Five minutes behind Matt Mower , here's a macro for Paolo's google-link request. That was too easy for Paolo Valdemarin . I want to try. Can someone send me a cup of coffee? [Brain Off] 

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One year ago there was the opml easter egg. At the time OPML was cool because of Instant Outliners. Just a couple of days ago we decided to use OPML to share topics across weblogs and aggregators using TopicRolls, another important piece of the weblog aggregators project. It's good to be able to use open standards that are at the same time simple to use and to understand.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 

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Matt's Macro. And here is Matt's macro. An espresso for you too. Two different implementations, both great.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 

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Mikel's Macro. Here you can find the Radio macro provided by Mikel. Thanks again. Here's your coffee. ";->"
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 

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Feature request. I don't know exactly whom should I send the request to, so I'm posting it here. Most of posts that I write have a bunch of links. Usually I write the post first, then I add the links. Adding links usually implies:

1. Running a search on google
2. Copying the url of the page I want to link
3. Creating the link in the post

Something like 95% of the times, the link I'm looking for is the first match in the google's results page. Type any person name and his/her weblog are going to be the first hit. Type any product or company name, and the product or company sites are going to be the first hit. Now... guess what I want? Yes, I want to write in my post something like "link:Dave Winer" and have it replaced in my post with Dave Winer in my post. Isn't it what Google's API are for? Let me know as soon as the feature is available. Thanks. ";->" PS: less than 20 minutes later I have the macro running, thans to Matt Mower (this link has been generated with the new "googlami" macro). PPS: 25 minutes later I have TWO macros, thanks to Mikel Maron. What did I tell you about the blogosphere? This is just great! [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] 

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Topic Rolls near reality.

Some while ago I talked about the facility for users to share topics with each other.  I was just beginning to experiment with topics and blogging and, at the time, was thinking of an ad hoc P2P mechanism by which users could ensure they were talking about the same thing by using the same topics.  I called this concept a topicroll playing on the theme of the blogroll.

More recently Paolo and I have been working on making use of topics to create a superior Action Journalling environment.  Paolo has also been involved in the Italian Blog Aggregator project about which he has written on several occasions.  These efforts have begun to dovetail and I wanted to document some of what we are doing.

For a while now liveTopics has provided the ability for Radio users to associate multiple topics with their posts.  This allows for fine-grained, ad hoc, associations between posts in a much more flexible way than categories allow.  Release 1.1.3 (due RSN) adds also the concept of topic types and these are central to our efforts.

liveTopics types are a way of classifying topics into functional categories.  For example the default types created by liveTopics are:

• generic
• person
• project
• place
• time

Each topic can belong to only one type (which defaults to generic).  Now my topic Paolo can be classified as being a person topic.  Now all topics are not equal and our software can start to provide useful interfaces based upon topic information.

Systems such as the Italian Blog Aggregator may want to define a control language for topics rather than allowing users to make up their own.  Even if it does not wish to control the topics, it may be useful if users can pre-fill their topic list with system defined topics.  That's what the topicroll is all about.  Now we're going to implement it.

To begin with we have choosen to use the OPML format for the topic roll (later on we will probably implement them in XTM as well).  Whilst OPML is not a semantically ideal language for describing a topic roll it has a number of advantage for us right now:

• It's simple: It basically has only 1 tag <outline> so it's pretty easy to get along with
• It's a standard: OPML is already used & understood around the world, we're not inventing it ourselves
• There are tools: In principle you should be able to create a topic roll in any OPML editor and load it into liveTopics and vice versa

As an example you can see my current topicroll for yourself (although I notice that Radio doesn't seem to make anything of it, I wonder if my OPML is bad).

The next step is to allow liveTopics to import topicrolls from other locations.

[Matt Mower: liveTopics] 

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RSS Feed Jackpot. I was checking out a link that someone sent me earlier, and stumbled upon this jackpot of RSS feeds. Insane! They've even got one set up for Robert Blake, for chrissake. Now, if only they'd add Charlie, I'd be set. I'm telling ya - if you don't have a RSS file, I ain't likely to return to your site. M'kay? Even if you have cool tools like this one or this one.... [C:PIRILLO.EXE] 

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One year ago today, a text editing cheat sheet for Radio. [Scripting News] 

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See the site to see the site.... New feature - top left corner, but you'll have to jump outta da aggregator... ;~) [jenett.radio] 

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Something I forgot about Radio.... Loyd asks:  "Why does it take all my titles and put them in the Shortcuts folder in Radio?"

I never realized forgot that you can enable Radio to do that (see help page).  Shortcuts=good.  Thanks Loyd! [jenett.radio] 

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Chris Pirillo writes and reminds me that he introduced me to the guy who'd solve my blogroll problem: Jason DeFillippo of Blogrolling.com. OK, OK, I created my blogrolling.com account and am off to play. Changes are a coming.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Four Guys from Rolla have a tutorial on RSS. [Scripting News] 

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Well, enough of FM Radio

I've given the FM Radio stuff a try -- very nice user interface, but missing integration with my templates. It did not, for example, know to post white text on this black background. For those of you following along at home, not one of the comments received in response to my "Radio or Movable Type" question has come down on the Radio side. Overwhelmingly, the voice of the bloggers says to move to Moveable Type ASAP.

[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing] 

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Radio tip: Getting tools to use the default template. I've just been working on a Radio tool, and one thing that's been bugging me is that it has been refusing to use the default template.

When you create a new tool and give it a page of its own (http://127.0.0.1/5335/myNewToolName), the template you get is really plain - just enough HTML to get your page to validate (maybe ;).

Deleting the #template node in the myNewToolNameWebsite table in your database and refreshing the page in a browser, the template changes to a very very old template (like the one on this page).

Just found the solution (in this message from 2002): you need to reinstall the tool to get it to pick up the changes. Selecting the .root window for the new tool, then Tools | Developers | Re-install Front Tool... will do this. And now you have a tool that fits in nicely with the rest of the desktop website!

Comment

[Second p0st] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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RSS Autodiscovery.

I totally missed this the first time around, but it's brainlessly easy and adds a nice little enhancement to your blog. A quick review - many blogs publish two versions of their site - HTML, which is what you view when you look at the blog through a web browser. At the same time, many publish an alternate version of the site in XML. This is known as an RSS feed (for Really Simple Syndication) - and allows other programs (most notably, news aggregators) to periodically monitor your blog to look for new content.

Last year, a couple people wondered if there would be an easy way for the HTML versions of your blog to point to the XML version. Turns out it can be done quite elegantly - and most blog vendors built it into their application in a few hours.

Why is this important? Well, when you're visiting a weblog whose RSS feed you'd like to subscribe to, it's now simple to click a button in your browser that will "discover" the RSS feed and send it to your aggregator automatically. It's nice.

If you're a Radio Userland user, all you have to do is follow the instructions here; it's a one-line macro that goes into your template. Once published, it adds the little snippet of code that allows web browsers to auto-discover RSS feeds. (Movable Type users can go here; others should follow the instructions for doing it manually here.)

The slick part comes next - adding the "auto subscribe" bookmarklet to your browser that will discover the RSS feed (assuming the site you're visiting has auto-discovery enabled) and add it to your aggregator:

• Radio Userland auto-subscribe bookmarklet
• Fyuze bookmarklet
• Amphetadesk

One really nice feature if you're a Newzcrawler user - it has auto-disovery built in; whenever you're at a site with auto-discovery turned on, it automatically pops up a hint that lets you know you can subscribe to the feed. Nice!

Bottom line - add the line of code to your template and make your visitors' lives a lot easier. Win-win.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Welcome to the RSS Search Engine Formerly Known as Roogle -- I Give you Feedster !.

Welcome to the RSS Search Engine Formerly Known as Roogle -- I Give you Feedster !

Well I've got two very good pieces of news for today.  The first one is the new name: feedster.com.  The site is up and working.  Feel free to stop on by.

Logo help from Etation Media and I know about the swoosh...

The Name

I know we're going to get comments on the name.  Its ok folks.  A name is a name and this one is short (8 chars), .com and has at least something to do with the concept (RSS is a feed after all) but unique enough to be brandable.  Also at this point I think everyone would rather have us making you the best possible RSS search engine NOT doing the corporate naming exercise.  I've done those and they aren't pretty.

New Feature

Search results are now subscribable via RSS.  Lets say you want see daily results for a search on 'feedster' then just search for that on Feedster and then subscribe to the RSS icon at the bottom of the page.  Brent from Net News Wire pushed me on this and helped me understand the <SOURCE> element which is now supported.  Thanks Brent!  I also tested this in AmphetaDesk which worked like a champ.

Known Issues

Here are a couple of things:

• I'm not 100% certain if this RSS of search queries works correctly in Radio.  I've had problems but it could be me.  Or it could be content encoding on RSS feeds that tell me they are in English when they're really in Russian.  Until we get language detection in place, this is probably going to be an issue.  Working on it.
• The CSS tabs look horrible at least on my OSX box.  Anyone have a thought?  They work on IE 5.5 (pc), IE 6 (pc), Opera 7, Konqueror (more on that next post) and Mozilla.

If You Find a Problem

We could use the help getting any issues addressed.  There is a mechanism for reporting issues (and easily capturing the page on which the problem exists).   Let's say you do a search and notice that your blog title isn't correct (as they aren't for all too many blogs; mostly my bad).  Click on the Report Problem link and just tell us about it.  Since query results can change, you might want to paste in the blog's url.  I'll look into adding that at the result list element level but no promises since that would mean making an icon.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Search Google, me or my friends!.

Search Tool Added Through Lilia Efimova .... Search Tool Added
Through Lilia Efimova I found Micah Alpern's microblogosphere search tool (go see Micah's weblog).

As a search tool to search my own blog, and the ones I read, was something I already had on my wishlist of improvements for my blog, I've imeddiately added it on the left hand side, directly below the blogroll.

Great work Micah! [Ton's Interdependent thoughts]

Very cool stuff. Check out my home page to see the resulting search box to see it in action.

You can now from one place search Google, my blog (a Google search limited to my site) or a blog search that searches across all sites whose RSS feeds I read. (Note: you'll need a Google API key to make this work on your own site; visit the Google API site for more info.) This is incredibly valuable - and just one more step down the path to the semantic web.

The end result? You can now run searches that effectively say - "show my everything about topic (X) that my community has said".

Whoa.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Testing Paolo's softshadowmaker "I've always loved the way Paolo's images have lovely soft shadows around them. Unfortunately as one of the artistically challenged I've never been able to do it myself. I asked Paolo if he could find a way for me to have soft shadows too... he came up with a very neat solution which we've now packaged into a Macro that you can download and use yourself. Enjoy :) To get the soft shadow around my picture I used:[Macro error: String constant isn't correctly specified. Must be of the form "abcd".] "Matt Mower's Knowledge Log - ( liveTopics, k-log, radio, blogging, RSS ) 

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New design.

I changed the design of this site last night, so bear with some hiccups. A quick summary of the changes (this is as much for my own benefit as anything, so feel free to ignore):

• I'm using a modified version of Bryan Bell's "Candid Blue" theme for Radio. Modifications include removal of the Radio calendar (most users tended not to rely on that as a navigation aid, so I ditched it), addition of my blogroll (using activeRenderer; I maintain the blogroll as an OPML outline in Radio), inclusion of the search engine box, and changes to the itemTemplate to include itemTitle and comments.
• Moved from 3-column to 2-column layout. Not only does this leave more room on the page for the main content, but it renders the text readable on any number of browsers. For the first time, I can read my blog on my phone. (The comments even work, which shocked me.) The layout is extremely simple - I may tune it up at some point down the road, but overall this is the look I was going for.
• Stopped using activeRenderer to "collapse" prior days on the home page; I'd decided that this wasn't intuitive for people who don't visit the site regularly. It just resulted in hiding prior content and making it harder to read.
• CSS is now incorporated into the template pages, instead of being contained within a separate CSS file. This helps with presentation when I'm working offline.
• Cleaned up my blogroll. Hadn't updated it in at least six months, so I was able to delete some stale links, add some new ones and streamline the overall organization.
• I recently added Stephen Downes' referral script to my template. The result is that any incoming referrals are captured - in this way, visitors to the home page can see where other visitors have come from; presumably, these links would be potentially interesting to some readers.
• Streamlined my liveTopics implementation, by moving away from multiple_words to "multiple words" now that lT supports multi-word topics.

For those reading this through e-mail or an aggregator, feel free to stop by the site and let me know what you think. As always, browser reports are welcome - if something doesn't look right in your browser of choice, well, then just buy WinXP and use IE 6. (Or tell me what's wrong. Either way works for me.)

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Radio tip: Getting tools to use the default template. I've just been working on a Radio tool, and one thing that's been bugging me is that it has been refusing to use the default template.

When you create a new tool and give it a page of its own (http://127.0.0.1/5335/myNewToolName), the template you get is really plain - just enough HTML to get your page to validate (maybe ;).

Deleting the #template node in the myNewToolNameWebsite table in your database and refreshing the page in a browser, the template changes to a very very old template (like the one on this page).

Just found the solution (in this message from 2002): you need to reinstall the tool to get it to pick up the changes. Selecting the .root window for the new tool, then Tools | Developers | Re-install Front Tool... will do this. And now you have a tool that fits in nicely with the rest of the desktop website!

Comment

[Second p0st] 

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Aggregator reviews: "If you use [...] rss feeds then you will need an aggregator service. There are more than you would suspect. Once and Future has done some research and shares his discoveries with various aggregators available, both as desktop versions and web browsers." [Private Ink] [Universal Rule] 

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Searching the Collective Mind of Your Blogroll.

Wow, I love the blogosphere (the capital "B" one and all the little ones)! First Scott Johnson creates Roogle, an RSS search engine (sorry, James), and then Micah Alpern just happens to have written an answer to my request for a search engine for my aggregator.

Searching the Blogosphere

"Until the semantic web arrives the best method we have to understand a users point of view is to examine the RSS feeds they subscribe to. I currently read RSS feeds from over 70 websites. This list of RSS feeds includes friends, publications, and domain expects; all people whose opinions I value.  If Googling my weblog is like searching by backup brain, then searching all sites in my RSS news aggregator is like searching the brains of people I respect and find interesting.

Some times I want to know what the world thinks                         (google)

Some times I want to know what I think                                        (my weblog)

Some times I want to know what those I respect think                  (blogs I read)....

I’m using the Google Soap API and PHP to do a series of domain specific searches with the site:foo.com advanced operator. Where do I get the list of news feeds to search?  Radio Userland, the RSS news aggregator I use produces an OPML file, which is an XML document that lists all my news sources.  All the results are collected together and presented on a single page....

As the quote by Alex Halavais at the top of this article notes, there are multiple blogsphere’s.  These intersecting spheres are broken down by, among other things, interests, associations, geography, and responsibilities. We each live in several sphere’s simultaneously. Identifying and exploiting these sphere will require technical infrastructure in identify and reputation that are still being developed.  As always the failure of geeks to find what they’re looking for will drive this development."

Basically, Micah has created an engine that searches the web (Google), your blog, or the blogs you read in your aggregator. It can even be incorporated into your web site! Wow. Majorly suh-weet with book-ending happy dances! Of course, you're still relying on Google's indexing of the blogs in your aggregator, but talk about a giant leap for blogkind. Thanks, Micah!

Isobel also suggests trying Agent Frank, which looks quite intriguing. I need more hours in the day!

[The Shifted Librarian] 

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Tinderbox blogging.

Tinderbox is a very cool application. In some ways similar to Radio for content management and weblog creation -- but different. Radio has a rich scripting language where almost anything is possible -- Tinderbox doesn't. Radio has a built-in web server and can FTP or upstream you rendered site anywhere -- Tinderbox can't.

Tinderbox is a phenomenal note-taking system that allows for visual organization of notes -- Radio doesn't. Tinderbox can render notes through a set of templates to generate HTML -- hey, so does Radio! Tinderbox can be used as a weblogging tool -- so can Radio. Tinderbox can be used to generate a static website -- so can Radio, but Tinderbox seems to have better control over the "notes" than Radio does over the outlines. What I mean is that opening a Tinderbox file the notes are all present, searchable via agents and seemingly more accessible that the outlines in individual OPML files.

Maybe all of the above are just my misinterpretations. I really like Radio. I've been using it since it was Pike. I think I'm going to really like getting to know Tinderbox. What I really want to know is how to get them to work together to utilize the strengths of each application.

Nothing like trial and error. I wish Tinderbox would allow a couple of more notes in the demo, maybe 10 or so. I still bought it. I'm open to any assistance from experienced Tinderbox users, especially those using it with Radio.

[Surgical Diversions] 

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Roogle an RSS search engine!.

A RSS search engine, Roogle. What a great idea!

[Joi Ito's Web] 

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SocialDynamX: "FM RadioStation is a desktop application that enhances the Radio experience by integrating 3 applications: news aggregator, blog publishing tool, and web browser into a single, easy-to-use, unified experience." [Scripting News] 

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Blog early, blog often.

Mike Sanders has been exploring habits of highly effective blogging. The series starts here.

[The Doc Searls Weblog] 

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Mystified by weblog jargon? Try this!

"Phil Gyford has produced An introduction to weblog terms for weblog readers. It explains RSS, permalinking and trackback - some of the more commonly mentioned weblog-specific pieces of jargon." [Blog.org]

[The Shifted Librarian] 

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Items from my Radio UserLand news aggregator are mostly being posted in the Items To Review and Radio Fun categories. Anyone visiting my home page will find the links in the left navigation column as To Review and RadioFun.

When (if?) I get caught up with old personal posts, I'll resume putting aggregator items on the home page.

 

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activeRenderer Developer's Notes. This - recently updated - document gives a step by step explanation of what is modified in your Radio configuration when you instal activeRenderer, when you turn on the weblog outline style, when you turn it off, and finally when you uninstal the tool. [Marc Barrot: activeRenderer] 

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activeRenderer's Macros Reference. activeRenderer packs a number of Usertalk macros, called from weblog or outline templates to customize your site's pages. I've recently updated the macros Reference Guide, adding all recent modifications up to activeRenderer vs 1.3.6. [read more] [Marc Barrot: activeRenderer] 

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UserLand is now offering more storage space to Radio customers.  Here's how to get it. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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RSS for Outlook.

RSS for Outlook

Since I'm an Outlook user, I'll definitely be checking this out:

NewsGator is a "news aggregator" that runs in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to subscribe to various syndicated news feeds (such as weblogs, news sites, etc.) and have news from these sites be delivered right into your Outlook folders. [_Go_]

The shocking thing to me is that the company doesn't seem to have a blog!

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Radio conneg. I just tweaked the Radio aggregator to do conneg by sending the relevant Accept header. I've posted details to radio-dev hopefully the Userland folks will fold the change back into the real thing. [Simon Fell] 

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referer. I asked a while back about turning off the referer header in the Radio aggregator. I just had a dig around, and whilst there's no GUI for it, if you open aggregatorData.root and goto aggregatorData.prefs and change appSignatureUrl to an empty string, that'll do the job. [Simon Fell] 

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