Real World Klog Pilot

Klogging pilot recap.. Rick Klau masterfully wrote up his firm's pilot of Radio UserLand. Valuable lessons on plannng, deploying, and socializing a klogging tool. [a klog apart]

 

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activeRenderer Version 1.3 Released. [img] The new version of activeRenderer delivers 2 new features:

• Image file urls, in gif, jpg or png format, can now be included in the outline as link attributes to the outline's nodes. Check the new Endless Web Page, and click the [img] 'camera' icons for a demonstration.
• activeBookmarks can now use Yahoo bookmarks instead of local browser bookmarks, a feature built upon the code contributed by Mikel Maron, current developer of myRadio.

There are other minor improvements and bug corrections in the 1.3 release, further details may be found in activeRenderer's release notes. [read more] [s l a m] 

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This month I have continued to update many of my stories.  Those with the most additions and updates are shown below with links to the respective stories.  The most volume of recent input to my stories categorized here as NEW A B C D.

• Alternate Realities - This Science Fiction Topic has nothing to do with Radio or Weblogging how-to.  Here I basically try to explain the Games Dimension, with a few movies, and I plan to do books later.   This is NEW in the last few days.   It could well be that this concept is so alien for some people, that it is as difficult to explain to newbies as it is to do documentation for weblogging.
• Blog Books - still stands at a dozen choices - I have now got my hands on a couple of them, and I have inserted brief overviews of what their contents are all about.  C
• Blog Money = a few more ideas. D
• Blog Software directory - I have not added much in the way of new links to software providers, but rather most of my recent additions have been expanding details about what each has to offer that is different, and links to more info. A
• Blog Software Types - this is a NEW story (2 pages long) started today, supplementing my Blog Software directory, by helping understand the fundamental differences that are out there - off-site / on-line / Radio mixture, and stating major advantages and disadvantages with each kind.
• BPCS Doc Sources - This has nothing to do with Radio or Weblogging.  BPCS is the ERP at my day job.  Documentation Sources is a recurring hot topic in some discussion groups, so I thought I would create something conceptually similar to Radio Doc Sources, and this is a NEW story (8 pages so far) built up this weekend.
• Link Services is a story that I started last month, and periodically been adding to, with respect to syndicating your weblog. D
• Heaven Dimension - This Science Fiction Theology has nothing to do with Radio or Weblogging how-to.  I have been a long time Science Fiction fan of Alternate Realities and I came across a depiction of Religion in a novel that I thought was extremely well done, although to some people this might seem a rather controversial notion.  NEW
• Radio Doc Sources - directory of links to different people who supply documentation for Radio users ... just a little amount added so far this month.  D
• Radio Start = a few more links for beginners. D
• Search Engine Tips - this keeps growing with links to cool things we can get from different sites.  C
• Understand Radio Categories = additional nuances.  C
• Understand Radio News Aggregation got a major rewrite expansion (now 6 pages), to clarify some jargon and concepts that had not previously been spelled out in what I thought was a satisfactory manner.  I am now making heavy use of analogies, comparing aspects of this to how TV News shares the headlines. A
• Understand Radio Referers - periodically I add additional nuances to this big picture. D

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

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Experiences of switching to a new Radio weblog theme. Matt Croydon::postneo answered my question about how easy applying the new theme was:

The transition went pretty well.  I had also tweaked my old theme, adding links and blogrolls down the side.  I saved my home page template so that I could keep these tweaks.

The next step was to turn upstreaming off in Radio.  I didn't want things to go live until they were ready.  I had to remove every reference of Veranda and Garamond from the movable type CSS file after applying the theme.  I'm an Airal guy.  It's clean.

After removing a few things like smaller fonts on links and adding a new section on the sidebar with my blogroll, I turned on upstreaming.

I opened Radio, and ran Tools -> Publish -> Entire website.  A good backup of your www folder should be done beforehand.

Overall I'm pleased with the result.  It didn't take a whole lot of time and was definately worth it.

Thanks for the answer! I think I'll have to look at my style definitions to make the new theme a bit more readable. But this is a good start, I believe. I also used the following hint on Centralized CSS in Radio:

If you would like to centralize your Radio CSS you can simple save your Style sheet as "#cascadingStyleSheet.txt" then place it in your "www" folder. Then simply add the macro to your template. Your CSS will be included where you included your macro.

[Universal Rule] 

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Find: Not Ready
I disagree with John. I only needed to test Find for about 20 minutes to dislike it enough to quickly uninstall it. Bear in mind, this is a beta product, and should improve with age.

1. Like: Very fast. 10 points for Find.
2. Dislike: Like other search products that claim to index email, it does not do so in any useful way for laptop users. A useful product must index Outlook OST files, allowing you to search and access files off-line. A useful product must index and search multiple Outlook PST files simultaneously. Find does not. During installation, working off-line with all OST and PST files mounted, I asked Find to index my email. It claimed it could not open the storage file. 0 points for Find.
3. Dislike: After installing and testing the basic file search feature, I told Find to try indexing my mail again. It claimed it must restart itself in order to index again. It appeared to shut itself down, but would not restart, claiming it could not restart until a prior running copy ended. I even rebooted the system. No luck. Find would not index email, and kept starting up full-screen every time I rebooted the system, though the preferences had not been set for this. 2 points for Find basic file search feature.
4. Dislike: For file search, Find claims to sort the retrieved file list by clicking on the column headings. Doing a simple ascending sort by file date does not put the files in order. It lists the oldest file first, but all other files are not in date order. Switching to a descending order does not even put the newest file first and, again, the rest of the files are not in date order. 0 points for basic 'list sort' functionality.
5. Dislike: No sense making a huge laundry list here. This is, after all, just a beta release. Just one more item: getting rid of the beta product.
6. Dislike: The uninstall routine does a very poor job. After uninstalling, a dialog box says the remaining files will be uninstalled when you restart Windows. So... I restarted Windows. The Find directory is still there, with about 20 files. All the registry entries are still there. I don't consider that "uninstalled", do you? 1 point for at least deleting some files and shortcuts.

I want a search product that works with Outlook email. Something that really works, both on-line and off-line, with OST files and multiple PST files simultaneously. I've tried several; none were worth the effort.

Innovation in search.  I have been using Find search on my desktop (beta) for a couple of weeks.  Here is what I like about it:

1. It's extremely fast.  Subsecond performance for everything.
2. It provides you with a preview pane so you don't have to leave the search results to get to the result.  This speeds up my search workflow.
3. It combines external search (pick a search engine) with desktop search (all files, including e-mail).

Here is what I don't like about it:

1. It doesn't let me restrict my search to specific file types.
2. The interface is still a little rough (too busy). 
3. I would also like to be able to index sites that interest me. 

A little more on that last point.  I know that this feature would quickly get out of hand from a scalability standpoint, but it would enable me to compensate for the gaps in the indexes at the major search engines (for the site's that I like). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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