Happy Birthday, Dad
Formerly a trademark attorney for a large multinational, my father taught me respect for the rule of law... among many other things. Strange to have that pop into my head out of the blue. Also taught me to fly a kite. Just two little examples from a lifetime of lessons. Happy Birthday, Dad! 

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California to Chile via Virginia
While here for dinner tonight, Bryan caught Kate in Chile via AOL Instant Messenger. Only three hour time difference California to Chile makes IM fairly easy way to communicate. Sweeeet. 

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Road To Amsterdam
Following on the heels of Kate's recent digicam acquisition, son Bryan also found goodies on craigslist this week. He found a good traveling backpack and Canon PowerShot S200 Digital ELPH. Great digital camera for a trip like this. Bryan leaves in September for a month in Europe, starting the adventure in Amsterdam. 

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High School Reunions
Was reminded today that my parents are headed to their 60th high school reunions in September. How great is that? 

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Radio Documentation Links
Decided to convert my IE browser favorites for Radio UserLand documentation into an on-line reference page. The favorites list was getting too long and hard to organize. Realized the value of converting to an on-line page in a typical Homer Simpson "D'oh!" flash of insight. Oh well ... better late than never. I've been tinkering with this conversion for far too long tonight/this morning. No link published to it yet, but there will be when I'm done. Maybe some sleep is called for... 

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Cleaning Day
Several hours spent in garage and under house gathering stuff for donation or disposal. Time for the pack rat to let go of the past ... at least a little bit. 

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Gotta Love Instant Messaging
Kate, newly arrived in Chile, noticed via IM client that her younger brother was on-line back home in California. She asked him to fetch Mom, who had nice IM chat with daughter in faraway land. First time they'd been in touch since Kate left for Chile. All is well; Kate's host family is working out well so far and Kate is already talking about seeing more of the sights. No pictures yet. 

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Happy Birthday to Blogging Alone
If you see this post, then Mark Paschal's Post To The Future worked.

Happy First Birthday to Stephen Dulaney's Blogging Alone.

Stephen, and the team at SocialDynamX, are working on the interesting FM Radio (FMR) product, a new GUI for Radio UserLand. Try the free evaluation and let them know what you think. 

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Happy Birthday, Debbie
[Post backdated from 7/1/03]
Once again, I didn't mail a card in time for Debbie's birthday. I will remedy that tonight. One of my apartment-mates during senior year in college, Debbie now lives with husband Beau in Michigan. Same state where we all attended school together. Fond memories of teaching Debbie to drive her manual transmission in the snowy football stadium parking lot. Happy Birthday, Deb. 

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Purchased FM Radio Station
This is my third post from SocialDynamX's FM Radio Station. I decided to support this small software vendor, and parted with the princely sum of $39.95 this afternoon. You can purchase the software at the UserLand Store. I assume this means that John Robb and UserLand like FMR. That's good enough for me. I hope these two products become more tightly integrated. It will be wonderful when this is seamless. A guy can dream, can't he? 

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On The Road To Chile
Not Hope and Crosby, but Bryan's girlfriend Kate on the road today for a semester in Chile. She bought a digital camera for the trip on craigslist last Friday. Found a nice little 2-megapixel Canon S100 ELPH, small enough to fit in pocket so she'll always have it handy. Looking forward to the first wave of photos. 

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New 'About The Asylum' Page
Just for grins, updated my About The Asylum page using the popular, but lame, "100 Things" format. Follow the link above or use the navigation column on the left side of this page. 

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How I Discovered Radio UserLand

Last week, a new reader asked, "What got you started with Radio UserLand?" The exact details are hazy, being over a year old, but the story goes something like this...

I started a backup brain in weblog format around May 2001. Almost exactly a year later, in May 2002, I considered posting the less personal material on a public site, permitting friends and family to witness the train wreck. I researched several weblog packages to ease the pain. Hand-coding a site wasn't difficult, but site-wide design changes were tedious. Microsoft's FrontPage had a proven track record as a piece of garbage. It was notorious for generating abysmal HTML, and constantly breaking any clean HTML that you wrote yourself. The product is still junk. I hope the development team has trouble sleeping at night. But I digress... I read reviews of several blog packages, but the details are no longer relevant. 

In June 2002, a long-overdue visit to Byte for Jerry Pournelle's latest column led me to Jon Udell's column Personal RSS Aggregators. (Original Byte link is dead. Jon's archive. My archive.) Being a tech-info junkie, this sounded like a great way to mainline the latest and greatest. I downloaded FeedReader and was tending to my news jones within minutes. Jon also mentioned his earlier column Radio UserLand 8. (Original Byte link is dead. Jon's archive. My archive.) Sounded pretty sweet. On the evening of June 16th 2002, I downloaded an evaluation copy of Radio and Redwood Asylum was born. I purchased a Radio license a few weeks later. The rest, as they say, is history. Thank you, Jon Udell, Dave Winer and the UserLand team.

This is my second post from SocialDynamx's FM Radio Station. Found some bugs and noted another enhancement request while preparing this post. However, since it is 3:20 a.m., I'm going to bed instead of documenting anything in detail right now.

 

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More Fun With FM Radio Station
I've sent a steady stream of notes to the support crew at SocialDynamx, the FM Radio Station folks, as I tinker with the 30 day evaluation copy. They've actually read my missives and responded quite positively. Will wonders never cease! Another very pleasant experience with a small software company. Imagine my shock when I received email from CEO Stephen Dulaney today! He's read my support comments and even popped by to read this Redwood Asylum blog.

I've played with several aspects of FMR, but it dawned on me that I had not yet used it for a blog post. D'oh! (Hey, I'm a news aggregator freak, not a heavy poster. So sue me...) Herewith, my first FM Radio Station post. This is a great new UI for Radio UserLand. The more I use it, the more I like it. Still, without a Post To The Past feature, I spend a lot of time in the standard Radio UI so I can use Mark Paschal's Kit. Some day I hope the core Radio product will incorporate this feature. Sadly, I'm not holding my breath. I'm sure John Robb and the UserLand crew have many higher-demand items on their plate. A guy can dream, can't he? 

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Want To Lose Your UserTalk Virginity?
[re-published 6/23/03 to fix bad link]
After looking at Rogers Caldenhead's new post indexing script earlier today, I decided it was time to learn some UserTalk. A search on Google for "UserTalk tutorial" led me to Matt Neuburg's Serious First Steps In UserTalk Scripting. If I'm going to drop UserTalk scripts into my Radio environment, maybe I should have at least some idea of what I'm doing. Now... where am I going to find some free time? 

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ActiveWords Cares
Received email today from Buzz Bruggeman at ActiveWords. Upside of dealing with smaller software companies? They care what their users think. Not a new concept, but sometime it feels like it. As I said recently, a fine product. Still recommended. See my earlier comments, as Ernie d'Attorney and John Udell do it more justice than can I. 

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Cadenhead UserTalk Training: Post Indexing Script
Great quick script from Rogers Cadenhead. (I've been using a method provided last year by John Udell.) I put Rogers Radio UserLand Kick Ass (Kick Start) book on my Amazon wish list. My son pre-ordered it as my Father's Day present.

Creating an index of weblog posts in Radio. Inspired by Rob Henerey's suggestion, I've written a Radio script that displays an index of weblog posts for the main weblog or a category.

Looking at the output of the scripts, I wish I had started writing post titles earlier than February. [Rogers Cadenhead: Radio Userland Kick Start]

 

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Radio UserLand Renewal Countdown
Noticed today that Radio now thinks my license is due for renewal again. This despite the fact that I renewed just fine last week. This is due, no doubt, to the fact that I restored radio.root from backup during my problems last week. Seems that I can't use my renewal code a second time. I posted this little difficulty to the Radio discussion group. Hope I get a workaround before the license expires. 

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Happy Birthday, Redwood Asylum
One year ago today, I installed an evaluation copy of Radio from UserLand. A frustrating and fascinating first year with the product. As I stated a few days ago: "Fantastic functionality, flexibility, and fun for $40. Where else can you get a content management system (CMS) at a comparable price?" This was not painless. Radio has many issues, some caused by the vendor code base, others caused by placing a lot of power in the hands of a UserTalk virgin. Will I continue with the product? Yes, I renewed my license last week. Today, UserLand's CEO posted encouraging words to all users in the discussion group. I look forward to fewer bugs, and more features.

Happy Birthday, Redwood Asylum. 

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More Radio Pain

• I thought I had fully recovered from my Radio disaster last Thursday.
• I thought wrong.
• Spent several hours today trying to restore good files over bad.
• I am no longer convinced that Andy's Data Cleaner caused the problem. There may have been (may still be) internal damage in weblogData.Root file.
• Ouch.

 

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FM Radio, again
Decided to download another evaluation copy of FM Radio. It didn't stay on my desktop very long the first time around, but willing to give it another look. Did not take long to find and report a few more bugs. The bugs reported during original evaluation are still there. However, they are making progress. 

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Practice Safe Computer Sex
Beware... mixed metaphors ahead! Earlier this evening I ran a data cleanup script provided by a helpful soul in the Radio community. When my private parts shriveled up and fell off, I knew I had a problem. The Radio application hung. This, as we all know, is hardly unusual. Since many people have problems with UserLand's own Compact File routine, I should not have expected smooth sailing with a pretty compu-stranger. When I finally forced Radio to shut down and restart, everything seemed OK.

Later, when checking my cloud site, all I found was a directory listing. Simple remedy, thought I. Silly old script-fondling fool. I republished my home page, but all graphics were broken. Poked around and found many other problems. Good thing I wore a condom this afternoon by backing up all data files before mixing scripty-fluids. I restored all data files from backup. Now I'm waiting for the entire site to republish. Due to my slow connection (124K ISDN on a good day with the wind blowing downhill) it will take a few hours for my private parts to grow back

Practice safe computer sex. Make a backup of all important files before a scripting quickie with someone you don't know. You never know where that programmer has been... 

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Radio Renewal
Renewed my Radio subscription a few days ago, as I approach my 1-year blogiversary. Many people in the discussion group have complained recently about Radio problems. I have issues with the product too, but for $40/year, including hosting, I live with them. Fantastic functionality, flexibility, and fun for $40. Where else can you get a content management system (CMS) at a comparable price? 

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Radio Damage
As I've mentioned before, I use Mark Paschal's Kit to backdate posts. The backdating function works very well. However, I had not modified my template to fix the permalink problem which backdating creates.

I tried his permalink macro this evening but it damaged Radio. System macros broke in several places, including the Desktop Home Page, News Aggregator, and upstreamed pages. I noticed that calling his macro during rendering created several bogus entries in weblogdata.root. Luckily, deleting the extra entries fixed the problem. I removed the macro from my templates and will go lick my wounds for a while. I'll have to document the details for him so we can discuss. 

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Thumbs Up: ActiveWords Support
I recently purchased ActiveWords. License activation caused a problem that quickly had me seeing red. ActiveWords support staff resolved the matter to my satisfaction quickly and professionally. Thumbs up. See what others have said about this product. I heard about ActiveWords via Ernie The Attorney and John Udell. Try a 60-day evaluation copy. Recommended. 

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Elder Statesmen?
Interesting to hear that many attendees at the Jupiter ClickZ weblog festival were over 40. That almost puts them in my neck of the woods. 

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Evangelist vs. Contributor
One might think, with all the evangelizing I did over the years for collaborative computing and communication tools, that being a content creator would come naturally. One would be thinking incorrectly. <grin> Spirited evangelist and talented content contributor are not always synonymous. Many bloggers combine these two traits admirably. Sadly, this one does not.

However, in ancient times, I pumped content into collaboration systems to bootstrap new tool users. One example: ever heard of Collabra Share? (See 1, 2, 3 at Netscape or 4, 5, 6 locally as linkrot protection.) Netscape acquired the vendor, Collabra Software, in November 1995 and Collabra Share was re-written to become Netscape's Collabra Server. Prior to the takeover, I purchased a 20-user Collabara Share license at work to manage one of our largest software development projects. I populated the system with bug reports, feature requests, and copies of the training material. To make a long story short, PC-based email at that time was so new to our company that major team players were mesmerized by it and would not consider other communication tools such as Collabra. As I knew they would, they eventually discovered the downsides to email for project management, but not in time to save the Collabra experiment.

There were other collaborative communication experiments, but some things just don't fit a particular corporate culture. It was years before our company evolved to the point that things such as extranets were possible. 

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Somewhere, Over The Rainbow...
... lies a place where this author does not suffer from severe news aggregator overload and blog block. I want to update this from notes I've made in my Handspring/PalmPilot, but somehow never do. Then I face the task of backdating everything, which isn't easy to do with Radio UserLand. I use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to backdate, but have not modified my template to fix the permalink problem this creates. Probably not a big deal, as nobody in their right mind would link to my posts, but I like to be complete. <pronounced "anal">.

For anyone reading this from my RSS feed (probably 2 people, maximum), my various categories will probably receive a flurry of updates. There exists:
RadioFun for Radio UserLand / RSS / Blog stuff
ToReview as misc. news aggregator backup brain
MacPile to stash Mac / OS X stuff so I can learn enough to help my wife

There, that wasn't so bad; blog block broken. Yeah, right. Don't hold your breath... 

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