Radio and Blogging Thoughts
Preamble
| | Right now, May 1 2002, I've been using Userland's Radio for about a month. I started out skeptical. I've been "blogging" for a while now using LiveJournal, which I've primarily used for personal postings. I have a small group of friends on there, some I met through the site, some that I knew on message boards and IRC a few years ago. But I wanted something where I could post more technical subjects, and become part of a different community that reflected my professional side.
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| | Since I've been reading Dave Winer's Scripting News off and on for a few years now, I became very exposed to hearing about Radio. I never understood the intent Radio 7, which seemed primarily sold towards sharing/managing MP3 playlists. But there seemed to be a lot of excitement building around Radio 8. There were a few features, particularly, that interested me:
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| | Instant Outlining. This showed up a couple of months after Radio 8.0 was released. Like many, I'm a big fan of Outliners, and have been using OmniOutliner on Mac OS X to document much of my work, ideas, and meetings. The notion of sharing an outline was (and still is) very intriguing.
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| | Self Documenting, free RCS. I'm currently working at a very small company (three people). We have a large and nice office, but all share the same room with our primary workstations. So, there's a lot of out-of-bands communication that goes on. But we never seem to really seem to know what each other is doing. When the Radio Community Server was offered for free, I became interested in implementing it in our company. I still haven't done it, but it seems like a decent knowledge capturing solution. And the price is great.
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| | On top of that, I saw all of this XML-RPC, SOAP, and little-guys versus the BigCo's discussion going on. But I felt there were some viewpoints not being heard. For example, Zope had an HTTP based RPC solution long before there was XML-RPC. Dave Winer made a point about articles in so called "BigPubs" about SOAP largely ignoring its younger brother (XML-RPC) and the smaller companies like Userland who have been doing Web Services long before Microsoft and IBM came on board. So, I wanted to join in and say "Well, Zope was there even before XML-RPC, and you guys never give mention to what it's been doing, even though it's supposedly in line with what you're championing!". I wanted a sounding board. I think I still need to sound off louder.
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First Impressions
| | So, I downloaded Radio to give it a trial run. During my first few days of use, I didn't get much out of it. I had it installed on my workstation, and ended up having very little time to write, and even less time to explore. I had hoped I'd be instantly integrated into some grand community. Instead, I felt like I was talking into a corner. And I had a couple of issues I needed to get used to:
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| | When is there time to write? -- I ran into this one right quick. My first posts were all brief "hmm, what does this do?" posts. I never had time to sit at my workstation and write anything more than that.
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| | Who's Reading? -- As there are more and more webloggers out there, how exactly does one get noticed?
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| | But, after a brief email exchange with Jon Udell, whom I've known for years (and who got me an article in Byte, published back in February 1997. it was one of the first big magazine articles about Python), I felt a tad more encouraged to give Radio another try after having it sit idle for a couple of weeks. I was liking it more, but I was still running into the "no time to write" issue. So, I moved it to my iBook. Now, I could write in the evenings. And I could still write at my desk, but just with less on-screen distractions.
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| | Finally, I was really free to use Radio. And I took to it pretty quickly. Its Web interface is very nice and simple. Over the next few days, I started to customize it (a very little bit). Finally, after a weekend of reading and writing from home, I purchased it.
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| | In the week and a half that's passed since that time, I've gotten involved with instant outlining, outline rendering, theme customizing, and even a little bit of programming. Radio offers a quality that I like in software -- It's easy enough to use for basic weblogging, but one can really start customizing and extending it if they desire. It's nice that you never really have to deal with the desktop application itself unless you want to. And most documentation is just a Google search away.
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Desktop based systems
| | By desktop based systems, I mean tools like Radio. This is where all of the content resides in a single desktop, and updated primarily have to happen through that tool. This has some advantages and disadvantages.
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| | Content has no chance of getting held hostage on a distant server. The recent outages at Userland's Radio hosted sites show what can happen here. Fortunately, they do have recent backups. But all that is required when their servers are back up and running is a re-publishing of new content.
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| | You can publish to a new location with relative ease. With Radio, it takes a few configuration changes and you can republish all of of your content to a new server. I don't know how well this works with other desktop based tools.
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| | You can work offline. Sometimes, one can get their best writing done away from the network. A desktop based system is more likely to allow you to update and edit content when a network is down, or on a laptop in the park than the server based solution.
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| | You can only update content from where you have the application installed. As I found out, having it on my workstation didn't give me much chance to use it, while with some other tools I can update from anywhere I want through a web browser or simple client. And while Radio supports the blogger API, I couldn't use such a tool to publish an entry from my workstation to Radio on my laptop (which would then push content to the server) due to the configuration of our wireless network.
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Server based systems
| | By server based systems, I mean tools whose data is kept on a remote server. Typically, these tools are primarily updated through the web, but may also have simple clients that can be run on a desktop. Besides Zope based systems (where everything is done through the web), I have most experience with LiveJournal.
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| | You can update content from anywhere, anytime, so long as there's a web browser and internet connection. This means I can update my LiveJournal from an internet coffee shop in Amsterdam when traveling. Or I can make a fix to an entry when I recieve an email saying "this link is wrong", even though my primary writing tool (my laptop) may be at home while I'm at the office.
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| | There's an offline client for LiveJournal on Mac OS X, which I also found valuable when traveling. Unlike Radio, which is primarily a 'push to server' system, the YaxJournal LJ client synchronizes journal entries, allowing me to use other means of updating. I can then pull those entries back into YaxJournal. There may be other blog clients that offer the same functionality. When it's there, it's great. But, as a disadvantage, there may not be a tool.
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| | Data may be held hostage on the server - if it goes down, or the data gets corrupt, you have no backup of your own. You cannot easily move data between servers as an end user.
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| | Editing options may be weak if you're looking for anything better than a web browser TextArea.
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Judgments on Radio
| | To be filled in at some point....
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