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Thursday, July 04, 2002
Paschal's Kit Rocks Radio with Aggregator on Steroids
I believe such filtering is critical to effective use of RSS and Aggregators in K-Log environments, where you may need to filter down to key articles that pertain to project- or time-specific topics. Oddly, a search for Paschal's name on the K-Logs Yahoo! Group yields zero results. I would think the other K-Loggers would have discussed this improvement.
Installation is a snap, directions are clear, and after a little experimentation use seems pretty intuitive. Oh yeah, Kit does all sorts of other things like run scripts, search weblogs, change time/date stamps on posts, edit outlines, and probably other things I don't understand. But if it didn't do anything more than give me control over the aggregator it would be a winner.
Paschal also makes Stapler, an RSS generator you can use to create feeds for sites that do't have them. Once you create the feeds Stapler will store them locally, update them, and even aggregate them into combined feeds. Pretty cool.
Another gem found courtesy of [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].
Enabling Category-specific Stories in Radio
Some months back Mark Woods at On the Mark published this article on Enabling Category-specific Stories in Radio. While not as easy as having Radio support category-specific stories directly, this function is one of the few remainining holes in using Radio for K-Log (knowledge logging) applications.Thanks to [Russ Lipton Documents Radio].
Automatic RSS Titles and Links
Andy Fragen got tired of having blank lines above his posts when he forgot to add a Title. He wrote a callback. Andy Fragen doesn't have blank lines anymore. Andy's cool.I can't make it work (I'm a Frontier idiot) but I will get it figured out. This will be a great way to have my Mail-to-Weblog posts formatted to match my active posts.
Untitled post callback.. OK, I fiddled with the untitled post macro to make it use the first sentence as the title of the post. If anyone wants the callback let me know. Actually here it is.[Surgical Diversions]
on untitledPost (adrpost) {
if not defined (adrpost^.title) {
adrpost^.title = string(string.firstSentence (adrpost^.text))}}Simple changes. Callbacks are great!
Show Category Listing for Each Post
Rick Klau points us to yet another nice K-Log feature addition to Radio -- listing the categories for each posting. I like this one. A category listing on each post makes it obvious to new readers there is a classification system here, and help them quickly visualize the structure and where to look for things of interest. Thanks for the pointer, Rick.
Many thanks to Roland Tanglao who pointed me to the comments at Jake's site that explain how to do it. It's simple - just drop a file into your Macros directory, then add one line to your item template. Took less than five minutes. (Roland's site is worth visiting for KM issues, by the way, and Jake's a developer at Userland who's got a number of good things to share re: Radio and blogs in general.)[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Shortening RSS Descriptions
This thread in the Userland DG is about creating a callback to truncate the default RSS descritpions in Radio. By default, Radio puts an entire post into the RSS. I wanted to send out only the first sentence. This helped. Thanks to Rick Klau for guidance.wipeCloud and Other Tools
A collection of Radio scripts and tools for more advanced users from Andy Fragen.
Links to Categories Macro
A DG thread that covers two things -- scripts from both Paschal and Phil Wolff for rendering a link-list of categories in a side bar, and Paschal's script for posting the relevant categories as a part of each post.Blogrolling
blogrolling.com, a web service for managing blogroll lists. I don't think this is any easier than Radio's outliner function -- since that lets you edit a text file -- but it looks like a good solution for other blog software that lacks a good blogroll feature.Aggregator Redux
I've been using AmphetaDesk while on the road. I think it has some configuration options I haven't quite grasped yet. I know Morbus Iff is going to add grouping in the next release. Some aging and auto-delete control would be nice, too.Nothing beats being able to post directly to the weblog, though. I miss that. It's a pain to have to do the cut-and-paste routine 2-3 times to get the URL, the title, the copy, etc. How do other weblogs do that? Do blogger and such have aggregator facilities or some interface element that lets users post from third-party aggregators?
In Line for Outlines
I'm starting to wonder if I could use the Outliner in Radio as a text editor -- I really like the blogroll trick. I'm wondering if there is a stand-alone version of it that would run on my laptop. I'm wondering if I could understand enough about OPML files to use it as a source for editing my weblog entries when I'm away from Radio. I saw a couple of docs in the DL on how to use renderers to read OPML files into HTML pages. I'm wondering if I really need to learn still another format. I'm wondering if my energy isn't better spent figuring out what to write instead of worrying about how to write it.
Deep-seated Insecurities
I like the idea of remote access. I'm gonna do it. Soon. I don't like the security issues. I think I'll have to setup a special machine that runs only the apps I want to access remotely, and has no access to other network resources. I'll have to figure out the stupid Windoze Users and Groups permissions so the machine runs in something less than Administrator mode. Lots of programs don't seem to run well like that. I don't know if that's my fault or the programmer's.If I do this I guess I'll be a "remote" user all the time, huh? Even from my primary machine I'll be accessing Radio over the network. Wonder if there are any performance issues. I'll have to experiment.
What about a software VPN? Doesn't Windoze have something built-in? It would be nice to have access to my files -- at least a subset of files. Ugh. Document management. Versions. Keeping track. Argh-h-h-h. Must be a better way. Anyone have a suggestion for accessible doc storage? I know X-Drive and all those silly "hard drive in the sky" operations have shut down, and I don't know that I trusted them anyway. I guess putting them in a pwd-protected subdirectory on my web host is about as good as it gets. But then there's uploading, file management, versions, keeping track. Ugh.
Maybe I just share out the D: drive on the host machine, mount that across the network and store my project docs and stuff there. Wouldn't be too hard to have a projects or work folder. Since my other machines wouldn't be on when I was gone there would be no chance of getting to them.
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This Page was last updated: 11/28/2002; 6:39:59 PM
Copyright © 2002 Terry W. Frazier
