How To Post An Outline To Your Weblog

Your Radio desktop application offers you a full-blown writing environment, though it does not resemble a typical word processing application.

(You will fail to find a Print feature, oddly enough).

Many folks find that they can use Radio 'out-of-the-box' to keep notes about their weblog and/or make drafts of texts that they can copy-paste to their desktop weblog. 

One advantage of this is that your Internet browser may 'freeze', 'hang' or otherwise blow away when you are in the middle of creating or editing a post. This is one of life's more frustrating experiences. By working within the Radio desktop application, you can thwart the nastier impulses of the Web.

To make notes within the desktop application:

1. Open the Radio Desktop Application.

2. Select File-New from the File menu within the Radio desktop application.

(Remember, we are not working within your Web browser weblog now but within the desktop application.)

This displays an untitled text window with a small 'caret' indicating the first line of your work. You can minimize, maxmize or close this window normally but you won't want to do that now.

3. Enter your note text (I use the concept 'note' here merely illustratively; enter any text you wish on any subject of interest to you).

When you press return, a new 'caret' appears. In fact, you are entering text into an outline. You may have noticed that an "Outline" menu appeared at the top of your Radio application window when you opened this outline.

(Feel free to explore the many commands and features available from that Outline menu. You can't hurt anything).

For instance, if you place your cursor on a caret and press the tab key, the caret (and that entire section of the outline) 'indents' to become a subhead (or subtopic) of the outmost outline element.

(While the outliner has many other features, I cannot explain them here within this brief topic).

4. Select "Save" to save your (outline) text to the location of your choice on your local hard drive. These files will not be upstreamed to the Community Server but are entirely private to you.

(Radio saves this outline in a special outline format known as 'opml'. You don't need to know how to use or manipulate this format to take advantage of outlines).

5. When you want to access, change or otherwise use this text again, get it through File-Open from the File menu within the Radio application.

To transfer a text from the Radio desktop application to a post within your weblog:

1. Right-click your mouse within the text entry area of your current outline window. It will display this menu:

2. Click on "Post to Weblog."

3. You will be positioned within the desktop home page of your weblog in your web browser. The text from the selected node of your outline will be displayed in the text entry area.

(Don't let yourself be thrown by the term 'selected node'. All this means is that my cursor was positioned on the first line of the outline when I selected 'Post to Weblog'. Each node (or 'caret' if you will) within the outline is treated as a separate 'post'. The node you select with your mouse is the one that will be posted to your weblog when you use the 'post to weblog' command. Got it?)

4. Edit your text further if you wish within the home page of your weblog. When you are ready to post it, select 'post' there just as you would if you had created the entire text from scratch in your web browser.