Radio Wishlist - I was just thinking as I added the most recent post about Max Dornseif's blog that it would be cool if I could offer to lawbloggers my OPML news subscriptions for the law blogs that I subscribe to. I realize that I could only offer my subscriptions to people who use the Radio aggregator. Still, it seems like it would be useful to lawyer bloggers who show up and use Radio to be able to quickly get all of the Law feeds. I'm not sure how to parse out selective News Feeds but I'm sure there is a way.
10:19:25 PM
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Radio's blog power leveraged - Matt Mower'sliveTopics tool is really amazing. Rick insisted that I load it (and he's my personal tech trainer so I did). I see some amazing power here. You create a topic for a post, and then later posts on the same topic get tagged under the same grouping. You combine that with an outliner (ala Marc Barrot) and you've got something that really adds to the KM power of Radio. I never cease to be amazed. Oh, and Matt showed me how to add a macro that goes beneath each "tagged" post (I don't have to assign a topic if I don't want to). The macro shows the topic and if the reader clicks on it they are taken to that part of the master outline that has similar posts. Wow!
Ernie responds: "I'm not sure what you mean by this question. I looked at your site which is quite nice, and I notice there is no XML coffee cup logo on your home page. Is this what you are trying to accomplish? If so look on your home page template and you should have some code like this (except that you will likely be missing the part that talks about the Coffee Mug):
Just copy the line above that is in bold (from the < to the >) and drop it in your Home Template and it should create the Coffee Cup icon. Hopefully, that answers your question.
10:07:56 AM
Friday, August 02, 2002
"radio-q"Is there a way to be notified via email when someone posts a comment to one of my postings or when someone replies to a comment I've posted? [Andy Meadows: RadioFAQ] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
Why be notified by E-mail? If you use the YACCS comment feature (free from www.yaccs.com) you can subscribe to your comments as an XML feed and have it show up in your news aggregator. That's what I do and it works great. I don't know if YACCS has an E-mail feature, but I don't think they do.
1:16:48 PM
"radio-q"Is it possible to use the Manila-Blogger bridge to send just one channel to Blogger API site? Someone asks "Is it possible to beam different channels to different hosts (it seems to be but I don't see anything like that in the Radio interface)? [Radio Free Blogistan] "radio-a"Rogers Cadenhead has figured out how to post categories to different channels. Paolo Valdemarin is doing it too, but I can't find the post where he talked about it."PhilPearson"
Okay, Rick knows how to do this, but he's on vacation til next Tuesday and won't be checking his Radio News Aggregator. He told me how to do it, and I had this in an E-mail saved to use if I needed to. You have to understand a bit about Radio, but I'll post this and let the others explain in more detail. The stuff in bold is a variable that you create. Here's the recipe:
"You need to know the ftp username and password for your web site. if you don't have it, get it from whoever maintains your site.
I don't know exactly how TrackBack will help in this new Radio FAQ adventure, but if Rick is for it then there is a good reason, and I'm for it too.
2:06:05 PM
Radio Static, Radio Silence. This morning Radio is stripping the headings off my posts (probably messing up the mirror too), and generating this error:
[Macro error: The file "08" wasn't found.]
Guessing that this has something to do with the change of month and the fact that Radio's been running continually on my desktop through several sleep cycles. I just quit and restarted the server to see if that will help. ...ok, that along didn't do it. I see that none of my posts today are streaming out to the Salon Blogs server. On a hunch I poked around my www/2002/ folder and saw that there is an 07 (month) folder, but no 08. I created an 08 folder (though I'm sure I shouldn't have to do that by hand), and now I'm going to see if posting works. If not, I'll restart the machine (maybe some handling component crashed overnight). If that fails, I'll have to get some technical support! [Radio Free Blogistan]
2:00:02 PM
Upstreaming issues - No biggie, but I've noticed that occasionally I get this error in my "events" page: "Can't upstream because "Can't open stream because TCP/IP error code 10061 - Connection refused." At that point I know that nothing is going out to the server to be posted. My fix has been to close Radio and re-open it. Perhaps if I waited long enough it would clear the cobwebs and do its thing. I'll monitor this and report further findings.
11:21:19 AM
Radio Wishlist #3 - It would be great if the News Aggregator would pick up the "permalink" information along with the other post information so that I could just "right click" and "Copy Shortcut" and have that information ready to paste into a link.
10:51:57 AM
I'm all over this. This is what Rick and I have been praying for. Rick actually got it to work. I'm going to play with it this weekend and see if I can get the Law Blogs thing to work on my main page. Onward and upward!
10:11:40 AM
Don Strickland has the same idea - here's what he has done about the "Radio Questions" thing -
"imo-open"I have an idea how to start this and I have the time and interest to moderate it. I've created a category on my blog; RadioFAQ. Here's how you can participate:
Create a category on your blog and name it Radio Questions.
Send me the url for Radio Questions on your blog.
I will ...
subscribe to your stream,
collect the quesitons,
post them to RadioFAQ in a standard Q&A format.
I will also answer the questions that I can answer.
Others can answer by sending me email or posting comments on RadioFAQ items.
I will clean-up the comments producing a clean stream.
Random color changes - A quirky headline thing. A while back I noticed that occassionally my headlines (which I format in Purple/Bold/Underline) would revert to Blue. At first I thought that I was forgetting to set the color to Purple, but now I have observed the phenomenon enough to know that it is reverting. Why it reverts I can't figure out. Any thoughts?
Later comes the likely solution -
Ralph Hempel @ 08/01/2002 10:00 AM. Ummmm, Purple Bold underline is what a visited link looks like. If your headline is a link, it will probably show up as blue bold underline. If you've visited the link it turns Purple. After a week, or whatever you've set the visited links expiry time to in your browser, the headline reverts to Blue. This is only true for the headlines that are also links. Hope this helps. Cheers, Ralph [YACCS Comments for Radio Questions & Tips]
6:43:13 AM
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
If you like this category you can subscribe to all of the comments that are posted here - to do so just click here and then copy the resulting URL into your News Aggregator subscription.
Boldly Going Where No Law Firm Has Gone Before - I have been wrestling with the idea of making my law firm's News & Events page of our website into a Radio Weblog....
Yup, it was easy. And I like finding little wins like this. Give credit to the folks behind Radio - it was a simple tweak, an obvious extension of the platform they built. Once Ernie pulls the trigger (by using Radio's "upstreaming" capabilities to upload the page to his firm's web site, instead of his own weblog), he'll be feeding news directly from his blog to his firm's site. Nice. Let's make sure that Ernie's firm gets credit for being the first firm to use a weblogging system to power part of their public web site... this is definitely a sign of things to come.
By the way, this is what the bigshots like Vignette and Interwoven call a content management system. They'll charge you six figures for the privilege of using their system. Radio costs $40.
Radio wish list - Several people have asked me why the Day Headers in this English weblog are in Swedish or German... ;-) Actually they are in Dutch and that's because "Radio" takes the system date from my Dutch MacOS to create the headers.
I'm aware that it's possible to hack "Radio" into displaying a different date/time format, but I'm a simple end user and not geeky enough to start messing with the software ;-) A preference to set the date/time format has been high on my "Radio" wish list for quite some time.
Someone is listening - here is a link to someone who picked up on my idea of a separate Radio category and is doing the same thing...sort of. What are the rest of you waiting for?
11:31:25 PM
Permalink Question - This is a "survey" question. Since I have been blogging I have found the permalink feature of blogs to be indispensible. I have discovered a quick way to copy the permalink recently (and I'm a slow learner so I'm sure most of you know this way). I'm wondering how others do this. Drop a comment and indicate how you do it. I'm sure it won't take long before someone posts the "correct answer" (assuming anyone is reading this category on my blog).
11:11:48 PM
SiteMeter Question - now that I know that I can use Radio's categories to post my law firm's News & Events page as a blog, I have other things I'd like to do. The first is to determine how many vistors that page gets. Obviously, it doesn't make sense to put effort into this if it is clear that no one reads it. And if we see that people aren't reading it then we can take corrective action with greater alacrity. So, I ask: can I measure the traffic on just that page? I'm sure I can and I'll check into it tomorrow. Of course, if anyone is reading this and knows the answer then drop a comment.
11:08:20 PM
Boldly Going Where No Law Firm Has Gone Before - I have been wrestling with the idea of making my law firm's News & Events page of our website into a Radio Weblog. The benefits are obvious (ease of posting, ability to add comments, XML feeds etc). I mentioned this to Rick today in our brief phone conversation. Rick said "oh, that's easy...just give me 10 minutes." I'll skip over the whole back and forth with tweaking etc. Bottom line: look at this page, and compare it to the other one. Uh, Houston ... we've got liftoff.
10:27:14 PM
My Radio Wishlist continued - okay, in the event that anyone is listening, here is what I would like to be able to do:
post multiple stories at the same time from the News Aggregator. I'd like to be able to do this so that I can take, say 4 stories from a source like Law.com and glom them altogether in one post that I can quickly edit.
I'd like for my newsViews tool (which lets me categorize news stories and then read from those categories) to allow me to post. Right now the post button doesn't seem to work. I go into Limbo. Not good. If I could reliably post from there and do multiple posts at one time I would be very happy. And much more efficient.
That's it for now. I do want to say that just because I wish for something that doesn't mean I don't appreciate what I have. I think Radio totally rocks!!! I also think that developers like Marc Barrot, who created activeRenderer, and Paolo Valdemarin, who created RssDistiller, are unsung heros. Oh, speaking of that, I'd like it if I could put pictures in my outlines. Anyway, thanks and let me know if there is anyway to get what I want by tweaking myself. I'm not unwilling to cook my own supper, so to speak. Comments?
