Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
I like.... RSS Explorer is an excellent tool if you use Radio. Kudos to Dave for the idea... [jenett.radio]
go ahead - click the button - I dare ya!.
Nice resource. BlogComp: Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table [Redwood Asylum < Column Two] [jenett.radio]
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]
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]
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.
- Calendar events, resumes, forms, etc. This includes making it easy to:
- 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:
- A Radio toolbar for IE like the ones from Google and Yahoo!
- Give every new Radio site its own domain, so Google works on a per-site basis.
- Keep new themes coming: pretty counts and differentiates.
- The portal idea: keep working on it.
- klognet in a box (radio, manila, RCS, RadioComments, a search engine)
- Federate RCS: I should be able to both run my own stats and choose to share them with other aggregators. You can't now.
- Run selective RSS feeds through Google's API for the translation. Let me read an Italian feed in machine translated English.
- Improve the post-to-email features. A checklist.
- Include permalinks in syndicated body
- Linkrot spider, reporter, and healer.
- mailThisItem macro.
- More than one multi-authored synthetic category per Radio.
- Geocode posts and RSS feeds. Blogmapper.
- Backlinking.
- Can Radio detect Astroturfing (fake grassroots blogging) in feeds it reads?
- Re-Publish Commands from the browser UI
- Outlook calendar to OPML and RSS.
- browser bookmarks to OMPL and back
- Show and let me manage the publishing queue. (like a print queue)
- 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.
- Secure blogs. Enterprise grade blog security.
- Localization.
- Measure and watch the unintended ways people use your tools.
- UserLand jargon file.
- RCS Referers as an RSS feed.
- Referrers in a rolling 24 hours.
- Let me float my Radio RSS news as a Windows screen saver. Make it fun.
- Finish cleaning up the archives.
- Do more for attachments, including more formats and format conversions. Details.
- 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]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]
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]
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]
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
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]
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]
- 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
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]
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]
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]
Personal Knowledge Publishing and The Outboard Brain
I forgot to post this item on the home page, though it appeared in my RadioFun category.
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".Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. Sébastien Paquet has written an article about the rise of personal knowledge publishing. [Radio Free Blogistan]
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]
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]
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] 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.
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.]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]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]
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]
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]
Regular Expressions. Data mining with regular expressions. [read more] [s l a m]
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]
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:
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]
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]
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]
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 to
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. [.jpeg)