A directory of Manila hosting services. [Scripting News] 

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Greg Reinacker's NewsGator. Greg Reinacker's NewsGator is a fabulous hack: an Outlook plug-in (based on the .NET CLR, by the way) that reads RSS newsfeads. It supports Outlook 2000 or 2002; I'm using 2000. I pointed it at my OPML subscriptions list and it scooped everything into a set of subfolders. Very NetNewsWire-like! ... [Jon's Radio] 

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Outlining Radio's News Aggregator. Mikel Maron: "activeRenderer View for News Aggregation. This is very cool. I've been using the aggregator in an outline, for a couple months now, and I wouldn't go back. Do check out the screenshot and I hope this update is enjoyed." Wow, cool indeed :-). With Mikel's myRadio tool, you can use Radio's aggregator, and get a better organized view of your feeds. If you're like John Robb, browsing through 116 subscribed feeds, the new version of myRadio sounds like a winning proposition. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Let's vote on it. (Ok, this wasn't working earlier, but it's fixed now. Get to it!) Reversible is a site that collects referers and trackbacks from pages that point to or ping it. For example, if I link to and then click through to http://reversible.org/kottke, that page will link back to me. And creating pages on Reversible is easy...just type in anything after the domain name: e.g. http://reversible.org/sports... [kottke.org] 

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blo.gs. Here's blogping.root a little Radio tool that pings blo.gs when you update your weblog. [Simon Fell] 

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More on Posting From Radio's Outliner. I did a little digging around, trying to find out what happens when I select Post to Weblog from the context menu in an outline. I found some interesting stuff. For one thing, I can extend the context menu myself. You can too. Just add menu entries to user.tools.menus.rightClickMenu. Any changes show up immediately! Hey, that's pretty cool because it means I can make adjustments to how stuff is posted into my weblog from an outline. More on this later.

I also found that the Post to Weblog menu item results in a call to radio.outliner.menuCommands.PostToWeblog. This is sort of a mini-renderer (see A Busy Writers Guide to Radio Renderers for background) that takes your outline, marks it up based on the structure of the outline, and throws the resulting HTML into the new post text box on your Radio home page. This default renderer charges through the selected node and subnodes. The selected node is marked up with bold tags. Any indented nodes underneath it are marked up as list items for an unordered list. More thoughts are forthcoming... [On The Mark]

 

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If you've written an article about RSS recently, please suggest a link in the section of the RSS directory. I included JD Lasica's article because, imho, RSS is not just for geeks anymore. But it is still for geeks too. I'm working this morning on the developer evangelism I promised yesterday. [Scripting News] 

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Doing Away With Button Images Thanks to CSS.

Dylan Greene did the button in CSS , which is precisely as politically correct as the PNG version. [Scripting News]

This is great! Surprised no one thought of this sooner. 

In fact, here's a translation of the instance CSS to a class so that you can stuff it in a stylesheet and reuse it for all types of buttons in your page:

a.standardsButton
{
    border:1px solid;
    border-color:#ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57;
    padding:0px 3px 0px 3px;
    font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
    color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#ff6600;
    text-decoration:none;
    margin:0px;
}

Then, you can use something like so:

<a class="standardsButton" href="http://www.xmlrpc.com">XML-RPC</a> [Drew's Blog] 

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What is RSS?. Mark Pilgrim (well known in the blogging community) has just written an introductory article on RSS. This walks through the various different versions of RSS, and provides XML examples. To quote: RSS is a format for syndicating news and the... [Column Two] 

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News.Com has a new page describing their RSS feeds. [Scripting News] 

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Overview of moving a Radio blog to a new host. A friend planning a host change (from an address based on usernum to a custom domain name) asked me for advice on making the move. Based on my own experience, I tossed off a list of things to do roughly in order. Warning: I may have left out something crucial! This list is a work in progress, which I will update with suggestions or my own emendations over time. These are broad steps and I didn't include any details or gotchas involved with each step, but I will elaborate on any specific step in future posts. I've already promised to explain using FTP to upstream to a different host/address, which is one of the items in this list:

1. Find a server to host your site. it.
2. Register new domain and point DNS to your new host.
3. Make backup of the old site.
4. Narrate the process to some extent in your blog (telling people you're about to move, to expect some possible discontinuity, and what the new address is going to be).
   
5. Think about any changes to the template at the "old" site you might want to make (like a sign on every page pointing to the new address).
6. Make a second copy of your design theme and modify it to be the design for the "old" site.
7. Switch to the new "old address" theme.
8. Post your farewell message.
9. Replace the RSS (news feed) file with one that includes the forwarding address.
10. Republish your site at the old location – will take a while.< br />
11. Set up Radio to know about your FTP address and password.
12. Switch the theme back and tell Radio to use FTP now.
13. Republish the site to the new location.
14. Check for things that did not switch over right (navigator links, etc. – there are some known issues) and fix them. From then on you can use Radio the way you always had except now you are hosting the pages (except the old pages), you can probably see more direct, complete traffic stats, you have to cover the bandwidth if you get instalanched, etc.
    
    If you decide to switch to a different blog tool at any point, that will be a separate operation.
    
    Lastly, after moving you may discover there's still stuff at the old site that you want to change (I did). If that happens, I devised a "back door" method for posting stuff at the old location, so I can help you with that.
    [Radio Free Blogistan]

 

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Storage space upgrades now available. Those Radio users who upstream lots of pictures, PDFs or other large files to their weblog will be happy to learn that you can now purchase additional storage space on Radio.Weblogs.Com. This page on the Radio UserLand website explains how:

"Each Radio UserLand license comes with 40MB of storage space on Radio.Weblogs.Com. If you need more than 40MB of storage, you can purchase additional space in 50MB blocks for $39.95 at the UserLand store."

Storage space is a one-time purchase and does not change Radio's annual license fee. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 

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If you are new to blogging....

State of the Blogs Address: Dave's "First Essay of the Year"
Dave Winer published his "First Essay of the Year". If you are new to blogging or want to know more about the current state of it, it's a good read.

Jeremy Allaire, of ColdFusion fame, has posted his thoughts on this essay. He has interesting ponderings of the present and is always thinking about what's next. [Brian Fitzgerald]

[Seblogging News] 

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trackback. Pingback. I've just installed Simons Pingback client add-on for Radio. Does it work? Let's see if I can Pingback his article. It works! But only sends the Weblog name - what did I miss? That's cool though - great work Simon! [Matthew Langham's Radio Weblog] You're probably confusing pingback and trackback, trackback provides excerpts. Trackback is next on the list. [Simon Fell] 

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DaveNet: First essay of the year. [Scripting News] 

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More RSS Goodness!.

You can now subscribe to Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis (RSS feed) and Fresh Reviews from PC Magazine (RSS feed) in your aggregator of choice. [via NewsIsFree: Recent Additions]

[The Shifted Librarian] 

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Ziff-Davis has two more RSS 2.0 feeds. One for PC Mag reviews, and the other for tech news from eWeek. Hey it looks like someone got the religion. Excellent stuff. [Scripting News] 

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Why I don't enable comments

Maybe it's a mistake, but I don't have comments on my site.

I publish most of the feedback I get and track responses on other sites (which is why we desperately need what Nick Denton describes in his Comments and Communities posting), but I don't open my site to floods of abuse, either of myself or other people. Forcing people to mail me makes them think first and the result is really good discussion.

Nick believes we'll all have blogs and we'll all use comments in dialogs that flow around the world. I think that many folks will follow along, using tools like Marc, Dave (who asked today why Halley's Comment blog doesn't allow comments) Mitch (Chandler, since it has a compound document architecture foundation will address tracking communications) and others are building, but there will be nodes where groups gather -- people do that naturally and we all know 95 percent of Web traffic is lurkers.

Every time I explain blogging, the first reaction from the listener is "sounds like information overload." This is why it's important to keep comments flowing through the author of some blogs. There are plenty that allow comments, and that's okay, but I'm with Dan Gillmor on this. My site is for structured and constructive thinking, not a free-for-all, which is why I think you'll find it valuable.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing] 

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Wondering Why Daypop Isn't Indexing Your Blog?.

Wondering Why Daypop Isn't Indexing Your Blog?

Apparently I never submitted my blog to DayPop.  DOH!  It's a homer moment.  What else can I say ? It's easy, fast and definitely worth submitting your blog if you haven't already.  [_Go_]

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Sorting items within a day.. Sorting items within a day. This is a great little tip from Mark Paschal. [Surgical Diversions] 

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Editing Radio Outlines on Your Palm.

Thanks to my new Treo, info on my PDA is always close by. I'm increasingly reliant on outlines as a way to organize info, collect thoughts, etc. But one limitation was that I couldn't edit the outlines on my Palm. When the Treo arrived, I put a little effort into trying to fix that.

You can read the results here.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Radio as Infrastructure.

Ernie's post the other day about how he'll be using Radio to update his firm's News page got me thinking about how flexible Radio really is. Here's how I use Radio today:

• As a weblog application. Radio runs on my desktop and uploads new posts to my weblog TINS (just in case you hadn't figured it out, it's an acronym: There Is No Spoon, from a certain movie...).
• As an aggregator. I monitor over 80 web sites - Radio downloads new content from them hourly and presents them in my aggregator page, saving me at least a half hour a day and making me aware of countless things that would otherwise never hit my radar.
• As an outliner. I have become an outline junkie, using Radio's built-in outliner to organize many of my most critical job-related activities.
• As a conduit from my Treo to our intranet. An outgrowth of my outlining habit is the need to have quick access to my outlines. I use Natara Bonsai as my Palm-based outliner, and wrote a quick hack to automatically export all Bonsai outlines from my Treo to a directory in Radio. Once in that directory, Radio automatically converts the outline to HTML and uploads it to our intranet - making my information immediately available to the rest of my company. (Note: the conversion to HTML is possible thanks to an outstanding plug-in for Radio called ActiveRenderer.)
• As a promotional web site for my book. Along with my two co-authors, I manage a group weblog in support of our book about marketing on the Internet. Posts are aggregated by Radio and uploaded to bookblogs.com (a domain I own).
• As a subject matter backup. I maintain a separate category in Radio for posts relating to Knowledge Management. These posts are then aggregated by David Gurteen in the UK, who maintains a "Knowledge-log" of various contributors on KM topics. (Apology in advance to David - I've been a bit slack in contributing lately. I'll get better, I promise.)

To sum up, Radio currently uploads content from my desktop to four unique web sites on three separate domains. Some content is automatically generated, some is converted and uploaded, other content is simply mirrored from my desktop up to the web. Radio has become a critical piece of my desktop.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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My friend and super consultant Jon Oltsik has a new site built with Radio.  The weblog is in process as are the links to the free reports he will post to his site.  This shows how you can easily publish a standard site with Radio and comingle it with a weblog.  More later as Dann helps him move this forward.  If I was a consultant or an analyst (again), the first thing I would do would be to build a marketing site in Radio and publish it to my domain via FTP.  The next thing I would do is start to publish a weblog on the topics I consult on (to start to capture the keywords in Google for that topic) and gain credibility with prospective customers.   Many consultants get this, most don't.  Frankly, if your brain isn't online, where is it? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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Washington Post: "Since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply." [Scripting News] 

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BlogLinker.

BlogLinker

blogLinker.com is a free tool to manage your web links on your blog/website and to dramatically increase traffic to your site. It can be embedded anywhere in your web page and can be easily configured to fit the existing design of your site. blogLinker is the only tool of its kind. (from site) Uses javascript that places a table with links on your homepage. This can be tweaked in a variety of ways. I placed it on myBlogging from the Barrio
weblog. [Albert Delgado]

Sounds interesting. Another link service worth a closer look... [Sebastian Fiedler]

[Seblogging News] 

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OPML Directories. Mikel has directed my attention to Dave's revival of OPML files as directory structures in Sunday's edition of Scripting News. As Dave demonstrates, the 'inclusion' feature of OPML (the link and url node attributes) allow for a really cool decentralized directory structure, with different persons managing different levels of what appears to be a unique outline. This has a lot of potential. If you have activeRenderer installed with your copy of Radio, you can experience the same level of integration within your web browser as you can using Radio's outliner. Take a look at my OPML directories demo. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Penciling in that weblogs in meatspace conference.

The Art of Blogging - Part 1

I've posted a new article: elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/archives/000432.html">elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm">Blogging - Part I: Overview, Definitions, Uses, and Implications(I'll post Part II later this week). The article is an attempt to provide an overview of what blogging is...and how it responds to the characteristics of the Internet...and altering how information is/will be handled. [elearnspace]

New Article: Art of Blogging - Part 2

I've posted a new article: Art of Blogging - Part 2. In this article I address getting started, "how to blog", tools, RSS and aggregators [elearnspace]

An excellent introduction to the current world of blogging.

We seem to be in a new wave of reflection on the blogging phenomenon, witness Dave Winer's proposal for a weblogging conference (Weblogs In Meatspace ) and the ensuing discussion by Scoble, Paolo, AKMA, Aaron, and Sam Ruby, among others. Something I'd like to be able to put on my calendar as well (although, like Shelley Powers, I would prefer to see it held in the center of the country as opposed to one of the edges).

One suggestion on volunteers and cost management. Tap into the experience base of the science fiction world and their experience with Cons. They seem to be able to pull off very complex events on very small budgets. [Jim McGee]

[Seblogging News] 

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How to Blog, part 2 - from eLearnspace comes this great article.  Talks about the history of blogging, how to get started, and how to set up and use an aggregator. [Ernie the Attorney] 

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Blog on blog.

Even if you're not new to all ... this... Weblogging Resources has some interesting links, and advice to go with them.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 

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search form improvement.... A big thanks to Christian for his Google search form how-to information.  Though I've been using Google as my site search for a while, I'm finally getting around to modifying the code so it only searches jenett.radio instead of the entire coolstop.com domain.  Thanks xian!

(Note:  The search form change won't appear on all pages until I finish some other changes still in the works, but the improved form now appears on all of this month's weblog pages.)  [jenett.radio] 

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6/2/02: How to create a directory in Radio's Outliner. [Scripting News] 

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Radio fixes. I've made a story of the fixes to the Radio File menu "View in Browser" and "Save As HTML" [Surgical Diversions] 

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BTW, there's a cool bonus app in there. Blog Browsers. The format Radio uses to back up the weblog is a familiar one. [Scripting News] 

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Radio: How to backup and restore your weblog. [Scripting News] 

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FYI to Radio users.  We are working on three things right now:

1. A back-up system that makes it easy to reinstall Radio after a crash on a local PC.
2. More storage space.
3. A synchronization system that makes it possible to post to your Radio weblog from more than one PC (solves the work / home problem some people have).

More is on deck (however these are more complex projects and require zealous caveats):  a snazzy Windows interface (potentially an OSX interface too) that takes advantage of slick OS enabled capabilities, a faster comments server, and P2P multimedia weblog publishing.

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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On The Radio WindowTypes Framework Hey, I stumbled on something in Radio I did not know about before. On The Radio WindowTypes Framework. Very cool! [On The Mark] 

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Radio Background Have you ever accidentally dropped an image or an HTML file over the Radio application window? It happens to me once in a while and the result is kind of interesting. Radio actually displays the image, or page, as its background. Fully navigable. A little web browser inside Radio. It is kind of cool until it gets annoying. It only goes away if you shut down Radio and restart. [On The Mark] 

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Automating the web (screen-scraping). Simon Willison has pointed to a number of web screen-scraping tools in his weblog. These are useful for two reasons: they can be used to automate web activities that the websites themselves don't easily support; they can also be used... [Column Two] 

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Here is way to view your Radio weblog on your desktop:

http://127.0.0.1:5335/index

Use this link only with Radio running.  This can allow you to do two things:  1) provides you a preview of your weblog if you are publishing while disconnected (ie.  a laptop on an airplane), and 2) allows you to use Radio as a personal journalling tool that is never published (this is a great way to create a extremely private back up brain of time organized notes). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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Restoring Radio's Default Background

... Mark, you can get the plain display to come back -- you don't have to restart Radio -- just right click on the background and choose Back. The "normal" background is also a Web page. It's in a file named background.html in the Appearance sub-folder of the Radio folder. You can edit that file, of course. (But keep a copy so you can restore it. Mark is right, it can get awkward, but it's lots of fun to play with.) [Scripting News]

Thanks for the update Dave. I thought I tried the context menu to get back to Radio's default background, but I clearly did not try hard enough. It works just like you said it would. [On The Mark] 

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Writing Posts From Radio's Outliner. For the last week I have been writing all of my posts from an outline in Radio and loving it. It turns out to be pretty easy to set up, if you are reasonably comfortable with working in Radio. I still have some additions I want to make to the framework and hope to tackle some of these additions in the weeks ahead.

• Support directives specifying an alternate renderer (so I can easily drop a table in a post).
• Provide a framework for managing posts (a bit like the old Radio 7.x weblog framework).
• Package everything up for easy installation on a non-technical user's machine.

[On The Mark] 

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Radio Tip Of The Day. Radio's glossSub macro allows you to substitute the text phrase of your choice for the text normally associated with a shortcut. For example, earlier today I wrote a story titled Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data With DBFView. The link was generated using Radio's shortcut facility - the title of the story enclosed in double quotes is automatically resolved and converted into a link using the Story's title as the link text. Radio's shortcut feature does allow you to associate any text phrase you want with the shortcut, but this is a one-time thing; the shortcut text is permanently associated with the shortcut. Sometimes you want to change the link text depending on the context in which it is used to improve the readability of a sentence. That is where the glossSub macro comes in handy.

With the glossSub macro you can still refer to the linked item using a shortcut, but you can override the link text itself. Using the macro is incredibly easy. I used this syntax in a prior post: <%glossSub("Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data With DBFView", "adventure")%>. The first parameter is the shortcut itself, the second is the link text I want to use. An optional third parameter allows you to specify an anchor tag within a page.

The glossSub macro, shortcuts, and writing in Radio's outliner become an unbeatable authoring combination when you automate creation of story shortcuts.

[On The Mark] 

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Radio tweak: editor size.

From the helpful folks at thought?horizon comes this useful tweak:

We have just added a useful tip on how to modify the size of the editor window used to write posts.  The short depth of 9 lines makes longer posts difficult. 

The basic steps are:

1. Open the Radio Userland console
2. Open Root.root tables
3. Navigate to user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorSize
4. Set whatever value you like and return to your home page.

You can read more in our Radio How-To.  Look under Tricks and Tips, Look and Feel.

[thought?horizon] [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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