Monday, September 30, 2002

Radio Tip ... we can learn how to improve our own art of weblog information presentation by reviewing the best of the best, then emulating their achievements.  Remember last week there was an award for the best British weblog? Thanks Alison Fish for checking out the Five Fish Award system, after I located what seemed like an interesting link in Genius Blogging Strategies from www.blogging.biz - other Awards to check out some time, and of course the sites that win, and get honorable mention, include: Third Annual Medley Medals by Biz Stone from whose book I am getting this info and there are links to the earlier years' awards. Scripting News Awards for great blogs by category Technology Insightful Manila Anchors Great Eye Candy Technical Mental Giants Blog Tools Blogger Contributions to Excellence The Bloggies 30 award categories, of which I am only sharing a few samplings here Rebecca's Pocket wins award for best article or essay about Weblogs. The Anti-Bloggies seem to me to be awards to people who have demonstrated great talent for doing hostile website things that would make us all pleased to see them leave Planet Earth, reminincent of the Darwin Awards. Blogs, that win great awards, are worth trying to emulate. 4:46:43 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.