Radio.active

After trials, tribulations, false starts, wearing of sack cloth and much gnashing of teeth (and the blood of one dead chicken) I have successfully moved my weblog. For the past week I have been posting only at the new location. It works as expected. All is well.

New Home page.
New primary RSS.

Most of the archives will remain here in order to preserve as many links as possible, but I ran out of disk space and had to delete some of the early ones to keep the site under 40MB. All the archives are at the new site. Eventually I will come back here and put in re-direct meta-tags for both web browsers and RSS aggregators to automagically load the new location. In the meantime, if you have subscribed to a particular Category -- i.e. Patento.absurdium -- you can re-link to it via the Category links on the left.

Many thanks to:

Mark Pilgrim for design guidance and CSS creation
Erin Clerico at Weblogger.com for site hosting and comments configuration
Brent Ashley and Matt Mower for technical assistance
the entire Userland discussion group for moral support.

(drum roll please)

Now, on with the show.......................

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

activeRoll for Blog-Tribe @ Ryze

12:29:03 AM

comment []

I just used the activeRoll feature in activeRenderer to render an OPML file stored at blogrolling.com and display the complete list of Ryze bloggers. It's an experiment to see how it works.

It's easy enough. Works just like the blogroll macro in Radio. I need to get a grip on aR's CSS to make it look right. But it works. See it at the bottom of the left-hand column, but catch it while you can -- it'll be gone soon until I learn to control the appearance.

Monday, November 25, 2002

Cleaning Up the Archives

9:09:45 PM

comment []

I've just spent a couple of hours cleaning up old posts so my archive pages would work. I decided to go back through the old posts and have Radio generate weekly archive pages. So I started going back to each eweek and editing one post. But I found a lot my my old stuff was poorly formatted. I must have found a dozen or so open blockquote tags, which causes the indent to run on down the page to all the subsequent posts. I spent about an hour going through and checking all the archive pages, editing old posts, and republishing the page. Finally go it all cleaned up.

I also decided to start using Marc Barrot's activeRenderer to keep a collection of link pages. I used aR to create the Archive, MapInfo, and Presentations pages on the site since they're link-driven and keeping an OPML file seems the easiest way to manage them.

I'm really starting to like the Outliner. I've been using Radio for about six months and I'm only now getting the hang of it. This points out one of the problems with the outline paradigm -- it takes a while to get your arms around it. And I'm a reasonably thoughtful and computer savvy person, though I'm not a programmer. But working your way through all the idiosyncrasies of Radio, then learning about renderers, then learning about the Outliner is a daunting task. There is definitely room for some sort of training and support with these products. But they sure are nice when you begin to understand them and they work like their supposed to.

Sunday, November 24, 2002

Radio vs FTP

12:59:05 PM

comment []

I have a suggestion for working around the serious problems with Radio's FTP function. Like others, I've been struggling with Radio's dysfunctional FTP upstream drivers while trying to move this weblog to my own domain. Radio's whole FTP driver structure is broken and needs to be fixed, but that probably won't happen

The main symptom seems to be Radio locking up during the upstream function, failing to send any data but churning away at 100% CPU usage for hours at a time. The only fix seems to be shutting down Radio and restarting, at which time Radio will pickup where it left off on the upstream process. I'm wondering if one of the Radio scripting gurus could write some sort of FTP monitor/restart script similar to Andy Fragen's Keep Web Server Up tool.

Keep Web Server Up monitors and restarts Radio's web server function under Mac OS X, which seems to have a habit of killing the Web Server service in Radio for no good reason. The FTP problem is probably more complicated since FTP isn't a separate Radio service that can be easily stopped and started. Maybe the solution has to run as some sort of external service. I don't know. But it's bound to be doable.

The other real problem is Radio sucking CPU cycles just querying for new files. When Radio uses the XML Storage System method it's CPU load for background upstreaming functions are trivial. But switch to FTP and the CPU pegs at 100% every five seconds. Radio basically takes a full 20% of CPU capacity to do nothing but monitor folders for FTP upstream. This can be stopped by turning the background upstream function off, or setting it to upstream only after publishing. But that's less convenient than leaving Radio's publish service on all the time.

Monday, November 18, 2002

New Construction Woes

9:45:17 AM

comment []

Well, everything is moved but it's not at all like I wanted -- Radio's ftp driver thrashes like a beached whale soaking up 100% of my CPU. Radio and the new theme don't seem to get along just yet, as it spent all night tying itself into knots trying to upstream.

The Radio TCP/IP plumbing is really broken. This is very frustrating.