Sam Ruby's site seems to be
picking up on my posts now that I have enabled the trackback feature in Radio. My reference to the Fade To White trick later in the post will surely ping again. The trackback feature seems to work well enough.
I can't say as much for the mail-from-aggregator feature which has stopped working.
I get an email every hour that does not have any links--no body, just a message about "This message contains the latest headlines, courtesy of Radio Userland" (actually not a quote). Well, I tried to tweak it just a tad by adding a couple of extra content substitution tags (or so I thought) I was hoping to have the permalink and site link appear in the email (it doesn't by default).
I've been writing a bookmarklet to parse out hyperlinks, text selections, and stylesheet references from a web page. While it has multiple uses, my primary goal is to create a custom "blog this" tool. I know they exist, but I'm reinventing the wheel. And whoever said that reinventing the wheel was bad, should consider the intellectual property wheel before applying that sentiment universally. Yeah, sometimes I reinvent the wheel, but *it's my wheel*. And I'm starting to get to the point, familiarity-wise, where I might actually be able to pull off the bibliography bookmarklet I wrote about before.
And it was working great until I tried to get Radio to give me just one or two more links in the emails I was getting. You're supposed to credit the source blog right? But the source blog is not consistently in the default mail-from-aggregator template. Is that too much to ask? It's not as though the format of the email wasn't intended to be customized. There's even a dedicated interface for just that. After I tried the web interface unsuccessfully (because of faulty assumptions that this feature would work like the text file interface where #anything can be referred to later).
So I dug into the database, as I'm becoming accustomed to doing lately. I really don't think I changed the code. I might have goofed and accidentally saved something, but I'm almost positive I didn't. I was a little disappointed in digging through the code to find out that the substitutions are hard-coded string replacements. I can't just pick some common substitutions like <%permalink%> on the item or <%link%> or <%url%> on the feed. Guess they just never thought of that.
There was some cool code that I did find, though. I was hoping it would save my butt, but no luck. Well, anyway, the cool part was that there was an "init" procedure that would create the default configuration entries if they were not already defined. Which means that if I wanted to restore the intial default settings, I had only to delete the existing values in Radio's outliner database explorer interface. They even reappeared mysteriously just seconds after I whacked them. For a second, I thought Radio was flaking, or Windows had a repaint problem, or I was trying to delete too many items (yeah, 3) at once.
Nope. Radio magically detects or polls and discovers that the entries are gone and need to be recreated. Just like it does with the cached upstream server stuff. You delete the entries and it instantly detects that they've disappeared and reads them from the disk if they still exist.
Now I'll have to do some research to find out if this is happening to anybody else. [Update: I found another tool called news2mail for Radio Userland that appears to already have the links I need.]
So, I wonder if Dale at Theoblogical will see this post before I leave a comment on his blog. Either way, it sounds like he has a problem similar to the one Sam Ruby solved with the "fade to white" social engineering technique--changing the color of the contents displayed in his deprecated RSS feed. I was puzzled at first when I saw it, but it was definitely effective.
Since he has switched, he is advertising his new feed. I'm a little confused, and a little surprised, too, with the next change going on there. I haven't read enough to get [oh wait, now I did] all the background. Now, maybe this is a second blog, and I can understand that. The cool thing is that he's using dotText, a .NET-based weblog tool. I had a tough time getting back to his Radio links because he's done a pretty effective job of redirecting his Radio weblog version to the Movable Type blog, which ironically still has a link to his Radio version which redirects back to Movable Type. Oh, well. I think it's par for the course when trying to manage all this stuff despite tools that are only partially customizable, reasonable, agreeable, etc.
Man, this blogging thing is really starting to catch on--so much so that I can barely keep up with the host of blogging tools and news aggregators. Yowza! Well, I had better get my publishing act together before it's a given that everyone can publish without thinking or without writing code, and I'll be considered behind the curve. As usual.
Of course, I'm all about customization and integration. That's half the reason that I'm frustrated with Radio, and half the reason I'm impressed by it. It's kind of a love-hate thing. [Note: I would give you a couple more links for the love-hate phrase in the last sentence, but I've already spent 2 and a half hours tweaking this post. Good night.]
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
