I am still not ready with a scripting page, but here is an advance installment. I love UserTalk (bundles are tres cool) but I also love Python. At the extreme positive limit, I would love to see Frontier/Radio itself recoded in Python and/or provide a super-tight programmatic interface to the object database and/or start delivering Python tools and applications directly onto Frontier and Radio. Easy for me to say, eh! Just thinking about the work effort entailed exhausts me.

As a close second best, I am excited by the interest being taken by Python hackers in Radio. David Brown's experimental Python IDE and now Philip Pearson's Python-RCS clone stand out.

Now, for a related point: many of us end-users may fail to appreciate Dave Winer's extraordinary generosity in welcoming (heck, linking to) folks that are re-using Userland's precious intellectual assets for free. I know of no other software vendor that so elegantly combines the best of open software with the legitimate claims of a for-profit business.

Also (listen up), as you compare Radio's occasional deficiencies relative to other blogging tools, ask yourself how many of those tools rest on an entire development environment that is available to the world's best hackers to make their own enhancements and extensions and then offer them back to us bloggers? This bodes well for Radio's future. Understatement.

(Interested in the full Monty on Python? Its creator wrote a literate tutorial. Mark Pilgrim's online book is superb and will give you an appreciation for HTML and XML processing as well. Not least, How To Think Like A Computer Scientist using Python isn't really just for computer scientists. Heck, I read it and even claim to understand some of it.)

feedback:   9:35:40 AM    

Hey, I told you documentation is a communal activity. Not to mention it is buggy. Jake Savin thought he was graciously enlightening me in a private email, "A piece of possibly little-known info: If you use the relative path in your www folder for the pagename attribute (case-sensitive) then your navigator links will still work, even if you change to or from the FTP option, or switch to a different community server. Radio knows how to figure out where they should link to."

Actually, it's worse than that. I already knew this but suffered major brain lock when documenting How To Create Navigator Links. Okay, fixed. Alas, who can fix my brain?

feedback:   9:07:58 AM