Bricklin and of course Dave Winer:

http://www.scriptdigital.com/fnt/frontierNewbieToolbox.html
http://docserver.userland.com/
http://frontier.userland.com/tutorial/
http://radio.userland.com/radioUserLandForDevelopers

...and "Developers" under Radio's "Tools" menu.

HackMaster is Palm OS software that enables dozens (hundreds!) of useful changes to that OS. Now Garth has used the same name for a tool to make changing Radio easier -- it lets you make changes to the UserTalk code (which implements many of Radio's features, and users can in theory extend), without having to go through a big deal of cutting and pasting things whenever UserLand updates that code (when they do that it usually overwrites any changes you've made). HackMaster main page: http://www.deadlybloodyserious.com/radio/stories/2002/01/27/hooksInRadioUserland.html HackMaster weblog: http://www.deadlybloodyserious.com/hackmaster/ So many cool holes i often can't decide where to dig!

Flutterby! points out that "Bill Kearney has said that he's going to be able to use geographical information in Syndic8," then shows you the HTML he added to the <head> section of his weblog to send that geographical information. Be careful, his HTML looks like it has an extra double-qoute toward at the end of each line. For Radio, presumably you would just add this to the Main template. <meta name="geo.country" content="USA">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Berkeley, California">
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.867;-122.267"> The Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names will probably find your coordinates.

Jonathon Delacour got this great advice from Manila (the server for most of our Radio pages) in his Events log after updating frequently:

It's cool that you're updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice -- take a break, you'll enjoy life more.

Heading to the east coast after tonight's Weblogger Interest Group meeting. I'll be seeing family and friends (i grew up around Boston, and Jeyanthy's folks are around DC and NY), and attending VeriCon II, hopefully with my brother Thomas.

Radio Review part II (i actually miss AbbeNormal's entry names, which is funny because it really bugged me that i had to come up with names at first -- i guess i want the choice) These have also been posted to the Radio discussion. Radio is slow for me (OS X) I guess i should expect it from a web-based app, but Radio is slow! Often takes several seconds between clicking on a link and getting a response. My Web Server Log page (that's yours) verifies this, showing 3-4 seconds typically, and up to 7-9 even for 15k files. For comparison, IE accesses bigger pages from Apache much faster. Fatlogic has a similar experience, on Windows. OS X even froze up (even the mouse!) for about 10 seconds at the top of one hour, and i think iTunes may have stuttered once or twice when i'm accessing the desktop website heavily, but i haven't been able to replicate those. I even had a complete freeze-up today (no kernel panic visible, and alas i had telnetting turned off), but like many OS X users, i run a lot of beta software, gNat and ASM in particular are implicated but i'm getting off-topic... ---- In the prefs it says: "Radio UserLand can send email to let you know when there are errors, where it stored a picture, or let a friend or colleague know that you've posted something" The rest of the features i list below don't exist yet AFAIK, but that first one is clearly supposed to be in here somewhere. I can't find it. Help? Discussion? (or was this a marketing design choice to push people who wish to respond to get their own weblog? Evil...) Search?!? Moazam Raja has already ranted about those two, and he's right -- *and* because there was no discussion tool, i couldn't let him know i agreed (and point him to an answer for another issue he had). Until Moazam+Raja+Sun on Google worked. But in a way the biggest one is the Edit button at the bottom of each item. Thinking back, seeing those buttons for the first time (i played with Radio 7 briefly--or was that Pike?) was an event that connected weblog and wiki for me forever. Okay, if it isn't clear from all this, you can't be this frustrated with a product and not be really excited about it (hey, this is how i often feel about PikiePikie -- which runs my other weblog, AbbeNormal). Oh yeah, finally linked here from there.

I changed my template, and weblog title/description, but the cloud site didn't reflect the changes until i made a post. Is there any way to get it to load manually?

Radio Review part I Finally read the whole Help and Preferences which took a few hours to read -- and no, i only studied and messed with half of the complicated ones. I've started reading the Radio Discussion now, to which i've just posted these: Undeleteing News I subscribed to a bunch of feeds, then spent a lot of time deleting the items i wasn't interested in so i could read the good ones when i had time. The next day, new items had appeared of course, but Radio had deleted all my old ones! The "culprit" was the default Archiving Options preference, which is to delete any news more than 24 hours old! If you're like me, you may want to turn that off. I'm assuming that the check box at the bottom applies only to news deleted ny this Archiving Option, or does it also apply to news deleted by the user? OS X Dock menu The OS X version of Radio's Dock icon has a menu with several handy items like toggling yourself on/off-line, opening your www folder, etc. The icon scales beautifully by the way, congrats to the designer. The only improvement might be visual clues to tell me whether i'm on-line.

Well, iCab (and other browsers) not reading images from Radio's desktop website turns out to be a known problem with a preferences solution, though i think i'll leave the pref as is for now, as it's faster this way.

O'Reilly's Primer for Accessible Web Pages. "On December 21, 2000, the Access Board, a committee created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), published regulations regarding the accessibility of Internet sites. These new regulations require that any web site built or procured by the Federal government must be accessible to the public in the same manner as buildings equipped with curb-cut sidewalks, braille-enhanced elevator buttons, or ramped building entrances. The Access Board's Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards put Web design best practices into law for the first time." [ZopeNewbies]

Radio problems to report: When i edit an item, and all i change is checking off a new category for it to be published to, it seems that there is no change. When i try to browse my desktop website from iCab, it refuses to load most images.