Monday, September 30, 2002

Friday, I shared news of the Lindows PC selling at Walmart for $200.00 that uses Linux to provide all the services that people are accustomed to paying a whole lot more from Microsoft, except Microsoft sued to stop them from saying what their PC could do.  Now comes AOL with a lawsuit and the comments on this article are also worth a review.  Apparently the marketing about some relationship with AOL Netscape was merely clicking I Agree to AOL fine print when making a copy of the new AOL version of free Netscape browser.  Thanks V. of TYR for passing on this link to me. 12:10:19 PM

Radio Wish Thinking - Recent Radio Discussion Group Posts indicate that there is a very high risk of newbies trying to follow current instructions for adjusting the code in Prefs, and getting error messages that are unintelligible to them.  If Radio Userland is ever to be marketed successfully to a large mass of computer users, this is a problem in need of a solution.  I can see that one of two solution approaches is needed: Plug In Tools be developed in which the end user keys in the name of what is to be inserted, and its url, similar to how we handle adding a link in an editing box, or add a subscription to News Aggregation.  This might have to be a subset of a particular standard Theme, because of placement on the left or right side of the screen. I think this is probably the more practical of the two approaches that I can think of. Wherever an error message could show up on user screen, add a trouble shooting button.  This would capture the text of the error message, the actual code that it was reacting to, the location of the scenario (specific Prefs from user perspective and www folder path name), then take the user to some Help resource that analyses the kind of stuff that might lead to this error.  Experienced XML programmers would not need the trouble shooting button.  The error message, and them carefully checking their code leads them to see what mistake they made. Intermediate XML programmers would need the FAQ about XML programming to help them see what are the most common human misconceptions that might occur here. Beginner XML programmers might need to continue posting questions to the Radio Discussion Group Forum.  11:39:38 AM

Radio Tip ... You in your favorite Search Engine, and you only want to look in weblogs, not the whole internet.  Here are some links you might want to check out. http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/ - Did Yah know that Google had this page just for searching what's been posted on Weblogs ??? Blog Hop knows about almost 12,000 weblogs Eatonweb categorizes 7,000 weblogs by content and other criteria http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/ = 3,000 weblogs by subject matter http://www.diarist.net/registry/ = 6,000 weblogs by nationality Yahoo has directories of approx 1,000 personal weblogs My earlier collection of Search Engine Tips; relevant Tools for Radio; and in my Radio Doc Sources, check out Sebastien Paquet on directories by profession. 12:14:54 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.