The Kindness Of Strangers
More tools for Radio UserLand. As a part-time programmer, I am impressed by the breadth of free tools available from a devoted user community.

dataFileCleaner Tool released. With loads of help from Greg Haneck, we are releasing the dataFileCleaner Tool. It is a complilation of several scripts that comb through several of the databases intrisic to many of the core functions of Radio and remove errant entries that are prone to cause problems. dataFileCleaner contains my cleanAggregatorStories script and Greg Haneck's cleanWeblogsComEntries script as well as another script that we thought would be useful, at least based upon several recent things Lawrence did to help others. The scripts that run in this tool are safe. Greg and I have been running them for many weeks now. If the tool does anything you will see an item in the Events Log. Try it you'll like it. [Surgical Diversions]

 

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RSS Explorer Access To Computerworld Feeds
Nice demo of Dave's new RSS Explorer tool. Thanks, Dave.

Computerworld has ten new RSS feeds. If you're a Radio user, be sure to get the nifty RSS Explorer tool, and then click here to choose the Computerworld feeds you'd like to subscribe to. It's a pretty nerdy pub, but they can probably tell you what IBM is up to and Unix and wireless stuff, and Microsoft. [Scripting News]

 

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Sample code for focused custom Google search. The site search feature of Google's free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/). With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I've come up with code that produces a custom Google search of just this blog. I've in fact replaced my calendar with it (well, I've moved the calendar to the bottom of my masthead column anyway, on the theory that robots may still find it useful). I want to offer the code to anyone to copy and tweak, but I've learned that posting code (even escaped-out code) to a blog entry tends to upset news aggregators, so instead I've written up the learning process with a few code samples as a story. [Christian Crumlish (xian): salonika] 

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Radio Tip: <a href="javascript:{p='http://www.dws.us/weblog/';d=new Date();y=d.getYear()-1;m=d.getMonth()+1;j=d.getDate();location.href=p+(y<1000?1900+y:y)+'/'+(m<10?'0':'')+m+'/'+(j<10?'0':'')+j+'.html';}">One year ago   [Jinn of Quality and Risk] Question: Given this JavaScript source for the function offered above, can someone send me an improvment that will work for blogs less than 1 year old? Can the script be improved to return the date the blog was born until it is at least a year old? <a href="javascript:{p='http://www.dws.us/weblog/';
d=new Date();y=d.getYear()-1;m=d.getMonth()+1;j=d.getDate();
location.href=p+(y<1000?1900+y:y)+'/'+(m<10?'0':'')
+m+'/'+(j<10?'0':'')+j+'.html';}">One year ago</a> [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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RSS Validator. This is a brand new RSS validator, built from the ground up to support all versions of RSS (but optimized for RSS 2.0). The interactive web front end is available now; XML-RPC, SOAP, and XML-over-HTTP interfaces are coming. Concept, web design, and 300 test cases by me. Coding by Sam Ruby. And of course it's open source. (167 words) [dive into mark] 

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I like.... RSS Explorer is an excellent tool if you use Radio.  Kudos to Dave for the idea... [jenett.radio] 

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go ahead - click the button - I dare ya!.  Thanks for the mention Bruce... [jenett.radio] 

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Nice resource.  BlogComp: Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table  [Redwood Asylum < Column Two] [jenett.radio] 

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Bootstrap: How to Redirect an RSS Feed. "You've just moved your weblog or news site, and the RSS feed has moved too. You want people who are subscribed to your RSS feed to automatically start reading the feed at its new location. This document explains how to do that." [Scripting News] 

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WebReference has another sample Radio chapter from the O"Reilly blogging book. This one is about the technology, the object database, scripting language, networking, content management, XML, SOAP and XML-RPC support, and upstreaming. Thanks! [Scripting News] 

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My Top Five Blue Sky Radio Wishes..

The top 5 really big improvements I'd like to see in UserLand's Radio.

Support the blogging of other objects besides a post.

• Calendar events, resumes, forms, etc. This includes making it easy to:
  • Define, add, and share definitions of new types of objects (e.g. events), and
  • Create, store, publish, permalink, annotate/comment, syndicate, and aggregate instances of those objects (e.g., my birthday).  
• Radio's support for RSS 2.0 is a good step in this direction.
• This also implies the ability to group and sort the posts in a category by attributes other than post date. Calendar events need to be grouped into present and future, sorted by the date of the event instead of the post date. Book listings might be sorted by Dewey Decimal. résumés by occupational category. Travel notes by region.
• A note on this to Garth. News Item templates. vCalendar and Radio. Calendar standards and Radio. Keyless klogging for the rest of us. Multi-payload klogging: a world of content. Macromedia audioblog object.
  
•  Click here to add this event to your Outlook or Netscape calendar.

Better news reading for scale, efficiency, and smarts.

• The current design is practical for only 20-30 active feeds.
• Help me read thousands of news feeds. RSS subscriptions are like active bookmarking; a stronger link. I'm subscribed to about 500 feeds after 9 months of using Radio, about 8,000kb of fresh html news daily, about 200 pages to read. Multiply by 10.
• MyRadio, Kit, and other add ins help a lot and illustrate various ways to tackle the problem. But this should be core functionality and more natural.
• Meme tracking. You have all the data and the spare cycles: give me more intelligence about what I'm reading.
  • Show me posts that are related, across sources.
  • Posts that cite each other.
  • Posts that cite the same source.
  • Trackback/Threading. Here are posts that cite the one you are reading.
• It would be interesting if I could access my newsreader from anywhere on the net.
• More specific suggestions. Rick Klau's May 2002 requests. Jenny's wish. Bryce Yeh's tuning of new aggregation intervals up and down.

Double User Success on Top 100 Tasks.

• Too many opportunities for a first time computer user to muck things up. Calendar navigation sucks.
• Start from scratch without an outside usability team. Rethink the metaphors and core behaviors.
• Specifics. LiveJournal screenshots.

Config and Theme subscriptions.

• Tweaking look and feel, tools, macros, etc. is too error prone and time consuming for newbies and kloggers.
• Let me subscribe to a trusted source (perhaps the IT or marketing department in my organization) for ever-fresh, well-tested, and enterprise-standard Radio setups. Radio configuration themes. Themes with Code.

Rework the Radio Outliner's user experience from scratch.

• I love the outliner, but this is this is an outliner only a nerd could love.
• The command surfaces are not intuitive, I found it awkward and error prone (its behavior not conforming to my mental model) and very hard to learn. Hard to get information out easily without learning ideas like "rendering" and "html" and "rules" and XML. I should be able to edit as smoothly and naively in the outline as I do in Word or in the IE edit box control. I want to be able to drag and drop things between open outlines (like dropping a Manila post into a Manila site structure). I want autosave and spellcheck and for it not to break html when pasted from RTF. I want more http://dijest.com/aka/categories/blueSkyRadio/2002/09/10.html#a1998  on the Prefs page. 
• It needs serious user experience analysis and redesign. Target the person who just knows basic Windows/Mac, email, and MS Office.

Those are the big ones. Heavy lifting. Big impact.

Here are 30 lighter ones, in on particular order:

1. A Radio toolbar for IE like the ones from Google and Yahoo!
2. Give every new Radio site its own domain, so Google works on a per-site basis.
3. Keep new themes coming: pretty counts and differentiates.
4. The portal idea: keep working on it.  
5. klognet in a box (radio, manila, RCS, RadioComments, a search engine)
    
6. Federate RCS: I should be able to both run my own stats and choose to share them with other aggregators. You can't now.
7. Run selective RSS feeds through Google's API for the translation. Let me read an Italian feed in machine translated English. 
8. Improve the post-to-email features. A checklist.
9. Include permalinks in syndicated body
10. Linkrot spider, reporter, and healer.
     
11. mailThisItem macro.
12. More than one multi-authored synthetic category per Radio.
13. Geocode posts and RSS feeds. Blogmapper.
14. Backlinking.  
15. Can Radio detect Astroturfing (fake grassroots blogging) in feeds it reads?
     
16. Re-Publish Commands from the browser UI
17. Outlook calendar to OPML and RSS.
18. browser bookmarks to OMPL and back
19. Show and let me manage the publishing queue. (like a print queue)
20. Declare fiction. When I post, let me checkbox if I don't intend this post as truthful reportage. It is an intentional fiction. I've seen several situations where someone is blogging in character, is writing satirically, or is just blowing off steam. Useful to keep memes straight.
     
21. Secure blogs. Enterprise grade blog security.
22. Localization.
23. Measure and watch the unintended ways people use your tools.
24. UserLand jargon file.
25. RCS Referers as an RSS feed.
     
26. Referrers in a rolling 24 hours.
27. Let me float my Radio RSS news as a Windows screen saver. Make it fun.
28. Finish cleaning up the archives.
29. Do more for attachments, including more formats and format conversions. Details.
30. Continuous writing (autosave to web)

What do you think? <A title="Add Phil Wolff to your AIM Buddy List" href="aim:addbuddy?screenname=evanwolff">AIM Y! @Ryze

[a klog apart Blue Sky Radio] 

[a klog apart] 

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I really need to get liveTopics installed here at Rdwood Asylum. Really!

liveTopic 1.0.5 released.

Today I am releasing liveTopics version 1.0.5

This is a minor upgrade and bugfix from version 1.0.3.   The documentation in this release is slightly worse than for 1.0.3 in that it is now out of date.  Documentation will be a priority for the 1.1 release.

If you do not have automatic updates enabled you will need to update manually. You do this my opening the Radio application (using the Open Radio option of the Radio icon in the system tray (or mac equivalent). Then from the Tools menu, choose the liveTopics submenu and from that "Update"

The ZIP file of v1.0.5 is posted on the Novissio website.

Whats new in this version:

1) Tools.

The liveTopics page now has a Tools section with the following tools:

• Topic Editor (basic info, rename and delete)
• Category Converter Wizard (turns categories into topics)
• Table of Contents Publisher (re-publish the Table of Contents via the web)
• XFML exporter (create an XFML export of your weblog suitable for facetmap.com and other sites)

2) Multi-word Topic Phrases

By enabling the preference here you can enable the use of multi-word topic phrases in liveTopics.

With this feature enabled you can use ' ' spaces to separate words in topics.  When entering topic phrases they should be surrounded using '"' (double-quote) character as in "a multiword topic phrase".

For more information and to see which bugs have been fixed, check JIRA.

 

[Matt Mower: liveTopics]

 

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Running out of Radio disk space. I was running out of Userland disk space. I got several tips for conserving disk space. I eliminated 7 of my 11 categories, and this helped a bit.

The biggest reason for the large disk use was my blogroll, which I had listed on the home template using the blogroll macro. Because there were 133 news sources in the blogroll, the size of the HTML files grew up. I cut down my disk use a lot by creating a separate "story" of my blogroll. In this light it is somewhat suprizing that so many sites carry listings of the blogrolls on their pages.

With these modifications I have some blogging time left until disk space becomes a problem again. Now I have 71% free of the available 40 MB. But I'm looking for a nice-looking template which would minimize the disk use even further. [Universal Rule]

 

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I made another small modification to the map page of this weblog. Now the page lists 300 latest titled postings. Perhaps that is too much. On the other hand, that amount of data shouldn't eat too much bandwidth. [Universal Rule] 

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Mapping a weblog. I made a map of this weblog using the Radio macros. On the map I have

• a Google search form
• pointers to the channels (categories) of this weblog
• a list of longer texts
• links to the most recent titled posts (currently 150 most recent)
• links to ranking sites to follow the use and linking to this weblog

This page was rather easy to do, and especially I like the list of longer texts, which helps in finding older relevant postings. [Universal Rule] 

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Question: How do I post my stories to my alternate categories? I want to have bios, short excerpts, etc. appear as a clickable link on the left hand side of my private, internal web site, not on my public Radio blog. Is this possible? Is this the best way of doing this? Answer: You currently can't post stories to categories. If you navigate to the /www/categories/nameOfCategory/ folder, you can just create new text files in this folder and it will be upstreamed to the server and rendered as an HTML page.[Lawrence Lee] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: This template reconstruction process is more difficult than you would think. Apparently others are going through the same struggle that I am. I just rediscovered this resource which I have overlooked because the title threw me off - thanks to Dog Newsie for pointing it out. How to Create a Theme is a good resource for people reconstructing their templates. Even if you have no interest in creating a theme for others to use, this tutorial provides a useful checklist for home template, item template, desktop homepage template macros to include. [Alison Fish: Radio Questions] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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The Circle Of Life #2: Surprise #2.

[RadioFAQs]

Radio Tip: Mark Pilgrim has a new innovative use for RSS. He accumulates inbound pointers to specific articles on his site in an RSS 2.0 feed. It's so twisty it drives my mind crazy. In a few minutes this comment will appear in his feed. [Scripting News] [Bruce Zimmer: RadioFun] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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The Circle Of Life #1: Found this reference to Redwood Asylum (Bruce Zimmer) while reading RSS feeds. Surprised.

Yes, I'm an RSS bigot too. I confess. I'm an RSS bigot as well. I've discovered that Radio's news aggregator is at least as important as it's tools for editing and posting. I find that I can more than fill up my reading time with content in the aggregator. The first thing  I look for in a new site is whether there is an RSS feed available. Second choice is to figure out how to use RssDistiller (or equivalent) to generate a feed I can route into my news aggregator. [Seblogging News] [Bruce Zimmer: RadioFun] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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Question: I tried installing radio on a different computer. On that installation I had radio point to a different domain. Now any permalink reference on my original radio site has the domain for the other site, so all sorts of links are broken. How do I manually change my permalink back to my original URL? Answer: You should be able to fix the problem by running the script on this page: http://radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$14904 [Lawrence Lee] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip:  for Beginners

• I have just created a new story on Stories and Shortcuts.  It tries to explain what is the difference between a Story and a Shortcut and how they work on Radio and Manila, which is not the same precise way.  I share step by step instructions how to setup this stuff, using what I consider to be constructive examples for people still advancing across the learning curve, near where I was until recently.
• I am working on a story (not yet finished yet, which is an all too familiar pattern on Al's Weblog) on the different kinds of Links we can have, and I got to the part where I wanted to explain Global Links as opposed to Local Links.  Well, Stories and Shortcuts are both Global Links in Manila, while Radio Stories are Global Links in Radio, while Radio Shortcuts are not neccessarily Links, but in my examples I show how they can be used that way, so doing a story on them was my path to explaining what are Global Links, by example.
• Check my latest new stories here.
  • Since my last post here updating this topic, Al's stories that have been started or added to, on Al Macintyre's weblog, are the following:
  • "Al Categories" 
  • "Al Introduction"
  • "Blog Books"
  • "Blog Software"
  • "Enhanced Radio Tools"
  • "Link Services" - outfits that help you see who is linking to your weblog
  • "Link Types" - what I was working on last few days, then needed to do "Stories and Shortcuts" to illuminate just one of the Types.
  • "Radio Doc Sources"
  • "Radio Start"
  • "Search Engine Tips"
  • "Stories and Shortcuts" - the latest new one

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

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Too Much Of A Good Thing?
I've already trimmed my "must read" list due to newsfeed overload. Can I handle yet another source for RSS feeds? Maybe. Maybe not. Do I still want Dave to inform me of these sources? Of course I do! I love the News Aggregator feature in Radio. It isn't *Dave's* fault that I can't read fast enough! <<grin>>

BlogStreet's Top-100 is another source for RSS feeds. [Scripting News]

 

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Quick Weblog Roundup
Sigh. Where was this when I first started comparing blog tools? It may lack the detailed narrative provided by other comparisons, but it is a great starting point. Thanks for the pointer, James.

Comparing weblog software. I have just come across a very handy weblog comparison site. It works like this: you pick up to five different packages to compare, and it builds you a table of features, showing which package does what. Very, very handy.... [Column Two]

 

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Think You're So Smart? Well, Transclude This!
Yes, everyone else in the Radio universe has already posted this. I need this reminder in my RadioFun category to make time to try this feature. Marc Barrot must have way too much time on his hands. <<grin>> Which, thankfully, benefits all of us Radio-geeks. Thank you, Marc, for expanding our horizons. There is no such thing as too many great knowledge-management tools.

activeRenderer 1.2 Released. I've released the latest version of activeRenderer tonight. Version 1.2 corrects a couple of minor bugs in the activeBookmarks feature (as reported by Gilles and Donovan), adds an optional 'uniqId' parameter to activeRenderer, to enable Mikel to call the rendering code several times within the same page in myRadio. However, the main feature of version 1.2 is browser based OPML transclusion, as demonstrated in the Endless Web Page: any OPML outline linked to the currently rendered outline is *inserted* within the page when you click on the link, the same way it's done in Radio UserLand's outliner. [read more] [s l a m]

 

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Personal Knowledge Publishing and The Outboard Brain
I forgot to post this item on the home page, though it appeared in my RadioFun category.

Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. Sébastien Paquet has written an article about the rise of personal knowledge publishing. [Radio Free Blogistan]

I'm still working on the best mix of personal and professional items for this home page. Reading Sebastien's piece reminded me that I never posted a link to Cory Docotrow's "My Blog, My Outboard Brain", a good introduction to the concept of "public memory". 

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Mark Pilgrim has a new innovative use for RSS. He accumulates inbound pointers to specific articles on his site in an RSS 2.0 feed. It's so twisty it drives my mind crazy. In a few minutes this comment will appear in his feed. [Scripting News] 

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Yes, I'm an RSS bigot too. I confess. I'm an RSS bigot as well. I've discovered that Radio's news aggregator is at least as important as it's tools for editing and posting. I find that I can more than fill up my reading time with content in the aggregator. The first thing  I look for in a new site is whether there is an RSS feed available. Second choice is to figure out how to use RssDistiller (or equivalent) to generate a feed I can route into my news aggregator. [Seblogging News] 

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CSS toggle bookmarklet. Scot Hacker passes this along, saying: "Very cool bookmarklet for web developers̬open this as a URL, then drag the bookmark icon to your toolbar": javascript:i=0;if(document.styleSheets.length>0){cs=!document.styleSheets[0].disabled;for(i=0;i. Now you can toggle CSS on and off for any page (with any browser). [Radio Free Blogistan] 

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I have been adding to my stories since my last update here.

• Blog Books directory of approx nine now.
• Blog Software directory now over one hundred different names there.
  • Printed out, it comes to about 7 1/2 pages.  Now until recently, my goals in building this thing were:
  • • List actual names of the software outfits, so that people can use search engines to locate them.
    • Give links for ease of checking out their latest offerings.
    • Give some info about what this outfit has to offer.
    • Add any links to relevant documentation I may have seen any place else.
  • I now have a 5th goal - I think I will split off the introductory material (first 2 1/2 pages) into a separate story, like I did with Radio Doc Sources, so that regular visitors can focus in on the actual one hundred or whatever listed.
• Blog Software MT and RU
• Radio Doc Sources
  • About 55 listed, in which I periodically adding a few more links.  Printed out, this comes to 8 pages with approx 175 links to documentation and other aids to understanding Radio.
• Radio url number system
• Search Engine Tips
• Understand series
  • Understand News Aggregation
  • Understand Radio Referers
  • In the Understand series I try to lift the fog on topics that have been a puzzlement to many users transitioning from beginner to experienced in Radio.

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

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Marc Barrot kicks some ass!.

Check this out.  Got to this page, and play around with this outline.  Realize that my section resides on my machine in San Francisco (as well as Mikel's), Marc Barrot's is in New York and Matt's file is in London.  We each have .opml files that are being 'transcluded' into one document.

Thansclusion is a term from - good old Ted Nelson.

Transclusion Breakthrough: The Endless Web Page. The links you can see on the Endless Web Page demo, with [img] icons, are the result of a long research. Clicking the [img] icon, or the link's text, will cause the linked outline to be inserted directly in the current page, as a child of the node that carried the link. [img] While the linked outline is rendered, the [img] icon is replaced by a small rotating globe. Once the linked content is inserted, the [img] reverses to a 'regular' outline wedge [img] , with the standard collapse/expand functions attached. This is the in-browser version of what Dave Winer and UserLand created for Radio's outliner. This is instant rendering, happening on the fly as you browse through the current page. It is totally recursive: try clicking on the 'endless web page' node that appears under my name in the demo page. [read more] [s l a m]

Meet Marc Barrot.  Not only does he spell his first name correctly - but he has 2 R's in his last name (which for some reason I keep getting wrong.)  Marc is also teh author of activeRenderer - which I use for displaying my LiveTopics (which was created by Matt Mower.)

The interaction of LiveTopics, activeRenderer and Paolo's IDEAtools registration and updating system - is wat first attracted me to these guys.  Watch for LOTS more from Marc!

[Marc's Voice] [dws.] 

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Radio Tip: RSS Tutorial. The Government Information Locator Service (GILS) project of the Utah State Library has a nice tutorual on RSS that shows examples of its use in a variety different scenarios.  They do good work.    [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Question: Meta-Weblog Question; Does anyone know of Weblog sites that perform services for Webloggers? Things like directories of Weblogs, places to announce new Weblogs, central indexes of Weblog content? [Eclecticity: Dan Shafer's Web Log] Answer: Lots of people have provided answers - check out the comments. [Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: More good Radio documentation.

A sample chapter from the new O'Reilly book on blogging. [Scripting News]

Including important instructions on Backing up your Radio. If I'm not mistaken, a lot of content on Radio Userland by the same author is available here.

[Seb's Open Research] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: I added http://www.yaywastaken.com/default.asp collection of Browser plug ins to my Enhanced Radio Tools directory, which now runs to just over 2 pages of links on such topics as Comments and News Aggregation, but I tentatively plan to move some of the Search Engine stuff to another story.  I found this latest link on my referers. [Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: Check out what Ernie the Attorney has to say about Active Words.[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Playing With liveTopics - Part II. I still don't know how many episodes this mini series will consist of, but today I'm focusing on the liveTopicsSeeAlso macro, which displays a list of related topics with each post. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Playing With liveTopics - Part I. Now that Matt has finally released a first version of liveTopics to the weblogging public, and is feverishly adding user requested features, the least I can do is demonstrate the use of some of liveTopics niftiest macros. Today, I'll focus on liveTopicsHotButtons, which displays a list of topics used in your weblog, most frequent first. [read more] [s l a m] 

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activeRenderer's Macros Reference. I've compiled and documented a list of the macros activeRenderer provides for improving Radio templates with outlines: check out aR's macros reference. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Regular Expressions. Data mining with regular expressions. [read more] [s l a m] 

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activeRenderer Site Updated. Inspired by Matt's work on liveTopics' site, I've tried to enhance the site dedicated to activeRenderer. I've simplified the home page and the whole layout, updated the faq, added part 6 of the tutorial series on publishing weblogs in outline style. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Cool the thumbnail maker works great.  I just right clicked the photo on my desktop and selected resize.  I selected to fit it into a 45x45 screen.  It created thumbnail right next to it.  I then dropped it into my Radio images folder.  I check Radio's events page to see if it was upstreamed, it was and I clicked on the link.  I then right click cut and pasted it  into Radio's shortcuts area.  I created a new shortcut called Bush.  So now, if I ever want to include this photo in anything I write, all I need to do is put Bush in double quotes ("...").  See:

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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Powertoys for Windows XP.  Ones I downloaded:  an thumbnail maker and a power calculator (I haven't had a scientific calculator for a while). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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system.verbs.builtins.radio.data.localization.languages.english.outlines.prefs changed on Thu, 05 Sep 2002 06:15:38 GMT: Added weekly archives checkbox to the Archives prefs page. [Radio.root Updates] 

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system.verbs.builtins.radio.macros.viewWeblog changed on Thu, 05 Sep 2002 06:17:39 GMT: Added support for weekly weblog archives. [Radio.root Updates] 

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Weblog as my backup brain. 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. [Seblogging News] 

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Mining your Weblog content. In a recent post Will Richardson is thinking "about the really important need to find stuff once you post it." Dale Pike touched this topic too, when he wrote the other day: "How does it pop back into my workflow? The most basic of models seems to be, "Didn't I make a post about that? Hmmm... Did I use the phrase "image management" or "picture database"?" Seems klunky". A one-fits-all solution to this problem doesn't really exist. Full text indexing your Weblog through a free search service is a valid strategy but delivers mixed results. I have recently played a bit with the Metadata plugin for Manila and some of the available macros like "include message" and "view newsItem".

The DataMining page I have thrown together already solves a few issues for me. First of all, it allows the quick monitoring of all posts, and comments. Just looking at the list of "headlines" I can see where the latest statements came from. Since Seblogging is focused on the voices of particular people, names play an important role for the organization of this log. If I want to check out an original post I can simply click on the headline. I can also comment on an item directly from this list view. What you cannot see is that I can even edit it from there, too. The way I have indexed my items allows me to search for any name or surname of a seblogged eduBlogger. If I target my search to the "body" of all items instead of the "newsItem.department" meta type I receive a list of all items that include my search term somewhere within the item text. Of course, I can construct more metadata types like "topic"or "keywords" to classify the items in a more elaborate way. What I really like about this approach is that I can construct and edit metadata types whenever I want. I don't have to anticipate a full metadata sheme right from the start. [Seblogging News] 

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Tracking activeRenderer. Thanks to Mike Cannon-Brookes, the activeRenderer project is now hosted at Atlassian JIRA. You can browse the project's current issues, and the roadmap ahead. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Learned something interesting here.... Morbus Rides In.  Morbus has created an excellent resource of places to find RSS feeds.... [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

A while back, there was some talk about why LiveJournal sites are ignored.  Someone had said on their blog that users' journals weren't available as RSS, which is incorrect.

LiveJournal is a free service that lets anyone keep an online journal, readable to anyone who happens by and updated whenever you deem necessary. Your journal can also be retrieved in RSS format, simply by adding /rss to the end of your journal's standard URL (like this)...

That's good to know... [jenett.radio] 

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Adding metadata to my template (per Syndic8). Peering into my referrer logs this morning, I saw a reader coming from Syndic8, so I decided to take a look at how this site looks through that syndicator's display. I noticed that RFB is listed as not having the metadata that Syndic8 looks for, so I followed a link to some metadata help, followed a further link to the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names to get the longitude, latitude, and a numerical code for Oakland, and came up with these new metadata entries for the HEAD section of my home template: <META NAME="dc.creator.e-mail" CONTENT="contactus@radiofreeblogistan.com">
<META NAME="dc.creator.name" CONTENT="Christian Crumlish (xian)">
<META NAME="tgn.id" CONTENT="7014250">
<META NAME="tgn.name" CONTENT="Oakland">
<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT=" 37.800;-122.267">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Oakland, California">
<META NAME="geo.country" CONTENT="US">
<META NAME="dmoz.id" CONTENT="Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/"> While investigating that last meta tag (name="dmoz.id"), I discovered that Radio Free Blogistan is not listed at DMOZ, so I submitted it in the Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs category. [Radio Free Blogistan] 

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Wow! mnoGoSearch Rocks!.

Wow!  mnoGoSearch Rocks!

Given my background in search and retrieval (like, oh, 15+ years), it's an absolutely travesty that my websites and my blog aren't searchable.  And, yes, I know it.  A real problem though, when you know a lot in an area, is that you become a perfectionist and are unwilling to not have perfection -- and that doesn't ever exist.  So, alone, unsearchable, my websites and blogs have wandered in the wilderness.  For the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights.  And then a shot rang out !  Well actually John smacked me on the head and basically shamed me into implementing a search engine.  He recommended mnoGoSearch so I ran with it.  After a few errors, wrong turns and some silliness on my part (and more than few difficulties with their "documentation"), I now have a searchable site and a searchable blog.  What's even better is that not only is mnoGoSearch hackable, I've been able to use its url spidering to implement a simple table of contents for my Radio stories on marketing (that url will go away in a few days when I make it better such as eliminating the stories which are still in draft stage).  In the future I'll use it to implement a link checker and other tools that rely on link spidering.  I am still fine tuning the indexing and making changes but the basics of search and retrieval are now quite functional.

Strongly recommended -- if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and grapple with poor documentation and a wee bit of bizarreness.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Weblog calendars useless?. Last week Jonathan Delacour removed the calendar from his weblog and explained why in Say goodbye to useless calendars:

it occurs to me that I never use the monthly calendar to access previous posts on my own site or any other site I visit. And, a quick check of my blogroll revealed that only a third of the sites displayed the standard weblog calendar on their main page. Those who don't have a monthly calendar include links to either monthly (the majority) or weekly archives.

He goes on to complain about weekly archives and their effects on google searches, and he points to a full-screen calendar with post titles and a photo randomizer for a possible replacement tenant for the screen real estate vacated by the calendar. [Radio Free Blogistan] 

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This is Big; deserving of front page coverage!  ~  dws.

Radio Wish: comment aggregation. Radio users: Ever notice how painful it is to check for comments people may have left on your Radio weblog? I'm sure I've gotten a few that are tucked away somewhere in my archives, but I don't have the patience to browse everything. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the comments were available as an RSS feed that I could subscribe to? Or simply as a plain summary web page? [Seb's Open Research] Answer: Comment Monitor by Phillip Pearson Answer: http://www.dws.us/weblog/categories/radiofaq/2002/08/02.html#a1772 Answer: Well, just when I had freed myself from the RSS aggregator along comes Phil Pearson with a new version of his comment monitor, one that will update me on new comments on my blog... through the RSS aggregator. Damn! But he's developed such good hacks that I'm willing to reopen the RSS floodgates and test this tool. I'll let you know what it does for me, Phil. [Driver 8] Answer: Wow, that was quick!... [Seb's Open Research] [dws.] 

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Adding Comments To activeBookmarks. If you take a look at the bookmarks activeRoll on s l a m's home page, or at this bookmarks outline, you'll notice that most of the bookmarked links start with a 'collapsed' outline wedge. Expanding the line will reveal a one line comment for each link. Adding comments is in my opinion one of activeBookmarks nicest feature. [read more] [s l a m] 

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activeBookmarks: Picturesque Definition. Ok, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, so here is the best definition of activeBookmarks I can come up with: [read more] [s l a m] 

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activeBookmarks Tutorial. I've published part 5 of the activeRenderer tutorial series last night. It covers publishing your browser's bookmarks in a dedicated outline page or an activeRoll. These activeBookmarks are the latest feature of activeRenderer vs 1.1, released on Tuesday. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Kit search and category-only posts.

Mark Woods writes:

Kit's search overlooks category information for a post; the upshot is that category-only posts do not get a permalink. Today I added a couple of lines of code to Mark's KitSuite.renderWeblogItem routine to fix this small oversight. You can download the code and try it out.

See, this is the kind of thing I expected from having an open source project. I guess it gets into the real nature of the concept, since Kit isn't really an open source project, just some software I put together that I happen to publish with an open source license. Radio also makes it more difficult to send a code patch than, say, some project in C, but even so, this is the first time anyone's actually sent code in the hopes that it'd be folded in.

And not to seem ungrateful, but I ended up doing the same thing in, shall we say, a more general (read: much less readable) way. I also copied the code to KitSuite.past.permalinkUrl, but I still think I'm the only person actually using that. Eh.

So if no one has any other complaints or fixes for Kit in the next few days, I guess 1.1.8 will be coming out.

[Mark Paschal: Kit] 

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Kit 1.1.7.

Mark Paschal will add permalink improvements to Kit. Guess I should get busy with that then. =)

Actually, I just realized it worked for me since I started using KitSuite.past.permalinkUrl for the permalink. But of course I should still fix the built-in macro.

Thus: Kit 1.1.7.

[Mark Paschal: Kit] 

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Another improvement to Radio as a blogging tool.

Thanks for another useful improvement to Radio.  This took me about 4 minutes to install, including time for adding short names to a handful of categories that needed it. Now I can see all the categories I've posted a particular item to.

Get Your Permalinks Here, They're Lovely.

With regard to my last post about making backlinking easier, I've modified UserLand's code to make it easy to see a particular post's categories and get at the matching permalink.

You'll get a checkmark for the home page and any categories to which the item has been posted, with each checkmark linked to the permament location for the item within that category (unless it's not being rendered, in which case you'll be told).

If you wade into weblogData.categories and set a shortName for the category, that'll be used instead of the full name, saving a lot of space. Enjoy!

[Deadly Bloody Serious]

[McGee's Musings] 

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An Answer to the Multi-Author Weblog Macro.

Roger Turner sends in this answer to my question of a few days ago:

Inserting the macro:

<%local (adrpost = @weblogData.posts.["<%paddedItemNum%>"]); if defined (adrpost^.sourceName) {return ( string.popSuffix (adrpost^.sourceName, ":") )} else {return ("")}%>

into your #itemTemplate.txt file (for the multi-author weblog category) does exactly what I was looking for: takes the sourceName from the contributor's RSS feed and strips the colon and everything following it. I'll soon announce where this multi-author blog is (and you can see the results there). In the meantime, thanks to Roger for sending me the answer! I love seeing this kind of generosity online.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Truncating my RSS feed.... Thanks to Marc for his rssTruncate macro.  I've decided to start truncating my feed and his macro works great.  I had to mod [read more] [jenett.radio] 

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RSS Resources. Steve Pilgrim posted number of good links to resources/information on RSS feeds yesterday.  Mark Nottingham's RSS Tutorial got my at [read more] [jenett.radio] 

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Derek is an inspiration to me in many ways. For example, I like how he aggregates multiple weblogs on his home page, so I'm going to try to learn how RSS Monkey works. [Radio Free Blogistan] [dws.] 

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