What is the Difference Between Upstreaming and Working Offline?

Fasten your seat belt. Read this slowly. Read it again. Then, follow my instructions at the end of this topic and forget everything you just read so carefully.

Upstreaming

Upstreaming takes the posts (or stories or pictures or template changes or navigator links) that you have created locally and publishes them either to Userland's Community Server or to another web site on the Internet that you have specified.

When you turn upstreaming "off", you can still make these changes locally but they will not be published to the Internet until you turn upstreaming back "on".

(This is one way to create drafts of material before revealing them to the world).

With upstreaming turned "on", Radio checks frequently to see whether you have new-or-changed files ready for publishing. If your local machine performance remains zippy, you may want to leave upstreaming on by default and continually.

However, upstreaming can impose a performance burden on your local machine - does the word 'slowwwww' mean anything to you? If so, you can turn upstreaming off from the Prefs menu until you are ready to publish new or edited material.

(Don't be too hard on Userland. Given the Rube Goldberg nature of Internet sites, Internet connections, varied personal computers and operating systems on those computers, upstreaming works amazingly well).

Working Online or Off

Even when upstreaming is "off", Radio checks various matters on the Internet so it can serve you in other ways - either by aggregating news items to which you are subscribed, checking changes to other weblogs or otherwise working on your behalf behind the scenes.

So, Radio is "online" even when upstreaming is "off".

(If that doesn't make much sense to you, you're in good company. Think about it this way - upstreaming is just one of many 'online' activities performed by Radio).

If you want to turn off the background checking described above, right-click the Radio desktop application icon and select "Work Offline".

While you might think that working offline will automatically turn upstreaming off, you (and I) would be wrong. These processes are managed independently by Radio, so you must manage them independently as well.

Take the Easy Way Out

Upstreaming and working offline may interact in somewhat unpredictable ways. Here is the bottom line:

I recommend that you turn upstreaming "off" before going offline.

For the same reason, I recommend that you go back "online" before you turn upstreaming "on" again.

Now, forget everything except for my recommendations and get back to your weblog.

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