Radio Tip: How to email to a category. [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: My Radio docs list now includes Andy Fragen's scripts [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Question: As I've become more comfortable with Radio I've begun using Categories to manage mini-websites -- for clients, special interests, etc. Currently, there is no way to propagate changes all the way through a specific Category except to "publish -->entire site". As my site gets bigger, this takes longer and longer. And it is pointless to republish stuff to the Userland cloud when all the changes are intended for an ftp server somewhere else. Adding the ability to publish all the pages in a single Category would greatly enhance Radio's effectiveness as a desktop website management tool. Answer: You should be able to do this using a Quick Script. Mark Paschal has instructions here: http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$10882#11024 (Quick Script, open the Radio application and choose Tools->Developers->Quick Script. Copy and paste the script into the window and click the Run button.) Question (follow-up): From reading Mark's post, it appears the way it works is I would create a script for each specific Category, and then run that script each time I wanted to publish that Category. Yes? Answer: Yes, you could always setup bookmarks for each of the scripts so you could just choose them from the menubar. [Lawrence Lee] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: Al's Radio Doc Sources got some additions thanks to Lycos search engine finding stuff that Google and Tecoma did not.  Here are some highlights of the revised connections.

Clark Venable

• Downstreamer Tool for Radio Userland - the opposite of upstreaming - send other people stuff for you to analyse on your desk top PC.
• This software was written by Seth Dillingham at Macrobyte Resources. (See Unknown)
• Hmm, I wonder if this could help with backup recovery?
• Your PC had a melt down and you not done a backup recently, then you trying reconstruction.  You might be able to use this to Publish in reverse from web site to replacement desk top???

Unknown

• Macrobyte Resources offers Form Generation Tool for Radio and Frontier sites.  See Clark Venable.
• Oh! Radio is a collection of links to Radio aids: Tutorials; Articles; some I have seen before, and some more places to explore.

Craig Burton

• Documentation Directory
• Tutorial on Radio Userland Channels
  • This is one of the best tutorials that Al has ever seen, and in this case also heard.  The interfaces are a bit different than Al accustomed to, which is a combination of Craig settings and the fact this was created over a year ago, and Radio has been upgraded since.  But Craig explained a lot of stuff, including stuff that was not previously clear to Al.  This may be worth viewing again some time, like going to a favorite movie or novel, and picking up more nuances on later trips.
  • He has done several tutorials: 
    • Click on the globe to get at the simple text;
    • Click on the hyperlink to experience the education.
• Define the word Blog
• Build a Radio Directory

I periodically reprint my Radio Doc Sources for reference review.  It is now up to 8 pages.  I may need to move my stuff to a separate page, so the explanation (just over 1/2 page) out of the way for regular visitors, and my elementary efforts at documentation don't pretend to be the equal of the worthies who came before me.  The count is now up to 48 sources of tools, tutorials, tips, documentation, examples, inspirations, and lots of stuff I do not grok yet as well as I desire.

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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Radio Tip: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing Accordingly, I have decided to down a healthy swig of geekola which I now share with the world as it was shared with me. Say you hate the idea of another site using your eminently marketable blogstuff to draw traffic and dollars that you never see, but you want your URL to be as widely passed around as possible. The syndication feed put out by Radio Userland can be customized, as it turns out. Here's all I know, though I haven't tried it yet. First go here and see if this makes sense to you: http://radio.userland.com/descriptionFilterCallbacksNo? Me neither. Then a white dove descended on a heavenly beam of light and delivered the following unto mine eyes: "That page says it in Radio-developer-speak, so not really. But you can: 1. Download this file: http://markpasc.org/blog/gems/rssFilterDescription.truncate.ftsc 2. Open the Radio application by selecting "Open Radio" from the its dock menu. 3. Select the File -> Open menu option and open the downloaded file. 4. Assent to saving it as weblogData.callbacks.rssFilterDescription.truncate. 5. The script will open; click "Compile" then close the script window. 6. Select the Radio -> Publish -> Weblog Home Page menu option. 7. Close the Radio app. On Windows File -> Exit actually stops Radio rather than just closing the app portion, but honestly I'm not sure how that works on Macs. The descriptions for your RSS items will be only the first sentence of each item instead of the whole thing. You could get more creative with deciding what to put, but it'd take someone else writing the script to be quite as easy as above. I hope that helps!" Hah! Well, I'll see. Thank you Mark, stay tuned, and pass me that geekola... [FarrFeed] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: RSS tutorial. Mark Nottingham: RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. (42 words) [dive into mark] [Don W Strickland: software] 

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LiveTopics Tool Waiting In The Wings
I hope this is finalized soon because I'm looking forward to using the liveTopics tool. The more I blog as "backup brain", the more I need organizational aids.

Radio Tools Licensing. Matt is looking for the perfect license model for his Radio tool. If you want to get your hands on liveTopics 1.0 before Hell freezes, you'd better join the discussion at http://www.quicktopic.com/16/H/tVkeJYmT2Wr/p-1.-1 and help Matt make up his mind fast. [read more] [s l a m]

 

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I updated the Radio weblog archive feature to include support for weekly archives. Starting the week on Sunday, each archive page displays the entire week of posts. An example of the weekly archive page for this week. [lawrence's notebook] 

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Weekly Archives for Radio Weblogs. One week ago, I released some code Lawrence wrote to enable Radio to generate Monthly Archive pages for your Radio weblog. Today I released some parts, also by Lawrence, that let you do Weekly Archives. Here's my weekly archive for this week -- week 35 of the year 2002. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 

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Radio Tip: Latest major addition to my Radio Doc Sources:

Scott Loftesness

• Notes on Customizing Radio with links to the various tools he found, and links to Radio Userland documentation that he found to be particularly helpful, and other people like I have listed here.

Do I really have 50 different sources there or am I miscounting?

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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Weblog as my backup brain.

Blog This at Con Jose.

Towards the end of the panel, Bill Humphries said "The web log for me is a research tool," and pointed (verbally any way!) to Cory Doctorow's reference to Dorie Smith's explanation of her web log as her "Backup Brain." Teresa Nielsen Hayden said "One of the reasons I have a web log is to keep track of all the things I find incidentally." The Live Journal folk said the same thing, and so I'm going to point (yes, again) to the commonplace book as a close relative if not a distant ancestor of the web log.

[Instructional Technology]

This nicely captures some of my key goals with keeping this weblog. It's the primary reason that I tend to take advantage of Radio's news aggregator to post mostly complete copies of the items that I want to remember. I also use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to search my weblog archives. I can usually manage to remember some fragment or key phrase about something I've posted. I can then usually find the original item in my archives.

The notion of personal knowledge management hasn't been explored enough. Maybe I'm sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can't see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible.

[McGee's Musings] 

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Radio Tip: Al Macintyre's Radio Doc Sources.

A great collection of links to Radio documentation, tips, tools, experts. I keep finding new, juicy things and ripe, proven resources. High editorial value. Thanks, Al.

[Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Adding navlinks to all Radio desktop pages.

After adding the radio_navlinks outline to my desktop website, I realized that only solved part of the problem. The other was getting the same navigation options for all Radio pages - the Aggregator page, the preferences pages, etc. If you add the activeRoll to the #template.txt file, you'll end up publishing it to the rest of the world.

That's when it hit me - all of Radio's "private" pages (i.e., the pages that only you as the user see, not what the rest of the world sees when reading your blog) are served up from the www/system folder. I copied the #template.txt file from the www folder into the www/system folder, and then modified the #template.txt file to add the activeRoll macro containing the radio_navlinks.opml file. Bingo.

This makes my own internal use of Radio far more effective.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Radio NavLinks.

Radio users only:

Just created a Radio outline called radio_navlinks.opml. The idea was to take all of the desktop Radio functions and put them into one outline. I then used the activeRoll macro by Marc Barrot (it's part of his activeRenderer suite) to put the outline in my desktop website template. The result? All Radio navigation options are available on my desktop website home page. I no longer have to navigate to two, three or four pages before getting to the one item I want.

If you want to do this, there's a couple steps:

• Save radio_navlinks.opml in your gems folder.
• Add <%activeRoll ( "file:///C:/Program Files/Radio Userland/www/gems/radio_navlinks.opml" )%> to your #desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt file wherever you want the navlinks to show up (I added them to my top-left corner).
• Make sure <%activeRendererHeader () %> is included in the head section of your #desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt file.

Please note: if you use this format, then you will always have the navlinks displayed whenever you load the desktop website. The downside: if Userland updates the navigation options, then you won't have those new menu items included in the navlinks outline. You can always point the activeRoll macro to the file that lives at my site - but if you're working offline you won't see the outline. Your call which makes more sense.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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myRSS "enables anyone to build custom RSS channels for virtually any news site they desire." [Scripting News] 

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Old-Time Original Weblog Directory
This resource does not get mentioned enough. It was where everyone went in "the good old days" to find the latest blogs. It is sad that some of the trail-blazing sites are taken for granted by many of us. So much so that we forget to mention them to newcomers...

Are you listed?. eatonweb portal.  A major improvement was implemented recently that adds bigtime value to Brig's alternative portal -- a new database is in place and all listed weblogs are now being tracked by "weblog name, url, description, country, state, region, language, category(s), keywords, birthdates, parent/children/sibling weblogs, author's sex, author's birthdate, ratings and reviews" -- needless to say, the site is now one super resource which will get better and better as more weblog authors respond to Brig's campaign to get people to edit their listings.  [Coolstop Daily Pick] [jenett.radio]

 

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What Is This Thing?
For those of you new to web logs, the following might be helpful. The tweney article covers a few of the reasons I blog.

Understanding weblogs. I've been spending the past several weeks messing around with weblogs. Last week, the light bulb went on: I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. (published in tweney report, 2002-08-28) [tweney.com]

 

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Updated About Page.

I updated the about this site page, incorporating changes with liveTopics and activeRenderer, and removing info about items that were no longer on the site. Request: if you're new to this site, take a look at the page and tell me if you can figure out what's going on. Since many people hitting this site aren't necessarily familiar with weblogs, I want to make sure that this is clear to non-bloggers. (That said, I'm interested in any opinions on the subject - so if you do know blogs and think I've missed something, let me know.)

Thanks.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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InstantOutlining Redux. 8/28/02; 10:14:02 PM by MB --Instant Outlining with IM protocols

• I've just downloaded a Jabber client (PSI) and opened an account on Jabber.org
• Next I've enabled Jabber in Radio's IM Notification preference page.
• Last step for now, I've unsubscribed from Dave and Jake's i/os, and resubscribed by clicking on their new OPML mug icons.
• Let's see what is going to happen...
• I obviously have to rework on my espressoCup macro in aR.

 [read more] [s l a m] 

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I released a new Radio feature this morning with some help from Jake to add monthly archives to Radio: "This feature lets you maintain monthly archive pages for your Radio weblog. Monthly archive pages contain all of the posts for a given month, so your readers can scan an entire month of posts on a single page." Example: Here's an archive page for lawrence's notebook with all the posts for August 2002. [lawrence's notebook] 

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Notification of instant outlining over instant messaging is now available.  This is a big deal.  Instant outlines require rapid delivery in order to live up to the name instant.  That is easily possible using an RCS and Radio in a permissive environment (on a LAN for example) via publication/subscription built into UserLand's tools.  It gets difficult on the open Internet were everyone is behind a firewall or NAT because there isn't an easy way to "push" notification to Radio on the desktop.  To simulate an instant experience, Radio would need to check the files on the server every minute or so, which of course chews up bandwidth.  This implementation solves this by using connections to commonly used instant messaging systems (AIM and Jabber) as a notification mechanism.  Nice.  There are lots of things that this notification system is going to make possible. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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IM Notification for Radio's Instant Outliner. New feature: Radio now sends and receives outline-change notifications over AIM and Jabber. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Let me explain:... What IM gives us: 1. It's fast because IM is designed to be fast. That's the nature of the transport. 2. It works behind firewalls and NAT (which includes *lots* of broadband users). Again -- it's made that way. 3. It saves bandwidth, since Radio no longer needs to poll over HTTP to see if an outline has been updated. 4. Bonus: Your copy of Radio will know who's subscribed to your outline. With a little UI work (on the way), you'll be able to see this info in your browser, and subscribe to your subscribers (and theirs, and theirs, and so on and so on...). Last, and most important: This is a first step towards opening up all kinds of doors for distributed Internet application development. Think about it... The milestone here is simple notification about changes to a file over a given IM protocol -- no big deal, right? What's new is that it's all open: the architecture in Radio is open and extensible, the protocols are known (and you can add your own at will), and the message format is a non-proprietary standard. Think about what else we might do a year from now... or 5 years from now... The mind boggles... [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 

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Question: I replaced my hard drive, and in the process repartitioned it into separate HFS and UFS partitions with those names, instead of the old single HFS partition named "Macintosh HD". When I tried to start Radio, I get an error message Couldn't create the folder "Macintosh HD" The desktop website is not available. I tried removing the Radio Userland folder from Applications and reinstalling from a fresh download (I haven't yet added any content), but it still fails. I couldn't find anything in ~/Library or /Library that appeared to refer to the old disk. Does anyone have any suggestions? Answer: Andy Fragen has something over at http://radio.weblogs.com/0001017/publicTools/scripts/ that I just used to fix a similar problem (Moved Radio to another partition due to space issues and creating a symbolic link to the new location so that it LOOKS like it's still in the same place didn't work completely until I ran his script.) [Andy Stoffel] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Question: I've spent a lot of time perusing the disparate RadioDocs of different authors. Some had "roadmaps" for learning Radio.

[Alison Fish: Radio Questions]

• Document Road Map by Russ Lipton: A list of what he wants to document according to this question:

The question on the table is, "what are the highest priority areas for documenting Radio, especially (though not exclusivley) for end users"?

Answer: My Radio docs list [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: Stories added to Al's weblog, off the home page, include:

• Radio Doc Sources
  • Tutorials for Radio, and nuance clarifications.
  • A road map to Radio documentation destinations.
  • My latest major addition & I expect I will be adding more here.
  • I think there may be a need for this kind of topic using the dws.Radio.FAQ model, to grow a directory of all shareable Radio documentation that anyone knows about.
• Radio url number system
  • A road map to Radio urls for the newbie that I am.
  • When I get versatile in Navigation Links I might not need this any more.
• Understand Radio Categories
  • Grok overall concepts, then step by step implement them.
  • Lots of links to other people documentation.
  • I think this documentation model worked out quite well.
• Understand Radio News Aggregation
  • Grok overall concepts, then links to other people documentation for the actual implementation.
  • I plan to do more later like this Understand Other Topics.

I plan to repost a directory like this one, from time to time, as my collection gets significant updates.

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: How to do this or that in Radio ... Al has links in past posts to:

• Until Al reverse engineered the [Radio url number system], Al was engaged in a number of wild goose chases, well armed with lots of wild misconceptions.
• [IE Spell Checker] info thanks to [Alan Brand Radio Instructions]
• Spell Checking, Thesaurus Tool, and Language Translation links shared Aug 17.
• [Understand Radio Categories] effort to walk through the process of understanding the concept, then implementing it, with links to other people documentation covering most of the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.
• [Understand Radio News Aggregation] story that tries to conceptually define what it is all about, to potential beginners, with links to other people documentaiton for how to get it working.

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Question: Are there search engines that are good at finding Weblogs on a particular topic, or in our neighborhood? Where do we find advice on increasing traffic to our web site thanks to search engines finding our content?

Answer: Check out

Scott Johnson's Becoming Part of the Weblogging Community which outlines Community Resources, with brief introductions to their functions and how we can participate.  Also check out his Etiquette on pages 8-9.  Just as there is a word Netiquette for e-Etiquette, is there a word for Blogging Etiquette?

• Weblogs.com
  • Recently updated - includes Radio and Manila sites.
• News is free.com
  • The blogging world includes people writing new content, and commenting on what others have written.  News is free.com helps us find interesting stuff to comment on.  You can also add your Weblog to their input.
• Day Pop.com
  • Search Engine of Weblogs.  Search for your own name and see who has commented on you.  This is not the same as referrers, limited to posts in the last 24 hours.
• MIT Blog dex
  • This indexes the information to which Blogs are linking.
• Meerkat
  • You can select types of news you want to follow.
• Garbox
  • Show you all sites that have linked to a particular weblog entry or news item.
• Syndic8
  • Alternative to News is free

Go to Scott's Info to get the actual urls of these places, reviews in more detail than my outline, and step by step how to participate in them.  Scott's [Fuzzy Blog] recently admired www.blogstreet.com which has 9,700 blogs there when I checked.

Answer: Check out Al Macintyre's:

• July 10 post on top UK Weblogs thanks to specific services.
• July 12 post on BlogChalking, which I do not exactly figure out.
  • Later, [Joseph the Poet] shares an alternate site.
• Aug 12 post on MSNBC and Eaton Web, both organizing Weblogs by subject.
  • Later, I find and explore some other conceptually similar sites.
  • http://www.jjg.net/portal/tpoowl.html
  • some directories have useful info even if they no longer maintained
  • http://www.cyberjournalist.net/cyberjournalists.html
    Directory of weblogs maintained by professional journalists
  • http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html
    Directory of weblogs maintained by librarians
  • http://portal.eatonweb.com/ appears to have approx 6,000 Weblogs on their search engine.
  • http://www.bloghop.com/ and http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ have twice as many
  • http://blo.gs/ tracks 39,000 weblogs for 450 users
  • Not all of them are Radio Userland of course.
  • When we look at the various Cloud Status Link connections from our Radio Site, the numbers seem to be higher.
• Aug 14 I try to register my weblog at Eatonweb and relay my struggles getting that done.

Al has often mentioned [Search Day] as a great source for information about Search Engines in general.  For example [Aug 22 Search Day] surveys why some perfectly good web sites fail to provide a search engine to improve user navigation.  In my case it is merely that there are many things I plan to do some day & this is one of those I have procrastinated with, and I want to use it for myself.  But I also want to learn what's involved in making a site Search Engine-Friendly.  QUOTE

More than 1,600 webmasters responded to the survey, which covered the topics of why site managers have or have not installed search engines, correlations of the sizes of sites and the installation of search engines, frequency of updates, file formats served, languages, and number of languages used on sites.  Also see [Search Engine Ratings] of the 16 most popular search tools.

 

Key findings of the [Search Tools Survey]:

• Most sites with a search tool installed wanted to provide better
  navigation and a professional look for the site.
• Sites with more pages tend to have search engines installed. 
• Sites which are updated hourly or daily are much more likely to have

  search installed than those which update less frequently.
• Sites with non-English text are more likely to have search engines

  installed.

  
  

  Why haven't the majority of web managers surveyed installed search

  engines?  Time and [complexity] were the most frequently cited reasons.

  
  UNQUOTE. 

[IT Analysis Com] reports that the US Gov FTC questions Search Engine integrity with respect to disclosing paid links. 

From Search Day I have found out about some Directory based search engines, where we start with the general flavor of site we want then drill down from there, such as

• [1DO3.com] in the UK has a section just on Weblogs covering current events.
• [Speciality Search Engines] has links to
  • [Invisible Web] where normal search engines cannot go
  • [Web Rings] where a cluster of sites are interlinked on topics of mutual interest, such as a Science Fiction Fan Club.  I think there are a lot more out there than this outfit has indexed.
  • Search Engines designed for usage through Wireless.
  • [Miscelaneous Other] such as discussion groups, job postings, literature, museums and art works, transportation
• Search Day newsletter subscribe from http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/
• Dig into Search Day archives.  July 11 they had a big article with connections to 131 different legitimate ways to improve traffic to your web site, by ensuring that search engines will include you properly.  There's also a bit here on the e-etiquette of linking to other sites, irrespective of whether they are weblogs.
• Remind Al ... 2 do includes getting into the gems = Al's notes on Traffic to Web Site ideas for increasing.

I mentioned a Radio Wish to one of my Radio correspondents, who said that it sounded like I was talking about [Mind Mapping] which intriqued me, but I still have that Radio Dream:

Many search engines give us the choice of searching the whole internet, just that one site, or just the sites run by a particular company.  I want a sub-category to be a group of people who have created Radio Userland documentation, in which we can adjust the list of sites involved, perhaps have new ones and url changes communicated to us via News Aggregation.  I also want a system of aliases, in which some feature might be known by different names to people familiar with different kinds of Weblogging software vendors, or may be commonly confused with some similarly appearing interface with other Computer software.

So we search for topic X and we also get links to Y and Z because of aliases, and we get hits where they exist on any one of the group of sites where people have done documentation.  But I want more, a directory of Radio features, with who has documented that, so it becomes obvious on which features no one has yet documented.

This concept could also be applied to other special interests ... we compile a directory of sites that are involved in a particular category of particular interest to us, then do a search vs. all of them at the same time.

This post was originally written for Al's new category [e-Radio Ideas = Empower Freedom of e-Speech through dws.Radio.FAQ learning in Radio Userland: Questions; Wishes; Tips; Speculation] but then as it developed, Al thought also applied to the Home Page.

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Template Changes
Corrected standard page template, moving jenett radio randomizer button. Found and fixed bug which caused font differences between home page and standard templates. 

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