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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]