Ian: Radio101

Unit 0: What is a weblog? What is Radio?

Radio is a publish and subscribe content management system, a system that allows you to author web pages on your own hard disk and have it simultaneously published (mirrored) to a remote 40MB 'cloud disk' somewhere in the Silicon Valley for others to access and read (subscribe).

Radio's most powerful feature is its news collection subscription system. Every major newspaper has its headline index encoded in a language called XML 'Extensible Markup Language). Radio can subscribe to these (XML) feeds so that a user can:
1) have a repository of the main headlines downloaded to a hard disk every 30 minutes (scan time is settable in the News Aggregator under Radio's Prefs dashboard menu).
2) link these headlines to a weblog with comments attached (allow the comments of others if desireable (settable in the Weblog 'Comment' preference under Radio's Prefs dashboard menu).
3) have a long vertical column of Internet links on a weblog for one-click connections 'everywhere'.
And finally not forgetting the editorial merits of Radio,the bundled word processor/ editor is an outliner, a writing tool that encourages a more structured way of thinking than free form pen and paper.
In short, Radio is the latest thing in the information age's feeding frenzy and your door to a truly 'inter-connected' Internet.

Radio 101: Overview

Two things can safely be said about human learning:

1) Good learning almost always results in instant gratification

2) There must be incremental success throughout the learning process or the learner will lose heart and give up!

Keeping these two principles in mind, Radio 101 will get you up and running quickly with this powerful web communication tool.
The curiculmn is organized by outline nodes: simply click on a node to reveal the information you wish to learn.
The information is organized chronologoically. You will first learn how to get your Radio weblog looking graphically attractive and then you'll learn how to become a savvy copy editor using the tools of the html trade.
This tutorial assumes you have installed Radio on your respective operating system (Windows,Macintosh) and that you have launched the Radio application and filled in your user identity and email address when first prompted by the Radio application.

Unit 1:Setting Radio's default background theme

1) Click on the Themes button in the Radio dashboard located at the very top of the Radio window.

2) The Default radial button will be highlighted.

3) To experiment using a different type of Radio theme, scroll to the bottom of the Themes window, click on the radial button for the Woodlands theme and then click 'Apply Theme' to change the default theme to Woodlands.

4) Confirm that you indeed wish to make this change and then hopefully you should find yourself staring at a soft green background with lattice crawling across the top of your Radio window. You have now installed the Woodlands theme.

Experiment installing other themes by following steps 3 & 4 above. You can test out the theme to see how visitors will see your weblog in a browser by going to Radio's Radio menu and selecting the Cloud Page's 'Home Page' command. This allows you to see your published weblog the same way as someone visiting your weblog and viewing it in a browser.

Unit 2: Setting Radio's default title text and subtext

When someone visit's your radio weblog by typing in your Radio url such as (http://radio.weblogs.com/0104048/), they will see your weblog title and subtitle. The default title consists of your username with no description or subtitle.

You can easily change this to be a slightly more catchy title rather than the default Your Username's Radio Weblog.

1) Click on the Prefs link at the top right of the Radio window.

2) Click on the first sub category of Weblogs entitled " Title and Description".

3) Fill in a new 'Title and Description' and then press the 'Submit' button to update the Title and Description.

4) You can verify that the above changes were succesfully made by going to Radio's Radio menu and selecting the Cloud Page's 'Home Page' command. This allows you to see your published weblog the same way as someone visiting your weblog and viewing it in a browser.

Unit 3: Adding a graphic to your Radio Home page

Having a simple weblog title page with only a simple description is fine, but you may want to add some eye candy in the form of a graphic (jpeg or gif) to spice things up. Here's how:

1) Drag the jpg or gif file you wish to use below your description into the 'images' folder in Radio's 'www' folder (this folder is a mirror copy of your homepage on the Radio server or what is referred to as the 'Cloud' in Radio lingo).

2) Click on the Events button at the top of the Radio Home page.

3) You should see the the name of the graphic file uploaded in bolded format.

4) With the Alt (Windows OS) or Control (Mac OS), click on the graphic file name in bold and select 'Copy Link To Clipboard'.

5) Click on the Prefs button in the Radio dashboard and then return to the Title and Description preference.

6)Add the following html code but with the pathway of your graphic subsituted from step 4 above instead of the pathway shown below (http://radio.weblogs.com/-this example shows this page's gif pathway)

7) Finally, press the Submit button to upload the change and then go to the Radio 'Cloud' Pages' Home Page to see the newly added graphics. Note that you may have to wait for a minute or so to see those changes reflected on your Cloud page.

8) Also note that the same procedure can be used to add graphics anywhere in your weblog using the IMG SRC html tag.