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Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Sunday, June 29, 2003Radio Documentation Links
Decided to convert my IE browser favorites for Radio UserLand documentation into an on-line reference page. The favorites list was getting too long and hard to organize. Realized the value of converting to an on-line page in a typical Homer Simpson "D'oh!" flash of insight. Oh well ... better late than never. I've been tinkering with this conversion for far too long tonight/this morning. No link published to it yet, but there will be when I'm done. Maybe some sleep is called for...
Thursday, June 26, 2003Happy Birthday to Blogging Alone
If you see this post, then Mark Paschal's Post To The Future worked.
Happy First Birthday to Stephen Dulaney's Blogging Alone.
Stephen, and the team at SocialDynamX, are working on the interesting FM Radio (FMR) product, a new GUI for Radio UserLand. Try the free evaluation and let them know what you think. Wednesday, June 25, 2003Purchased FM Radio Station
This is my third post from SocialDynamX's FM Radio Station. I decided to support this small software vendor, and parted with the princely sum of $39.95 this afternoon. You can purchase the software at the UserLand Store. I assume this means that John Robb and UserLand like FMR. That's good enough for me. I hope these two products become more tightly integrated. It will be wonderful when this is seamless. A guy can dream, can't he?
Tuesday, June 24, 2003[Ann] Uploading with my hidden Radio commands menu. I've been using Radio since it was called Pike. Over that time I've collected a menu that I use to force upload, and do other nice things from within the Radio app. Not all my own work.
I've put a page up describing what the commands can do, maybe some who are having uploading probs may want to try some commands out. Page is a bit rough, hurried.
If you're hosted with the radio server, you may suffer, independent of this menu. If you're on your own server, as I am, this menu set will be a boon.
Comes without warranties, back up when you can, and good luck... I'll try fixing a few things tomorrow :)
--
Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ By Steve Hooker. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Sunday, June 22, 2003How I Discovered Radio UserLand
Last week, a new reader asked, "What got you started with Radio UserLand?" The exact details are hazy, being over a year old, but the story goes something like this...
I started a backup brain in weblog format around May 2001. Almost exactly a year later, in May 2002, I considered posting the less personal material on a public site, permitting friends and family to witness the train wreck. I researched several weblog packages to ease the pain. Hand-coding a site wasn't difficult, but site-wide design changes were tedious. Microsoft's FrontPage had a proven track record as a piece of garbage. It was notorious for generating abysmal HTML, and constantly breaking any clean HTML that you wrote yourself. The product is still junk. I hope the development team has trouble sleeping at night. But I digress... I read reviews of several blog packages, but the details are no longer relevant.
In June 2002, a long-overdue visit to Byte for Jerry Pournelle's latest column led me to Jon Udell's column Personal RSS Aggregators. (Original Byte link is dead. Jon's archive. My archive.) Being a tech-info junkie, this sounded like a great way to mainline the latest and greatest. I downloaded FeedReader and was tending to my news jones within minutes. Jon also mentioned his earlier column Radio UserLand 8. (Original Byte link is dead. Jon's archive. My archive.) Sounded pretty sweet. On the evening of June 16th 2002, I downloaded an evaluation copy of Radio and Redwood Asylum was born. I purchased a Radio license a few weeks later. The rest, as they say, is history. Thank you, Jon Udell, Dave Winer and the UserLand team.
This is my second post from SocialDynamx's FM Radio Station. Found some bugs and noted another enhancement request while preparing this post. However, since it is 3:20 a.m., I'm going to bed instead of documenting anything in detail right now.
Thursday, June 19, 2003More Fun With FM Radio Station
I've sent a steady stream of notes to the support crew at SocialDynamx, the FM Radio Station folks, as I tinker with the 30 day evaluation copy. They've actually read my missives and responded quite positively. Will wonders never cease! Another very pleasant experience with a small software company. Imagine my shock when I received email from CEO Stephen Dulaney today! He's read my support comments and even popped by to read this Redwood Asylum blog.
I've played with several aspects of FMR, but it dawned on me that I had not yet used it for a blog post. D'oh! (Hey, I'm a news aggregator freak, not a heavy poster. So sue me...) Herewith, my first FM Radio Station post. This is a great new UI for Radio UserLand. The more I use it, the more I like it. Still, without a Post To The Past feature, I spend a lot of time in the standard Radio UI so I can use Mark Paschal's Kit. Some day I hope the core Radio product will incorporate this feature. Sadly, I'm not holding my breath. I'm sure John Robb and the UserLand crew have many higher-demand items on their plate. A guy can dream, can't he?
Wednesday, June 18, 2003Want To Lose Your UserTalk Virginity?
[re-published 6/23/03 to fix bad link]
After looking at Rogers Caldenhead's new post indexing script earlier today, I decided it was time to learn some UserTalk. A search on Google for "UserTalk tutorial" led me to Matt Neuburg's Serious First Steps In UserTalk Scripting. If I'm going to drop UserTalk scripts into my Radio environment, maybe I should have at least some idea of what I'm doing. Now... where am I going to find some free time?
Cadenhead UserTalk Training: Post Indexing Script
Great quick script from Rogers Cadenhead. (I've been using a method provided last year by John Udell.) I put Rogers Radio UserLand Kick Ass (Kick Start) book on my Amazon wish list. My son pre-ordered it as my Father's Day present.
Creating an index of weblog posts in Radio. Inspired by Rob Henerey's suggestion, I've written a Radio script that displays an index of weblog posts for the main weblog or a category.
Looking at the output of the scripts, I wish I had started writing post titles earlier than February. [Rogers Cadenhead: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Radio UserLand Renewal Countdown
Noticed today that Radio now thinks my license is due for renewal again. This despite the fact that I renewed just fine last week. This is due, no doubt, to the fact that I restored radio.root from backup during my problems last week. Seems that I can't use my renewal code a second time. I posted this little difficulty to the Radio discussion group. Hope I get a workaround before the license expires.
Tuesday, June 17, 2003Happy Birthday, Redwood Asylum
One year ago today, I installed an evaluation copy of Radio from UserLand. A frustrating and fascinating first year with the product. As I stated a few days ago: "Fantastic functionality, flexibility, and fun for $40. Where else can you get a content management system (CMS) at a comparable price?" This was not painless. Radio has many issues, some caused by the vendor code base, others caused by placing a lot of power in the hands of a UserTalk virgin. Will I continue with the product? Yes, I renewed my license last week. Today, UserLand's CEO posted encouraging words to all users in the discussion group. I look forward to fewer bugs, and more features.
Happy Birthday, Redwood Asylum.
Sunday, June 15, 2003More Radio Pain
- I thought I had fully recovered from my Radio disaster last Thursday.
- I thought wrong.
- Spent several hours today trying to restore good files over bad.
- I am no longer convinced that Andy's Data Cleaner caused the problem. There may have been (may still be) internal damage in weblogData.Root file.
- Ouch.
Friday, June 13, 2003FM Radio, again
Decided to download another evaluation copy of FM Radio. It didn't stay on my desktop very long the first time around, but willing to give it another look. Did not take long to find and report a few more bugs. The bugs reported during original evaluation are still there. However, they are making progress.
Thursday, June 12, 2003Practice Safe Computer Sex
Beware... mixed metaphors ahead! Earlier this evening I ran a data cleanup script provided by a helpful soul in the Radio community. When my private parts shriveled up and fell off, I knew I had a problem. The Radio application hung. This, as we all know, is hardly unusual. Since many people have problems with UserLand's own Compact File routine, I should not have expected smooth sailing with a pretty compu-stranger. When I finally forced Radio to shut down and restart, everything seemed OK.
Later, when checking my cloud site, all I found was a directory listing. Simple remedy, thought I. Silly old script-fondling fool. I republished my home page, but all graphics were broken. Poked around and found many other problems. Good thing I wore a condom this afternoon by backing up all data files before mixing scripty-fluids. I restored all data files from backup. Now I'm waiting for the entire site to republish. Due to my slow connection (124K ISDN on a good day with the wind blowing downhill) it will take a few hours for my private parts to grow back
Practice safe computer sex. Make a backup of all important files before a scripting quickie with someone you don't know. You never know where that programmer has been...
Radio Renewal
Renewed my Radio subscription a few days ago, as I approach my 1-year blogiversary. Many people in the discussion group have complained recently about Radio problems. I have issues with the product too, but for $40/year, including hosting, I live with them. Fantastic functionality, flexibility, and fun for $40. Where else can you get a content management system (CMS) at a comparable price?
Wednesday, June 11, 2003Radio Damage
As I've mentioned before, I use Mark Paschal's Kit to backdate posts. The backdating function works very well. However, I had not modified my template to fix the permalink problem which backdating creates.
I tried his permalink macro this evening but it damaged Radio. System macros broke in several places, including the Desktop Home Page, News Aggregator, and upstreamed pages. I noticed that calling his macro during rendering created several bogus entries in weblogdata.root. Luckily, deleting the extra entries fixed the problem. I removed the macro from my templates and will go lick my wounds for a while. I'll have to document the details for him so we can discuss.
Displaying category links on Radio weblogs. New Radio UserLand macro: viewCategories() displays a list of links to a weblog's categories. The script supports Cascading Style Sheets and the placement of HTML before and after each link. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Monday, June 09, 2003Elder Statesmen?
Interesting to hear that many attendees at the Jupiter ClickZ weblog festival were over 40. That almost puts them in my neck of the woods.
Sunday, June 08, 2003What makes a weblog a weblog? [Dave Winer, Weblogs at Harvard Law]
Re: How Do I Archieve?. There are several ways that you can allow others to look at your past posts without having to scroll through the calendar dates...the easy way, is to setup a navigator link for your monthly archives...mine looks like this in my navigator links..
<item name=Monthly Archives pagename=""/>
<item name="May" pagename="http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/2003/05/"/>
where you insert your url in place of mine http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318
another way is to enter a "recent posts" macro inside your main template that looks like this in my template..towards the very bottom of the template... <%radio.macros.recentTitledBlogPosts()%> I currently am using blogrolls instead of navigator links but the concept is the same and you can see my recent posts if you scroll down to the bottom of my main page.
Also you can check out some of my newbie tips for additional info/help..
How this helps... Julie http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/ By Julie Wiggins. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Re: Radio Roadmap, Wishlist. With my assetManager tool you can set up email notification on a post-by-post basis. Use it to send an email to a yahoo group or other email list whenever you post to your weblog.
Check it out, it might do what you want:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001161/stories/2003/02/26/assetmanagerTool.html
Cheers,
David. By David Davies. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Re:. You might want to bookmark to my collection of links to people doing subsets of Radio Documentation http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/08/23/radioDocSources.html
Answers to most of your questions can be found by exploring my various links. I suggest you plan on participating in Radio FAQ ... notice the multi-author content, where different people post questions and wishes, then other people post answers and solutions.
To get there, you will want to learn how to subscribe to other people Radio posts, including this one; understand categories; then create a category that DWS will subscribe to, where you will post your questions ... one question to a post ... and be prepared for an educational revalation voyage.
DWS suggests that you call your category that is aimed at him "Radio Questions" but notice that I labeled mine "Radio Ideas" and other people also labeled theirs using other terminology. Some suggestions are easier than others to implement.
A common area of confusion for people starting out with Radio is what they see ON THEIR PERSONAL COMPUTER HARD DISK and what can be seen ON THE PUBLIC WEB SITE. Many of the screens LOOK virtually identical depending on your browser. This was hard for me because I had come from a reality in which the appearance of things changed more noticeably depending on WHERE the stuff was. I try to clarify that whole topic in my story on the Radio url number system.
Another area of confusion for newbies is knowing the right terminology to describe the problem they are experiencing.
There is a place for settings (I not have the link handy) so you can set what goes into your Events Log, how frequently things get updated. It is a trade off. If you not have a lot of bandwidth or PC resources, you may want less frequent or less intensive upstreaming. We tinker with this stuff, then forget what we told it to do. By Al Macintyre. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Re: No StaticSites tool?. Several people have added documentation in addition to that supplied by Userland. You can find links to some of those people at http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/08/23/radioDocSources.html Sorry I have not been keeping this current ... some day I shall return to it and you will see more links. By Al Macintyre. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Blogroll macro and CSS codes.
So I'm no longer using the navigator links macro <%navigatorLinks%> for the left side of my blog..just because it got to cumbersome to keep using the navigator link page and a blogroll is easier to deal with at this point...so I had to insert the CSS Style Code into my main template, my desktop template and of course my home page template so that my text would left-align and be the small text
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold;
padding: 0px 0px;
padding-top: 2ex;
}
.blogrollLinkedText {text-align: left;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;
padding: 0px 0px;
}
Then I also had to insert the blogroll macro <%radio.macros.blogroll("http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/gems/blogroll.opml")%>
I'll write more detail instructions soon on how to add a blogroll and where exactly to insert the above info into the templates..but I didn't want to lose my info...
[Julie Wiggins: Newbie Tips]Changing the Look and Feel of Titles.
I finally figured out how to change the look and feel of my titles for my posts..this was pure accident..I thought maybe I need to insert the HTML tags into the title.
This could be quite confusing if you are a newbie to HTML code...so here is a simple way to create a title inside the WYSIWYG mode of the post and then copy and paste the title into the field/box underneath your post if you have item-level title and link turned on in your preferences in Radio. (the item-level title and link has two text fields that appear on the Desktop Website Home page)
1. Create your title such as "Changing the Look and Feel of Titles"
2. Change the font color, make it bold, make it italic, etc... for example:
Changing the Look and Feel of Titles
3. Change to SOURCE mode and look at the code for your title, here is what I got:
<FONT color=#8080c0><STRONG><EM>Changing the Look and Feel of Titles</EM></STRONG></FONT>
4. Copy and paste this code into the Title Box
Now you have italized, bolded and changed the color of your title
[Julie Wiggins: Newbie Tips]Calendars for weblogs. Jarno Virtanen doesn't like calendars for weblog navigation (via mpt).
It looks like he'd find a table of contents more useful.
Mine also has topic summaries, which make the search for 'posts like this one' much easier. It doesn't quite make up for the lack of a search engine (although I've been hacking on one, bit by bit, for about six months now).
Thanks to Doug Landauer for the idea.
[Second p0st]
CSS support revisited. A handy chart detailing CSS2 support in just about every browser you can think of, plus a few you never think about. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]
CSS based Tabs (and simple too by gum).
Joshua Kaufman - CSS Tabs. How to create tabbed navigation with CSS.
I really need to make a CSS category.
Excellent. I had just been wondering about this very thing this morning.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]Dave's new search software is cool. But, it's down right now cause Google doesn't like having more than 1000 visits.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]The business of RSS. How do you count subscribers in the RSS network? Tim Bray meditates on the question in an essay on the subject. Dave Winer says that Radio's Web Bug Simulator (WBS) solved the problem last year. There a few different issues here to tease out, but in the end I'm not sure there is, or ever was, a problem. ... [Jon's Radio]
ZDNet [NewsIsFree: Recent Additions]
SF Bay Area Bloggers. SFBayBloggers.com is now live (after being on the back burner for months)! If you are a blogger in the... [geeky chick dot net]
MicroDoc reviews SocialDynamX FM Radio Station. "I can safely leave a partially finished blog and go see a news item, or surf to a site in the browser without the fear of losing my partly completed log. This is one of the best feelings I have had since beginning to use FMRS." [Scripting News]
A Sincere and Honest Thank You to Simon from Incutio.
A Sincere and Honest Thank You to Simon from Incutio
Man I have to hand it to Simon. I don't think there's a time I don't stop by his blog and learn something. Often several somethings. He's starting a new series of blog articles on CSS and here's an excerpt:
One of the aims of this course is to show how relatively simple CSS can be used to make dramatic improvements to existing sites. Today, I'll show how CSS can be used to reduce the amount of code needed for a small part of the design of Scripting.com.
Scripting.com presents the main blog entries as a series of paragraphs under a single header for each day. Here is a screenshot from today's edition of the site:
Now that's both a ballsy approach and a damn good one -- its something that we can all relate to and it spikes an anti-css advocate where he lives (like I should talk given some of my recent postings although I do have a "why css is hard" analogy soon to come).
Now if I was an editor at a book publishing company, I'd strongly look towards signing Simon up. Damn but he's good. Thanks once again Simon, you done good. Very good.
[The FuzzyBlog!]Radio Discussion Group RSS feed. You can now subscribe to the Radio.UserLand.Com discussion group RSS feed. This feature will be included in Frontier 9.1. [UserLand Product News]
Simon Willison is doing a makeover of Scripting News using the latest CSS technology. [Scripting News]
Vibe looks like a cool way to share your photos with your friends.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Jason Cook: Sharing Your Site with RSS. [Scripting News]
Last night I demo'd the viewRssBox macro at the Thursday Berkman Blogatorium, part of the demo of macros. [Scripting News]
WHO WAS,WHOIS, AND WHO WILL BE: Domain Name Ownership Research Tools. Professional Reading ShelfWHOISSource: Online"WHO WAS, WHOIS, AND WHO WILL BE: Domain Name Ownership Research Tools"Mark Goldstein takes a comprehensive look at fee and free services to search WHOIS databases. One tool that Mark doesn't mention in his article is a free software app called Sam Spade. [ResourceShelf]
Radio UserLand tech support via RSS. The Radio UserLand discussion group, the best place to receive user-to-user technical support on the software, now is available as an RSS newsfeed. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Help filling a Radio weblog's sidebar. Julie Wiggins has written up some useful Radio UserLand newbie tips on "how to use the blank space under my calendar for phrases, other links, mysubscriptions (and anything else that I didn't want to put or couldn't figure out how to put into my navigator links) and how to align/center the text and change the font size of mysubscriptions.opml with a little help from the discussion boards and a friend at radio." [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Displaying random XML data with UserTalk. Peter Backx has created a UserTalk script that displays random pictures on the homepage of his Radio UserLand weblog.
I created a modified version of his script to display random text links and am using it here on Workbench.
If you're new to UserTalk, Backx's script is a nice short example that demonstrates how it can be used to read XML data. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
CSS Zen Garden.
Graphic artists can flex CSS muscle in Dave Shae's new CSS Zen Garden project. Read the introduction over at Mezzoblue. Via Stopdesign.
Chris Lydon has mastered the art of text wrapping around pictures. Scroll down. There's a lot there. [Scripting News]
CSS based Tabs (and simple too by gum).
Joshua Kaufman - CSS Tabs. How to create tabbed navigation with CSS.
I really need to make a CSS category.
Excellent. I had just been wondering about this very thing this morning.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]New Spring Clothes for that Old Blog o' Mine.
New Spring Clothes for that Old Blog o' Mine
Yup. New templates for the blog finally. Why? a) tired of the old one and b) wanted a blog that more gracefully handled changes in width and was more "laptop friendly". Please let me know of any issues.
This change wouldn't have happened without a generous donation of a template I could hack on. Thanks man.
[The FuzzyBlog!]Glue for Technorati API. Glue for the Technorati API for Frontier and Radio is now available. "Dave Sifry has kindly provided a way to access the data in Technorati using XML over HTTP." [UserLand Product News]
Technorati API 0.9. David Sifry announces the Technorati API 0.9. It sounds good. Very good. Technorati is by far the most valuable blogging tool I have found so far. I wish I'll find some time to play with the new API soon. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Something new for Radio users.... Rogers @ Workbench: "Peter Backx has created a UserTalk script that displays random pictures on the homepage of his Radio UserLand weblog." [jenett.radio]
CSS Zen Garden. If you would like to see an amazing demo of CSS in action, have a look at the CSS Zen Garden, which showcases what can be done with just CSS. Truly beautiful! [Thanks to Simon Willison.]... [Column Two]
Andrew Grumet: Deep Thinking about Weblogs. [Scripting News] [dws.]
A Radio macro to display category links. Radio UserLand tip from Mark Paschal: How to add category links automatically to your home page. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
New Howto: "We back up all the sites on the Harvard Law weblog server regularly, but you never know what can happen, and according to Murphy's Law, the worst thing will happen at the worst possible time, so it's best to be prepared." [Scripting News]
How to do server-side includes in Radio. Radio UserLand tip: There's a way to do a server-side include on a Radio page before it is published. To include one file within another, call <%file.readWholeFile(...)%> with the name and exact location of the file as the only argument.
For example:
<%file.readWholeFile("C:\\Program Files\\Radio Userland\\www\\footer.html")%> More information on file.readWholeFile is available from DocServer, a reference to Frontier and Radio verbs. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Kick starting my Radio UserLand book. I'm getting lots of useful feedback since announcing Radio UserLand Kick Start last week. The response was insane -- around 50 weblogs linked to the news within a day, putting this site briefly on Popdex alongside Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, iTunes, and other targets of transitory weblog love.
The book now has a home page on this site with a table of contents and some of the spiel I used to persuade Sams Publishing to green-light the project. If I get their OK, I'll put another chapter online later this week. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Shirley Kaiser has a great summary of RSS resources on her weblog. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]
Corante Goes RSS!.
I'm going to have to find a new site to pick on because the Corante posse has hopped on the RSS bandwagon! Full feeds for all of their great blogs, which I will now actually read! Thanks, Corante!!
[The Shifted Librarian]"In news we hope you'll appreciate: Corante now offers RSS for its blogs!
Ad Hominem
Amateur Hour
The Bottom Line
Brain Waves
Connected
Copyfight
Corante on Blogging
Got Game
IdeaFlow
In the Pipeline
Living Code
Many-to-Many
Moore's Lore
Open MindWe'll be adding links to them from the respective pages over the course of the day - please alert me to any hiccups you encounter. Huge thanks to the WebCrimson crew!"
Great primer about RSS/RDF on the Ariadne web site. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]
Another Nice Collection of RSS Links.
Friday Feast #42: The World of RSS Feeds
"There is a plethora of information available about RSS (RDF Site Summary), feeds, feedreaders, and tools. Today's Friday Feast lists some of the more helpful ones I've recently found." [Brainstorms & Raves, via WebWord]
My new must-have link for RSS presentations, with some resources I hadn't seen before.
[The Shifted Librarian]Why I blog?.
In Adam Kalsey's latest post, The Agenda of Professional Blogs, I'm reminded of why I started weblogging, and realize that I've gotten away from it.
Why do you blog?
[inluminent/weblog]Blogging for Links. Attention new bloggers & those who just want to get more links: Eugene Volokh has some typically excellent and thorough advice for you on how to promote your weblog. I agree with basically everything he says, especially the following: ...pitch... [The Truth Laid Bear]
InfoWorld: Are you ready for RSS? This is the second publication that has recently given me (appropriate) co-invention credit for RSS. Thanks. [Scripting News]
Emergent Report:. The Emerging Technology Weblog [News Is Free: Recent Additions]
SocialDynamX releases FM Radio. After their preview release in March, SocialDynamX has released the final release version of FM Radio today. It offers the following: 1) Spell check. 2) A slick Windows editing surface. 3) Tabbed browsing. 4) Outlook style news aggregation. 5) Simple image insertion. [UserLand Product News]
I haven't checked out the O'Reilly weblogs in a while, but they really have built up a great group of folks. You should check out the list.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Here's Steve Gillmor's new CRN weblog. Now, Steve's a guy who gets it. He knows more people in the Enterprise space than any human should be allowed to know. He's bright and nice and gracious on top of it.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Fixing Bad Word Output With 'HTML Tidy'. Copying text from Microsoft Word and Pasting it into your WYSIWYG equipped Manila website used to work perfectly, and still does if your version of Word is older then 2000 or XP. For some reason copying text from MS Word 2000+ produces a ton of very useless, and I would consider poorly formed HTML. The usual result of this poorly formatted HTML is to have your page peppered with weird tags and odd characters. Most people who run into this problem spend a lot of time fixing the anomalies that show up in their source code by hand. A friend of mine pointed out this site to me today... and it might be a solution for those people who have battled this problem. I have put together a small tutorial on how you might use HTML Tidy to help Windows users who run into this problem. now you can't say I never did anything for Windows users ":)" [BryanBell.com]
Check out all the Microsoft weblogs. [Scripting News]
RSS redirection and regex/Frontier/XSLT XML hacking. After I posted yesterday's note about RSS redirection, Dave Winer wrote to remind me that there is a mechanism known to work for both Radio UserLand and NetNewsWire. It looks like this: ... [Jon's Radio]
The FeedRoom is "the world's premiere broadband news network, gives high-speed Internet users the video news they want, from the sources they trust, anytime they want." Lots of RSS feeds. [Scripting News]
More RSS Resources.
More RSS Resources
Boy the RSS stuff just is popping out of the woodwork. Here's another good page of RSS resources. And here's a new aggregator, Awasu, I've never even heard of. Awasu doesn't seem to be .NET which certainly appeals to me. But Awasu does get the "I don't care about people linking to me so I'll build my website with frames so they can't link to specific pages" award. That's silly -- and from a company that understands blogs enough to write an aggregator? Go figure.
And anti-mega has a great rant about RSS usability. Its titled "RSS. Sucks." and in a lot of ways he's not all wrong. If I was writing an aggregator, I'd definitely be looking at his points. He also has some good comments on .NET and a comparison to Java. Just these two points were good enough for me to add his blog to my (growing) blogroll. Recommended.
[The FuzzyBlog!]CSS Columns Wizard.
CSS Column Layout Builder -- a very cool wizard for those of us that are falling behind on the CSS curve. [via Daypop Top 40]
[The Shifted Librarian]Very nice introduction to RSS on Fagan Finder, with links to directories, search engines and more. There is also a cool page which allows you to enter a query and send it a search engine of your choice, very nice indeed. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]
Great Resource: RSS Aggregator Directory.
Great Resource: RSS Aggregator Directory
Hebig put together a great directory of available aggregators. Thanks man. There are even two native aggregators for Linux which I know people have been looking for as well as a series of cross platform aggregators.
[The FuzzyBlog!]Best practice URL design. pixelcharmer has brought together an excellent list of resources on best practice URL design. Excellent stuff...... [Column Two]
Lockergnome Windows Daily. http://windowsdaily.lockergnome.com/ via voidstar.com [News Is Free: Recent Additions]
Netcraft [News Is Free: Recent Additions]
Presstime: Syndication Made Simple. [Scripting News]
Incredible overview of RSS.
How to make an RSS feed
Scripting News -> "Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch explains how to make an RSS feed. He walks through all the version confusions, but it's much simpler than that for most people, since many weblog tools these days automatically generate RSS feeds. 
" [Scripting News]
[Audioblog/Mobileblogging News]
This is an incredible overview of what's up right now by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch. It's important for folks to know what you have to do to "build" an RSS channel. Dave is right - most blogging tools do it for you automatically. That doesn't mean you don't need to understand how it works and what's up.
Right on to Danny. This goes into my "Important Statements" roll. And right on to Dave Winer and Netscape for creating RSS in the first place!
Much RSS Goodness Today.
Library Stuff found "three new articles from Search Engine Watch about RSS and weblogs:
- RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content
- Making An RSS Feed
- Loving Each Other More: Search Engines & Blogs"
- Plus, Steven reports that OCLC Research news now has an RSS Feed.
Scripting News overflowed with news of new RSS feeds today:
- "Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features.
- Apple has four new RSS feeds.
- Fast Company has an RSS feed too."
- Even Microsoft has hopped on the bandwagon!
Methinks I see a tipping point approaching....
[The Shifted Librarian]Matt Carter at Fawcette sends a pointer to their new RSS feed. He says it contains "all of our magazine articles, online stuff, code, interviews etc, updated twice a day." The subject of the message is Bandwagon Jumping. The bandwagon here is Microsoft, and I think I must write a DaveNet piece about this. A remarkable movement, and a remarkable move by MS. They didn't reinvent RSS as they jumped in. This is a new idea for a BigCo. Of course there's still plenty of time for them to reinvent it. Praise Murphy! [Scripting News]
Apple has four new RSS feeds. Thanks to Steven Garrity for the pointer. [Scripting News]
Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features. [Scripting News]
Somewhere, Over The Rainbow...
... lies a place where this author does not suffer from severe news aggregator overload and blog block. I want to update this from notes I've made in my Handspring/PalmPilot, but somehow never do. Then I face the task of backdating everything, which isn't easy to do with Radio UserLand. I use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to backdate, but have not modified my template to fix the permalink problem this creates. Probably not a big deal, as nobody in their right mind would link to my posts, but I like to be complete. <pronounced "anal">.
For anyone reading this from my RSS feed (probably 2 people, maximum), my various categories will probably receive a flurry of updates. There exists:
RadioFun for Radio UserLand / RSS / Blog stuff
ToReview as misc. news aggregator backup brain
MacPile to stash Mac / OS X stuff so I can learn enough to help my wife
There, that wasn't so bad; blog block broken. Yeah, right. Don't hold your breath...
Sunday, June 01, 2003Restore a Radio weblog from a server backup. I'm working on a Radio UserLand Kick Start chapter about backing up a weblog and restoring it over a new installation of the software.
I ran into a Catch-22 problem: You can't restore a weblog without updating Radio.root so that it is current, and doing that prevents the weblog from being restored correctly.
As it turns out, Radio creates a new www/backups folder when Radio.root is updated. When you try to restore a weblog, Radio sees this folder and uses its files, rather than looking on the Web server for the last real backup.
To fix the problem, update Radio.root, delete the new www/backups folder, and then restore the weblog.
Note: All Radio users should turn on nightly backups that upstream to the Web server. Otherwise, there's no hope of using this feature after disaster strikes. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Installment Two: Software Stories. Mark Paschal says something about Radio® worth sharing:
Its magical self-healing properties are really a lack of fault tolerance: faults happen, so people complain it's broken, but then whatever temporary state causing the error goes away, and it "fixes itself." Magically breaking is no way for software to behave, unless you want to go insane.I think that's what annoys me about Radio the most, but to move this to a more positive place, I thought I'd mention a few of my magical solutions to the problem of Radio not always shutting down properly. They don't always work, but they seem to make a difference. If they don't work for you, sorry, but I'm just another user grappling with bugs because I like the features. Like Mark says, we're talkin' magic here...
- Before deleting a subscription, I delete all posts in the aggregator from that source.
- When I've deleted a lot of news items and/or subscriptions during a session, I manually clean out the trash in aggregator.root, and then compact data files before shutting down. I'm not sure if compacting the files frequently can cause additional problems, so I do this sparingly.
- Under Preferences > Periodic updates, I've unchecked changes from Weblogs.com and update the Hotlist (and cleaned out certain data from those features' .root files) for two reasons. I don't use them, and more important, they seem to more frequently generate macro errors when compacting data files than the other data files (followed by Radio not shutting down properly).
Please note the above is opinion and conjecture and should not be considered reliable or taken as a suggested course of action, thank you. [jenett.radio]