[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Inc.com has a RSS Feed.

Here's a feed I've been looking forward to for a long time: Inc.com RSS 2.0 Feed [via Scripting.com]

[inluminent/weblog] 

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[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Re: Radio using all of my CPU power. try this: http://jake.userland.com/categories/radioDevelopment/2003/03/28.html

it greatly reduced the CPU usage on my Windows XP machine, now its down to 30-40 percent when I run Radio and doesn't lock up my taskbar except everyonce in a great while

Julie http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/ By Julie Wiggins. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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[from RSS on 7/31/03]
THE BLOGGING PROCESS
A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.

And then a description of what's needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation.

For some bloggers, just writing is enough. For most of us, though, we're looking to the blogosphere to provide us with useful and interesting information, education, entertainment and/or inspiration for our writing, and feedback, a critical audience, and help with the creative and publishing process. That process looks (to me at least) something like this:



As we all know, this is a lot of work, and there's never enough time to do it perfectly. I budget 75 minutes/day for reading (the steps in red), 60 minutes/day for writing (green), 15 minutes/day for promotion (blue), and, on the weekend, 60 minutes/week for blog community activities, focused on Salon Blogs, my chosen community. As an empty-nester and night-owl, I do most of this between 8-11pm, but I try to post during prime blog time (5am-5pm) so my posts show up in the 'recently updated' lists when most people are reading.

Blogging has taught me to write better (believe it or not), to write faster, and what blog readers like and don't like of my work. That's enough to keep me blogging. But I know of several bloggers who gave up because they didn't discover, or didn't feel, a sense of community. Or they found blogging too impersonal compared to chat, IM, and the telephone. A blog is a very blunt tool, and provides little context of the writer's personality, the kind of context that allows the development of real relationships (business or personal).

For personal relationship building, some bloggers have added chat, IM or webcam functionality to their blogs. Group blogs, forums and wikis allow collaborative work, which enables some real relationship building. And business networking tools like Ryze and LinkedIn allow bloggers to identify business needs and credentials to forge stronger business connections.

But in the absence of these appendages, blogs remain primarily one-way communication media. Comments threads, especially when they get long and divergent, are very clumsy ways of carrying on a communication. As a result, back-channeling (taking a comment thread 'offline' and continuing it by private e-mail) deprives the rest of the readers of the benefits of the conversation, and e-mail threads aren't very good conversational vehicles themselves (compared to face-to-face, telephone, chat or IM).

Why can't we enhance blog software so it allows a discussion, at the author's discretion, to migrate simply to other, more powerful conversational tools without losing the connection to the initial blog post that provoked it? I could (as lots of bloggers do) add applets and links for chat, IM, voice-over-IP, a webcam, desktop videoconferencing, my forums and groups, and my Ryze and LinkedIn pages. But they still wouldn't be connected, and I'd expect few readers to comfortably jump to the other 'channels' to continue a discussion started by a blog post. Or to use these tools 'cold' to communicate with me out of the blue. This probably shows I'm just not used to these other tools and their codes of behaviour, but I'd bet most of us are in the same boat. What's needed is a seamless migration path between the 'channels', and an accepted and intuitive protocol for deciding which 'channel' to use when.

Not all bloggers will want or use this bi-directional communication functionality, of course. The blogosphere has multiple information cultures, and many bloggers are perfectly content with one-directional communication. Some don't even turn on their commenting capability, following the historical magazine dictum of only allowing readers to write 'letters to the editor'. And I respect their right to do so.

But I think many of us are aching to enrich the relationships with our readers, to whom we owe a great deal, and would welcome bi-directional, multi-channel communication functionality, tightly linked to our blog posts, to allow us to engage in true conversations and community-building with them. If you know of examples of blogs that have been so enriched (probably by tech-savvy bloggers tweaking their own blogs) please let me know, and I'll start a list of them on my blogroll.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to push the blog envelope in more modest ways, within my very limited technical capability. I've put up my picture at right and updated my bio, so I'm not so mysterious. Watch for some peculiar boxes to appear at the end of certain posts that will take you to my IM address, scheduled discussions on my forums and groups, or my Ryze or LinkedIn pages.

Yes, I know that figuring out blogs' peculiar technical foibles is already hard enough for most of us, and that none of us has enough time even for the steps in the chart above. But if we're going to save the world and stuff we need to really communicate, to make blogs tools to really connect us with like minds, not just to inform and entertain. I've 'met' a few of my readers in person or by telephone conversation, and let me tell you the sudden jump in medium and connection is psychologically jarring. It shouldn't have to be.

Who knows, maybe by next year the chart above will be so much more complex it'll look like a plan for extricating Bush from Iraq.
[How to Save the World] 

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[from RSS on 7/31/03]
Nick Finck: The Why and How of Blogging.. Great introduction to blogging in a work context. From a presentation web designer/developer & information architect Nick Finck gave at Web Design World this week. Nick's the publisher of Digital Web Magazine and a blogger. [a klog apart] 

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[from RSS on 7/30/03]
How to Make Your Own RSS Feed.

How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.

The ultimate low-tech guide to creating your own RSS feed. By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, July 29, 2003 [OLDaily, via Seb's Open Research]

Why should you care? Because you can be Blown Away by RSS Feeds & Blogs [via Scripting News]. I'm sure Steven will be reading this one closely, too!

[The Shifted Librarian] 

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[from RSS on 7/30/03]
Using MT and Radio - An Overview. To start answering Bruce's question about my using both MT and Radio to produce jenett.radio, perhaps an overview is in order. [jenett.radio] 

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[from RSS on 7/30/03]
Thanks to Jenny for the link to How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer by Stephen Downes. I linked it into the howtos section in the directory. [Scripting News] 

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[from RSS on 7/30/03]
Matthew Thomas: How to recognize a Weblog tool by its permalinks. [Scripting News] 

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Possibilities
[back-dated from 10/6/03]
Talked to Nate about an opening at Maria's college and the potential for broad-based experience. Discussion covered a lot of ground; maybe something will come of it. 

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Coming soon. I heard from Bruce Loebrich over the weekend: "I noticed your site still says it is powered by Radio 8.0.8 as well. I'm interested in finding out exactly how this hybrid functions. Are you planning on discussing this at all?" [jenett.radio] 

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Excellent Radio fact sheet from Marc Barrot. Last year. Must've missed it. Insightful. [Scripting News] 

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Re: CSS- How to stop Radio from including in CSS into uploaded files. More than one way to skin a cat on this...

You could set up your categories to have each a different theme, but this will give you new templates, item templates, day templates etc. etc. for each category. In each different template you'd call your different CSS file.

However, having multiple templates can be a royal pain. As I've found out myself. Now, I have a single set of templates in the top level of my www: folder.

If single templates is the way you're set up, just like me. You'd want to create a sort of macro of your own, and at the time of rendering, it's value would be set up according to whatever category you're in at the time. This is more sensible, but, You'd need to make sure EVERY category had a value, even if it was blank (in my example below, you'd add CSSFile "" to your #prefs file).

Each category would need to fill those details by putting a directive in a new #prefs file in their top level folder (www:myCategory:#prefs). If you want further granularity you could put a #prefs file in, say April 2003 (www:myCategory:2003:04:#prefs) and that archive you'd display with a different CSS file.

Here's the head section of my current template before testing this out, see below for other screens of the test.

Before any testing.

I added a macro to a template, as above with the <% markers.

And added a directive to a #prefs file in my category. With the values I want transposed. Notice that you have to put the value in quotes and escape the quotes that are already inside the string.

And there you have it view source in NN7. You can see the value has been transposed.

Naturally, it can be anywhere in a template and we need not swap solely CSS, it could be a picture, a wav file, a bunch of HTML, all these can then be only shown if you were rendering out a particular folder with a particular #prefs file.

--
Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ By Steve Hooker. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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CSS- How to stop Radio from including in CSS into uploaded files. CSS- How do I stop Radio from including my CSS file into the uploaded files?

I am trying to control my CSS on an individual category basis but Radio puts the CSS code into every page before uploading. I want to be able to change look and feel across all category (including archives) by simply changing the CSS file on the server.

If I can't stop Radio from hard coding the CSS into the files -can I accomplish this with a server side include?

Thanks. By John Lawlor. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: Want to create templateless render. Put #flRender false in a #prefs file in the folder you don't want rendered (check out your gems folder) or as a directive in a file. And I'd guess you'd want to call that file's extension ".html" rather than text.

For SSI you'd also need to change your extensions on the files that are going to call your include ".shtml" by using #renderedFileExtension in the #prefs file again or in the directives in a page.

You can call different template by putting directives at the top of your page. I think you'd need to add a folder to your www:system: called templates and call them from there, using #indirectTemplate. Bit hazy here been sometime.

You could use a very minimal template also, with just #title and bodytext in there. Maybe one or two other macros/directives, again bit hazy.

So, in summary, put a plain template in the folder or above the file you want to plainly render, or add flrender. Else, you're into other powerful but hazy ";->" indirect template stuff.

HTH

--
Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ By Steve Hooker. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Andy Ruff has the best Gnomedex weblog I've seen so far.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Chris Pirillo has links to tons of Gnomedex blogs. I'll read through them later and see which ones are best.

I'm so missing this.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Re: Can not select or deselect Tools. Try running this from the QuickScript window.

table.emptyTable (@user.tools.databases)

You may need to restart Radio afterwards. This will reset all tools to active. By Andy Fragen. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Blogging For Exposure
So you're blogging. That's really great. You can say you have these altruistic motives for doing so, but at the end of the day, you're doing it to get exposure. This is especially critical in the .NET community, as there are hundreds of thousands of us lowly code monkeys vying for attention. So how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd? Simple Answer: Put your name in your blog title. You'd be surprised how quickly this affects your search placement with Google. Fire up your browser, and search for "Kirk Allen Evans" in Google. The 2nd result you'll see is his blog. That's important when a potential employer decides to Google your name to see what comes up. Scoble and others have noted that their blogging is what helped them get hired. [Robert McLaws: BoyWonder.NET] 

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Re: Radio spiking CPU to 100%. I wonder if one or many of your roots have bloated. This happens over time with roots. There's a script that 'saves as' each root on the Userland's samples site. I've a version of this which does some nicer stuff, particularly a report telling you of the squished effectiveness, how much was saved in other words.

After running Radio for over a year, I first run this because my Radio root was 108MB. Squished its 21MB. The aggregatorData.root also bulks up quite a bit, and I regularly squish 300% out of this.

Try this script then, just double click to import into your workspace, open it, press run, wait maybe 5 minutes as it trundles through your roots, doing a save as on each one. Once it's finished, a window will open from your Radio folder:logs:Save as.txt telling you what it did.

You should then quit Radio. Delete the Radio.root. Rename the newly created Radiox.root to Radio.root and restart. All the other roots were squished and deleted automatically.

I run this at least weekly, sometimes when Radio's getting slow/sticky. It may help your 100% CPU, it may not, it certainly won't harm it.

--
Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ By Steve Hooker. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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About.com reviews RSS News Aggregators. If you've been wondering what RSS is, or what a news aggregator is, this is a good place to start.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Re: Latest on recovering userland blog after hd crash. http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/2003/06/13.html

...is where Rogers talks about this.

--aslam By aslam. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Just a quick note on FTP hosting for those who haven't done it before.  Here are the instructions I used to publish to my site using Radio (for those of you who know what they are doing technically, please disregard this post):

First, I bought a domain at Network Solutions (cost: $75 for three years).  I then used the account manager at Network Solutions to put in the location of Digital-Crocus's (my hosting company) DNS servers for the domain I just bought (Note:  Network Solutions defaults to their own servers, so you need to change them): 

primary:  ns1.digital-crocus.com  and the secondary:   ns2.digital-crocus.com

OK, now that I did that, the new location of my domain will take 24-48 hours to percolate through the Internet's domain system.  In the meantime, I published my weblog to the new location.

First, using Digital-Crocus's domain manager to register my domain www.mindplex.org.  I waited a bit until it showed up and then I created a subdomain:  jrobb.mindplex.org

I then went to my FTP preference in Radio (with Radio running click this link):

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/prefs?page=1.5

and put in the following information:

1. UserName:  xxxx  (the UserName on my Digital-Crocus account)
2. Password:  xxxx  (the Password on my Digital-Crocus account)
3. Server:  ftp.digital-crocus.com
4. Path:  /jrobb.mindplex.org/
5. Url:  http://jrobb.mindplex.org/

After submitting that information, I then republished my entire weblog from Radio.  To do this, I right clicked on the Radio icon in the system tray (near the clock) and selected "Open Radio."  Next, I selected from the menu in the application:   Radio>Publish>Entire Website.  I set down the computer and waited, 30 minutes later it was done.  

A final note:  I did use Radio's category feature to publish additional category weblogs to different locations on my domain.  More on how I did that later. [John Robb's Weblog]

 

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Adding dates to Radio page titles. Radio UserLand tip: To add a date to the title of each daily archive page, add the following UserTalk code inside the title tag of the home page template (#homeTemplate.txt):

<%local (d); if radio.weblog.file.getArchiveFileDate (radioResponder.fileBeingRendered, @d) {": " + string.dateString (d)} else {""}%>

This code will be replaced with the date in the form "Monday, June 30, 2003" (example). [Workbench]

 

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hmmm..... blogLinker

HERE'S THE BIG IDEA: If you link to a member of blogLinker, the member will automatically link back to you, thus dramatically increasing the number of visitors to your site!

[via Sugarfused] [jenett.radio] 

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Susan Bradley put together a really great page of Microsoft RSS Resources. Fire up your aggregator! Thanks Susan for doing this! Yet another example of MVP goodness.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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839 Buttons.

In case you haven't noticed, the "Steal My Buttons" effort run by Taylor at gtmcknight.com is up to 839 Buttons. Wow.

[inluminent/weblog] 

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Blog Chatter. With Blog Chatter, you can get an up-to-the-minute list of recently updated blogs. It is a real-time event stream of weblog updates, similar to the data provided by weblogs.com, without polling or a static data format. Pings to BlogChatter are displayed instantly the moment they are received, and only persisted in memory for no longer than 30 seconds. This is actually a good way to check out some new blogs, and be assured that they haven't gone stale. Permalink Created Wed, 09 Jul 2003 ### [The J-Walk Blog] 

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Re: Traffic stats?. Scott, Try blogpatrol. http://www.blogpatrol.com/ By Kevin Respecki. [Radio UserLand Messages] 

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Re: Backup Error. Thomas, do you have any posts for March 2002?

If you open Radio and choose Tools->Developers->Quick Script. Enter the following and then click the Run button:

local (adrblog = radio.weblog.init ()); local (firstdate = clock.now ()); bundle { //determine firstdate local (adr); for adr in @adrblog^.posts { if adr^.when < firstdate { firstdate = adr^.when; dialog.notify (adr)}}}

What number is displayed at the end of the string displayed in the dialog box. It should look like:

...weblogData.posts.["00000005"]

Lawrence By Lawrence Lee. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: set bg color of desktop template recent posts?. That should be:

<%radio.macros.weblogRecentPosts (bgColor:"#333333")%>

with a colon instead of an equals sign. By Mark Paschal. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Referers Link Code.

Interesting, realized that my referers link wasn't working correctly. I could see it but no one else could...lets see if new link works..then I'll add the code..its works..correct code for referers link:

<a href="http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/referers?site=0119318&group=radio1">

whereas your radio weblog number goes in place of the mine which is in red above

[Julie Wiggins: Newbie Tips] 

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Re: Reinstall following a disk crash. Here's a link to the script that you were probably looking for:

myFixFilePathsAndAddresses from Andy Fragen

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001017/publicTools/scripts/

Lawrence By Lawrence Lee. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Newbie Tips: The Blogroll. Just created a newbie tip for the mysterious Blogroll, how tos, where to insert in templates, etc..

http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/categories/newbieTips/2003/06/29.html#a275

Have fun Julie By Julie Wiggins. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: RSS Feeds Mixing Categories?. Radio to the Past does not properly update the storyLists, so technically it should be causing this: it works by renumbering posts, so after it reorganizes the entries table, the numbers in the storyLists don't necessarily refer to the posts they're supposed to. (This is why Radio to the Past is an ugly icky hack that requires the permalink changes and whatnot; Radio is not designed to allow item renumbering.)

But the quick script I posted earlier should've fixed it, by regenerating the storyLists from the actual entry data. So I'm not sure why it still had the spurious item number after that. By Mark Paschal. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: Number of posts. There's a tip in the categories FAQ on doing this:

http://radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$12501

Lawrence By Lawrence Lee. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: Search engine in the weblog. You can find instructions on limiting a Google search to your weblog here:

http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$23433?mode=topic

Lawrence By Lawrence Lee. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: RSS Feeds Mixing Categories?. Try this quick script, then publish a test item to category A, and see if it still has items from B in it:

for x in @weblogData.categories { new(listType, @x^.storyList); }; for j in @weblogData.posts { for c in @j^.categories { if(c^ and defined (weblogData.categories.[nameof(c^)])) { weblogData.categories.[nameof(c^)].storyList[0] = number (nameof (j^)); }; }; }; true

If that fixes it then, er, yeah, I guess Radio to the Past did it. By Mark Paschal. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Re: Titles-only permalinks Index page?. It looks like someone heard your request. It looks like Cadenhead (who is writing a book on Radio) created a Radio script/macro to do exactly what you want (http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$25744?mode=topic&;y=2003&m=6&d=18)

However if you still want searching with Google, I outlined my successful experiment with Google Search on my website. Check out the story here. My site still needs to be reindexed, but it will help find archived content over time. Based on my referer logs from Sitemeter.com, it appears that people are using the feature. My hack uses a special Google syntax called inurl to get around the Free Search limitations. By Jim. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Implementing Trackback for Radio Userland in 3 easy steps.

Paolo was wondering whether we could setup the standalone Trackback server and use it to implement trackbacks for Radio Userland.  It turns out (as this post proves) that the answer is yes!  All that was required was to install the CGI and then write a macro for Radio Userland and embed it in the #itemTemplate.txt.

The macro is supplying the RDF metadata that Trackback depends upon.  In order to allow the standalone trackback server to serve multiple blogs I have added a unique prefix (in my case @matt.blogs.it) to the unique post ID's supplied to the trackback server.

[Curiouser and curiouser!] 

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Cool Blog Tools. Don't know which blogging software to use? Need to know about the less-popular alternatives? You could always try before you install, but I'd recommend refering to the Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table. And if you're looking for links in all the wrong places, perhaps you need a little BlogMatcher? And what would a post be without telling you about that guide I created last week; if you've read it and have any additions, let me know and I'll include them in the next revision!... [C:PIRILLO.EXE] 

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Re: Are Radio Weblogs searchable?. You can also use the inurl parameter...

http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$23433?mode=topic

Lawrence By Lawrence Lee. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Worth your time. Truly engaging websites. Beautiful redesigns. CSS mini-tabs. Great reads on the use of weblogs for marketing and PR; design basics, from fonts and color to white space and alignment; how fonts really work in Mac OS X. Desktop backgrounds. Swedish pop bands. And so much more. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report] 

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Re: Are Radio Weblogs searchable?. Here is how to do it with Google and a Radio-hosted weblog (posting a link to my weblog as I'm not sure how an HTML form would fare in this discussion board):

http://radio.weblogs.com/0103811/2002/09/18.html#a564

All you have to do is add the relevant HTML code in your template, and change the last parameter "as_q" to your own designated RU user number. I use it all the time to search for old entries in my weblog -- that's how I found this one :-).

Hope this helps. By Magnus Kempe. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Hey folks who use Microsoft products: point your RSS News Aggregators at the Microsoft Download RSS Feed. Thanks Susan Bradley for linking me to this.

[The Scobleizer Weblog] 

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Blog Traffic School. I've crafted and released a new guide for the world: Chris Pirillo's Blog Traffic School. It was designed to help you get more traffic to your (duh) blog. I've already shown it to Dave Sifry, Robyn, Robert Scoble, and Jason DeFillippo; they've all given it a "thumbs up." For $10, the information is yours to keep. Heck, I'll even start a blogroll for all the people who buy it and like it.... [C:PIRILLO.EXE] 

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Re: Links within text. Sorry if this gets posted more than once, my Internet link died right as I was trying to do here.

You might want to review my outline on different kinds of links that you can use in Radio. I try to define the terminology behind over a dozen types of links doable, and for each one include links to help you locate the documentation how to do that kind, if you want to.

Included are:

Active Links;

Blog Rolling:

Calendar;

Category Links;

Directory Links;

Global Links vs. Local Links;

Hostile Links (learn how to be nicer to other users);

Moving Link urls (if you move to a different ISP and want to redirect your links);

Story Links;

and lots more. By Al Macintyre. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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A look at recent user level activity in the RSS world.

I've been an advocate of RSS and the less recognized value of the aggregator side of the blogging world for some time. There have been a whole series of recent examples of RSS applications worth noting. I thought I'd pull together a niumber of the items gracing my aggregator on the topic.

For example, we have technology analyst firms beginning to make their content available through RSS. Perhaps what's notable here is the shift in focus to actually thinking about increasing the value to customers.

Forrester gets RSS. [via Chad Dickerson of Infoworld]

In my post about Mr. Safe, RSS, and IT analysts, I criticized the analysts for not "getting it" on RSS.   I'm glad to report that I didn't have the full story on at least one of the analyst firms.  Ezra Ball, a senior web developer at Forrester, wrote to me and pointed out that while Forrester has not covered RSS heavily, they do produce RSS feeds themselves.  To me, actually doing RSS is a greater demonstration of "getting it" than only writing about it.  According to Ezra:

Forrester does provide a couple of RSS feeds: one for all research ( http://www.forrester.com/rss ), and one for "free" (requires guest registration) research ( http://www.forrester.com/rss/free ).  We've actually had these for about three years, but people are still only starting to wake up to how to consume RSS.

Jupiter Research gets RSS and weblogs. [via Chad Dickerson of Infoworld]

When posting about Mr. Safe, analyst firms, and RSS a couple of weeks ago, I criticized Gartner and Forrester/Giga for not covering RSS effectively.  Ezra Ball at Forrester let me know that they have RSS feeds, despite a lack of significant coverage of RSS in the research they offer.

Today, I got an e-mail from Michael Gartenberg, VP and Research Director at Jupiter Research (the inline links are mine):

Hi, just a quick note that Jupiter was the first research firm to have analyst weblogs (including RSS feeds). Our Microsoft Monitor research service also has a companion weblog with RSS as well. In addition, Jupiter ran the first business weblog conference this past spring and we will be doing a follow up to it on the West Coast this fall. We have covered the RSS issues extensively in our written research as well coverage of Weblog adoption both in terms of who is writing them and who is reading them. Other firms often do not cover trends like RSS until they become mainstream, Jupiter has a slightly different approach.

Jupiter certainly deserved a mention in my original post.  Their weblog conference was well-attended by folks in the community and  they have a substantial weblog presence.  Unlike Gartner's weblogs, all of Jupiter's weblogs have RSS feeds -- a weblog without an RSS feed is like a cheeseburger with only the bread.

We're also beginning to see other examples of RSS in use beyond the primary example of RSS to support weblogs. Of course, as you might expect, there's a certain amount of noise in the system as Vizard reflects in his remarks below. He invests a lot of energy in trying to convince himself that RSS can simply be grafted onto CRN's existing model of trying to drive traffic to their websites. This is whistling past the  cemetary in my view, but I don't mind as long as the experiments are being run. The market will twist the technology to its own purposes as always.

RSS for Publishers. [via EMERGIC.org]

CRN's Michael Vizard on RSS and its growing importance:

Web logs are interesting, but what's even more interesting is the RSS technology. Now, I've got a mechanism by which I can let people customize how they want to have information come to them. One of the things you've seen happening on CRN.com is that we're creating an RSS feed around storage. That's my first experiment with getting people to sign up for it. People can have a storage feed and get all the related headlines coming to them.

Once they get the headlines, they click on them and it takes them back to our site. It becomes a mechanism for driving traffic to the site that is phenomenal. It also is a beautiful thing for readers, because it allows them to customize content in accord with what they're looking for.

Right now, we're not shipping out whole stories via RSS. People want tight, limited summaries in an RSS feed, but will come to the site to read the stories. They use it as a digest and index to what's going on, but at the end of the day it will actually drive more traffic to the sites.

I think RSS means that people will move from the days of active Web surfing to passive Web surfing. By that I mean that people will no longer go on the site because it's fun, they'll only go when they have some specific thing that they care about. The RSS feed is a way to bring people back to sites for stuff that they care about it.

At the same time, people will find Web sites richer because they'll find them easier to navigate. I don't care whose site it is -- aggregating any site's content these days is a difficult chore because there's so much of it. RSS gives people a point of entry into the site for things they care about. I think that it will actually rejuvenate content on the Web. We could also have a much longer conversation about how RSS and e-mail will leverage and extend and improve each other.

Not surprisingly, Inforworld is beginning to use RSS feeds in several new ways and is providing more content in the feed instead of trying to force readers back to their site. They are also experimenting with embedding advertising in the stream.

New InfoWorld RSS feeds and changes. [via Chad Dickerson of Infoworld]

We just added a bunch of new RSS feeds here at InfoWorld. You can see the entire list on our homepageEach of our top-level Tech Index categories now has an RSS feed, and we also threw in a Test Center Reviews RSS feed so those of you with RSS readers can more easily keep up with the product reviews we are doing every week.

Responding to the suggestions of folks like Dwight Shih as I promised, we've also made our feeds less "parsimonious"(as Dwight put it). Instead of just using the "deck" (journalism jargon for what you might call the sub-headline) as the description, we're using the first paragraph of the story, which certainly makes the items a bit fuller.

On the advertising front (see pointers to earlier discussion here about ads for NewsGator), we are trying out a new way of advertising using an auction-based system (similar to Google) called Industry Brains.  We're already using Industry Brains on our site (see "InfoWorld Marketplace" at the bottom of our homepage, for example), but it will work in our RSS feeds like this:  Advertisers currently bid on links in our News section.  The top bidder will receive ad placement in our Top News RSS feed for the first feed of the day (i.e. not every time the feed is updated).  The ad link and copy will appear in the description of an entry after the editorial content and indicated by "ADVERTISEMENT" text.  As I said in our early trials of RSS-based advertising, we're experimenting and look forward to your feedback, either via e-mail or in your own weblog.  Matt McAlister, our director of online product development, is driving this effort, so feel free to e-mail him if you have questions or comments.

 Dickerson also has a nice post on a variety of business uses of RSS and some emerging cases studies in that area:

RSS and business -- what really matters.

As I've noted before, I had been swimming in the seas of RSS for a while as a producer of RSS content at media companies, but it wasn't until recently that I had my awakening as a consumer of RSS.  In a classic case of (possibly) bad timing, my personal RSS awakening converged with the recent Echo discussions.   Whether or not anything will change is to be determined, but my discussions with non-developers who use RSS indicate that they are pretty bored by the whole discussion and just don't want the rug pulled out from under them -- Technology Marketing writer Jonathan Angel represents this contingent well when he writes "Stop wanking and drive."  In any case, I'm reminded of an excerpt from Ellen Ullman's book Close to the Machine, a book which offers the best glimpse into the mindset of programming that I've ever read:

When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it works.
(this quote is actually on page 2 of the Salon excerpt)

...[snip]....

The developer discussions aside, e-mail from my last column about RSS elicited some interested feedback from the business side of things, which is what really matters if RSS or RSS-like technologies are going to be ultimately successful.  Greg Reinacker pointed me to an RSS case study for his NewsGator product (full disclosure:  Greg advertises his product in InfoWorld's RSS feeds as I've discussed here).  While the case study obviously focuses on how Greg's product was leveraged in a business setting, the real story is how RSS met a defined business need, and met it well.  Yes, I know case studies are marketing tools, but I include NewsGator's marketing material here because it illustrates a coming-of-age of the RSS concept, i.e. material you can show non-technical people to help them "get it."  Also, everything in this case study rings true based on my experience with RSS. (a Google search for RSS and "case study" actually gives you the NewsGator case study as the first useful link -- if you know of any more RSS case studies, let me know):

Triple Point started with a simple goal: "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information ‘hunt and peck’ that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says Allie [Rogers, CIO of Triple Point Technology].

I also heard from Phil Gomes, the co-founder of PR agency G2B Group, which has a blog of its own and a whitepaper on RSS and corporate communications.  Jon Udell has already covered Phil's whitepaper well, but suffice it to say that it's refreshing to see that some people in the PR world are thinking about this and getting it.  I subscribed to the G2B RSS feed so I can stay up-to-speed with where they are headed in their thinking.  The great thing about weblogs/RSS is that I can afford time-wise to peek into the thinking of this world on a regular basis -- I'm subscribed to 31 different sources currently and have yet to feel overburdened by the amount of incoming information.

As a final note on business and RSS, Paul Beard references my previous post about RSS awareness at Gartner, Forrester, and Giga, pointing out that if I search for RDF on those sites, I would do a little better.  Thanks, Paul.  I'll let Mr. Safe know, but I have a feeling he's getting pretty tired of talking about this and is thinking about other things.

Dave Winer reports on a new RSS service from Wired News that lets you subscribe to a feed with the outputs of a search.  "Happiness is a new RSS application from Wired News."  Meanwhile, Scoble reports on another Microsoft RSS feed:

More RSS shows up at Microsoft. This time the Knowledge Base alerts are published as an RSS feed, says Kevin Dente.

As all this activity takes place, you start to see lots of smart people beginning to think about where RSS might be taking us. Among the examples worth taking a look at:

Hmmm. [via Steve Gillmor]

Rather than just inserting RSS into an email client paradigm as in Newsgator, it might be amusing to invert the solution and explore the usability issues of rethinking email as being just another form of feed served up to a reader, with plug-ins for creating & replying, etc. Hmm..

I just noticed Ray Ozzie's update to his Email/RSS musings, not through NetNewsWire, but via a Technorati cross-link to Collet's Weblog. Perhaps I reset the unread flag without noticing it (I am using an alpha version of NNW) but I can't be sure unless Ray does another silent update.

and this from Dave Sifry,

RSS as Infrastructure. [via Dave Sifry]

With the announcement yesterday of the assignment of the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard University, along with a Creative Commons license and a new 3 person steering committee, RSS 2.0 has become more firmly cemented as an infrastructural element in the web publishing world.  This is a good thing.  It will help wary organizations to feel more comfortable using a syndication standard with the assurances that it is not going to be changed on a whim or hijacked by someone with a hidden agenda.  RSS 2.0 isn't perfect, and that's one of its best qualities.  It was designed with a "worse is better" mentality, what I like to call POGE - the Principle of Good Enough.  That means it is simple, easy to understand and to code.  It means that it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, and it isn't a format for all things or all purposes.  It has a history, which means it has some bumps and warts, but IMHO, it does a pretty good job of doing what it sets out to do: Be a format for the syndication of published content.  This is not a knock on other efforts that attempt to achieve other goals.  My perspective is to use the best tool for the job at hand, and it is OK for different people to have different opinions on what that is. Kudos to Dave Winer, the folks at Berkman, and the Advisory Board for taking this positive step....

and from EMERGIC.org

Something New and Big is Brewing.

I tried an experiment over the past 10 days or so to get an idea of the utility of blogs. I get about 500-odd items from my 90+ feeds daily. I decided to delete the ones which I found not very useful, and see how many items would be left over a 10-day period. The answer: about 300. This means, that I getting about 30 good ideas / comments from bloggers daily. I cannot think of any other source which provides such a rich set of new inputs. Bloggers cook food for the brain, and RSS feeds are the delivery people.

With my Info Aggregator, I am now as excited as I've been about a new technology. RSS is undboutedly the HTML of today. The Info Aggregator (or more broadly, an RSS aggregator), is creating within me the same excitement that I felt using Mosaic in the fall of 1994.

Something big is underway. The pieces are slowly coming together. Blogs, Publish-Subscribe, RSS, Information Refinery, Dashboard, Web Services - its all very exciting. We all have an opportunity to be part of this new emerging world.

From Steve Gillmor again, who also notes the value of RSS in keeping tabs on whether someone you want to hear from has posted anything new lately, without your having to surf in their direction.

The Sound of Silence. [via Steve Gillmor]

Nothing sways me from the notion that RSS is a transcendent technology. As it continues to gain momentum, nothing seems to effectively slow it down. Name changes, name-calling, namespaces--they're more fodder for the Channel. RSS is a superset; it's inclusive of email, collaboration technology, sales force automation, iTunes, Hailstorm, IT, standards, portals, and especially weblogs.

Going beyond that, Gillmor argues in a later post that despite current experiments integrating RSS into email (e.g.,  Greg Reinacker's NewsGator), email will ultimately get folded into RSS feeds instead. Phil Wolff of a klog apart elaborates on Gillmor's hypothesis:

Steve Gilmore says email is a subset of RSS. You betcha..

Microcontent. It's a big big idea. Steve Gilmore, at last night's Jing Jing Blogger Dinner, had two comments on my email as syndication client post.

First, he thinks I have it backwards. RSS (and its decendents) won't fold into email. Email will fold into newsreader tools. This may be semantics, but I don't think so. Echo is extensible. You will see a wide variety of microcontent formats. Box scores. Supply chain orders. Cat pedigrees (it's a blogging world, after all). Each type with its own editing, display, and storage. So email is just an instance, a special case of microcontent syndication and management. 

Second, he sees Microsoft too entrenched in Outlook. So dug in, they can't reimagine it as a general microconent client, let alone completely re-engineer the plumbing. I'll trust him on this; Steve knows many more people at Microsoft than I do. He says that clicking on a link in an Outlook message shouldn't launch an external browser; it should stay in the reader context. If they got it, they'd be working with all forms of content internally.

Meanwhile, all the independent software developers are getting creative. Mail service providers jump at RSS to differentiate themselves. NewsReaders gain features people use to manage overflowing email. Portal makers flow RSS feeds in and out. Blog hosters bake RSS into default templates. Social network and digital ID elements are touching syndication, promising new value for getting messages via syndication server vs. email server.

But aren't InfoPath and the deep XMLization of Microsoft Office evidence of microcontent thinking? RSS/Echo is hot buzz at Microsoft developer conferences. Will Redmond politics amid the product silos fuel the reinvigoration of Outlook as a microcontent client before the third party world completely redefines microcontent messaging?

Maybe.

I think Steve just wants RSS feeds delivered to his Blackberry. For now.

And from Chad Dickerson at Infoworld one more time:

RSS killed the Infoglut Star.

It's "all RSS, all the time" this week in my weblog, and my weekly column for InfoWorld is no different.  In this week's installment, I write about how RSS has really changed the way I consume information for the better:

It's fairly common knowledge in pop-culture trivia circles that the first video to air on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," a song with a title that proved prophetic in its bold announcement of a shift in the way music was consumed and marketed. Something similar but perhaps just as profound is happening with the delivery of information online with tools that leverage RSS [read the rest here]

It's truly amazing how something so simple -- almost dumb -- can make such a difference, but trust me, it does.

[McGee's Musings] 

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Simple instructions on replacing your expensive and relatively useless KM system with a K-Log system that actually works.... [John Robb's Weblog] 

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[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]

 

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Viola!. I think I'm gonna like Movable Type. This is the christening post and my fingers are crossed (and so are my toes).

If you're a current subscriber to the jenett.radio feed, you won't have to change anything. A symlink is in place and your news reader or aggregator should automatically pick up the latest feed. Subscribing to the new feed or the old feed will net the same result.

However, the various category feeds will no longer be updated (this will be the last post that will appear in the old category feeds). New links to the current category pages can be found in the top right corner of the new main page. All new posts (except for the dailywebthing) will be included in the new jenett.radio single feed. More info will follow, but that's gotta be it for tonight... :~))

(Important note: To browse older posts, you can start at the last page published with Radio. Category links on those pages lead to the prior category main pages.) [jenett.radio] 

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Instructions on how to FTP a category weblog (using Radio) to a new location. [John Robb's Weblog] 

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Radio's web bug V Blog Patrol. I think I'm very happy with Blog Patrol. I've moved off Radio's web bug because it was slowing down page loads. Blog Patrol's got a lot more stats too. As well as top 20 referers, last 10 referers (prefer last 24 hours), top search words, last 10 searches; OS, screens... Not bad.

Time to roll it out across all my pages. A whole site render, well there's a few new things in the templates, like a Feedster search, which is very useful for me to find past posts. All due to my new tool, Back Log RSS.

And, I've finally moved all my blog reads from the tabs of NN7 into Radio's aggregator. Lets see how good it is. [Steve Hooker's Radio: kids, war, blogs, gadgets]

 

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[Ann] Sex with Feedster (or export ALL your posts in RSS:-)*. I've mad a tool, download and install according to the instructions here: http://www.cyberSaps.org/publicTools/backLogAllRSS/index.html

It'll make a new RSS 2.0 XML file of ALL your posts. With this you can do what you like. I've added mine to Feedster as per their request.

Now I can do a search of all my posts, dead handy IMHO, just about to add their search to all my pages.

--
Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ By Steve Hooker. [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

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Other Reasons To Redesign
Forgot to mention two other reasons for site redesign. The new CSS layout allows folks using 800x600 resolution to see the design width. The old table-based layout forced part of the right-hand edge off the screen for some of my readers. This new design also allows readers to use their browsers text sizing option to make the text larger and easier to read. 

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Site Template Redesign: Baseline #1 Complete
This took longer than expected. I've learned, the hard way, to make incremental changes when modifying an unfamiliar template. Joe Jenetts' simplicity.2.1 template is almost all CSS. Not that hard, but differs enough from the old template to make me slow down and pay attention.

With one eye on my many small changes, and one eye on the Comedy Channel (South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut), I finally finished the new baseline about 3:30 AM. I started the upstream, using the "All Weblog and Category Pages" option in Radio UserLand, and dozed on the couch waiting for the upstream to finish. Yes, the more knowledgeable Radio template freaks already see the problem. Don't all shout at once.

I awoke about 4:30 AM and checked the results. Home page template migrated OK, but not the main template. [D'oh! - Homer Simpson] I should have used the option to republish the entire site. The option I chose did not upstream new template wrappers for the story pages. A complete site push takes about 2 hours over my ISDN line. Tomorrow is another day. It is now almost 5:00 AM and the sky is starting to lighten. Time for bed... 

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Redwood Asylum Gets A Facelift
Time for a change. After a year, I'm changing the Asylum's design. This is the last post using the Transmitter theme by Bryan Bell. I'm changing the main site to the jenett.radio.simplicity.v2.1 theme by Joe Jenett, the same theme used for my category sites. Thanks again, Joe. 

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RSS Feeds Not Correct
I noticed that one of my RSS feeds contained a post from an incorrect category. I poked around and found that weblogData.categories.[categoryname].storyList was not correct.  There was a post on the discussion group recently about this, so I made a backup and then ran Mark Paschal's storyList rebuild script. All fixed now. I guess I should get into the habit of running this script after I use Mark's Radio To The Past (Post To The Past) feature. 

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