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Enhanced Radio Tools
Radio from Userland is an Open Source Mentality with many different people supplying plug ins to make improvements. I have stumbled across some that interest me, and I wish to explore more as my time permits.
Here are links to details by topic of what they address. Some of these are for any Weblog Browser user, not just Radio, and I do plan to split this story at a later date and have just the Radio Tools here, but for the moment this is a list of a smorgasbord of what's available out there. This story now runs to 2 1/2 pages, dominated by Comments, spell checking dictionary links, but there are perhaps a dozen major types of tools here so far.
- See my Radio Doc Sources for links by name of person who has created plug in tools for Radio or documentation to enhance our Radio learning. Check out these people:
- Paolo Valdemarin; Radio Userland; Unknown; Mark Paschal; Doug Kaye; Andy Fragen; David Davies; Marc Barrot.
- Check out the Radio Userland Community Tools Directory, which I found thanks to tracing my referers to Jeff Cheney then looking at some of his links.
- Check out what Ernie the Attorney has to say about Active Words.
- Comments - apparently there are several alternative systems.
- Default Radio - there are several problems which I would rather be fixed before I start using this. We need ability to more rapidly locate what comments have been posted to our site, and delete those we do not want. For example, Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing Blog explains how blogs with comments attached to every post can be used by spam robots to insert advertisements. For more info on how spammers can contaminate the Blogging experience, check out in Understand Radio Referers after I explain distinction between actual link and people using the link, I go on to clarify how some of the links are created by spammers promoting porn sites.
- Organizing access to Comments onto our Radio Weblog.
- BlogOut
- CommentIt was changed, according to Manila Newbies List post November 2002, so that now it will be released as part of the Bayly.root from David Bayly for Manila sites, built into Frontier. I suggest that it is advantageous to you to take a look at this Bayly.root link since a lot more is offered here than comments feature.
- Enetation
- Quick Topics - my notes on this are in Understand Internet Collaboration
- NetComments
- YACC - check out Jenny Levine Radio 101 documentation
- Scott Johnson [The FuzzyBlog!] writing in dws.Radio.FAQ, identifies this http://www.haloscan.com/ alternative, which Allan writes in Radio Userland Discussion Group that it does not force inclusion of e-mail address of person doing the commenting, and you have the option to edit or delete comments that may be unsuitable for public consumption.
- Grammar checking what we key here 2002 Aug 17
- Knowledge Management and Documentation Tools
- Language Translation 2002 Aug 17
- Manila Tools thanks to Andy Sylvester's Ruminations
- The Merriam-Webster Toolbar. Thanks to [Alison Blog Fish] for this info.
- QUOTE
-
I am absolutely loving this browser toolbar. I installed it about a month ago. You can use it to look up definitions or synonyms with the Thesaurus. 
It caches your lookups, viewable by clicking the arrow of the drop-down box. This is really useful when composing a post in Radio's WYSIWYG editor - the definitions pop up in a small separate window, so you don't lose your place.
Sorry Mac users, IE 5.0+ on Windows required.
Another bonus: a reverse dictionary for those moments when you find yourself asking "isn't there a word for this?" (comments) [BlogFish]
- UNQUOTE
- Miscelaneous Tools that include things not exclusively for Radio
- News Aggregation Enhancement tools
- Random sites - visiting
- Search Engines
- I started a general thread just on "Search Engine Tips" and may move some stuff that is here to there or to other general tips threads I might later start.
- Search Engines to help us navigate Weblogs in general, not just Radio sites - see my 2002 Aug 22 review
- Search Engine on our site to help visitors, and ourselves, navigate our own stuff.
- dws.Radio.FAQ shared Radio Tip about Google Search from Andy's World
- Apparently stuff published to our site is not recognized by Google for 48 hours later, and of course not when a post is hung in upstreaming.
- dws.Radio.FAQ Tip from [Werblog]: The Atomz search engine I've been using on this site isn't working properly, so I'm experimenting with some alternatives, including FreeFind (now running on the left side of the page) and PicoSearch. UNQUOTE
- Search Engines know about your site thanks to various registration services.
- http://www.siteadd.com/ to Excite HotBot Infoseek AltaVista Go Lycos WebCrawler Canada whatUSeek NorthernLight DirectHit Google SearchIt AllTheWeb Magellan - Their FAQ links and Search Engine news. In addition to above list of free additions, you can buy their service to link you to 400 other search engines. They also offer a variety of services for web sites.
- Spell checking what we key into this place ... see my 2002 Aug 22 posts specific to that, also Aug 17 several posts
- Subject Matter basis of organization rather than Calendar = 2002 Aug 17
- Themes enhanced by Macros 2002 Aug 30 discovery via dws from John Robb
- Visitors counted on your site - site meter is free here.
- Website monitoring service
- As we come to rely upon the veracity of our web site always being available to visitors, we might like to know when it goes down.
- Internet Seer has a free service, and various products offered for sale.
- They will monitor your website once an hour, and if they find that you are down, they will send you an e-mail notification. Of course this is only going to work to our advantage if our e-mail is on a different ISP than our website, if we check our e-mail regularly, and if tech support at our website is responsive to our contacts.
- After activation of my account, I got a screen of freebies offered. I decided to take them up on the complimentary one year subscription to Forbes Magazine, which turned out to be too good to be true. This took me to freebizmag where I filled out my business profile - industry, profession, etc. which then told me which magazines offered for free to my combination, and none of them I particularly wanted since I already familiar with most of them. What I was interested in was Forbes, and it was no longer on the list.
© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.
Last update: 11/15/2002; 12:27:38 PM.
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