How To Reinstall Radio

Once you install Radio for the first time, you may find that you never need to reinstall it from scratch. However, if you feel that something has messed up your copy (how is that for precise language?), you are certainly free to reinstall Radio. You can reinstall Radio as often as you wish providing that you are within the scope of your annual paid subscription.

Three Ways To Upgrade Radio

A complete reinstallation is only one of three ways that you can use to oversee the software as a whole. The other two are ....

.... Radio updates. One of the coolest aspects of Radio is that Userland can automatically transmit changes, bug fixes or feature enhancements to you on a daily or near-daily basis. Alternatively, you can check for updates yourself by right-clicking the radio icon in your Windows status bar and asking for updates.

... Version upgrades. At the moment, Radio is considered a 'version 8' release. However, from time to time, Userland collects together a range of changes, bug fixes and feature enhancements and packages them as a so-called 'point release' (for instance, 8.06 or 8.07). This is handled somewhat differently by you and me than a first-time installation or a reinstallation of the entire product. More about that in another topic.

Download and Reinstall

(Note: this topic assumes that you have already downloaded Radio and installed it at least once.)

1. First, make a copy of your important Radio files. You can leave them in the Backups folder as I suggest. Radio won't alter them during the reinstallation. If you are the cautious type, place them somewhere else or make yet another copy and place that somewhere else!

2. Go to the main Radio Userland download site, located here.

3. Download Radio just as you did when you first installed it. Make sure you reinstall it now to the same location on your computer that you did that first time. However, when the screen below appears, you may launch Radio right now.

4. Radio will prompt you to enter information about yourself so that it can assign you a user number and password just as it did when you first installed it. DO NOT DO THIS. YOU ALREADY HAVE A USER NUMBER. Instead, scroll down this same page until you reach the section shown below:

Now, enter your current user number and password. If you don't know it, enter your email address as requested and wait for Userland to send you the needed information. In most cases, this should only take a minute or two. Once you receive this data, enter it into the fields shown above. This enables Radio to match up your reinstalled version with your publicly published weblog on the Community Server.

Reload Your Original Theme And Templates

5. When this is finished, Radio will load your home page. Uh-oh. Whoa! What happened, you ask? Why did Radio launch a different theme than the one I now use? (Of course, it might turn out that Radio loads the same theme that you are now using.) Most likely, this is the theme you will see:

What happened, a bit oddly, is that while Radio preserves the current state of nearly all your other content, it does not retain your theme or template files. Happily, you have made a copy of those files when you copied your WWW folder. What we need to do now is re-choose the theme we had before and match up the same template files.

6. Right-click the radio icon button in your Windows status bar and turn off upstreaming. Unfortunately for us in this case, Radio automatically installs with upstreaming turned on. As a result, we can't keep Radio from upstreaming the home page of your reinstalled site with the default theme.

(Go to your public home page after reinstalling Radio and you will see what I mean. Don't despair. The rest of your pages will still have the old theme and we are going to fix the home page next).

7. Go to the Themes page from your Radio Command Menu. Select the theme that you had chosen before you reinstalled Radio. Click submit. This will restore the theme you want. However, if you have made any changes or enhancements to the theme within Radio templates, these will not yet be reflected. To match up template files wiht your original theme:

7.1 Open the back-up copy of the WWW folder that you made. You did do this by backing up your important Radio files, right? Right?

7.2 Open the new (current) WWW folder within your reinstalled Radio Userland folder.

7.3 Copy and paste the following files from the old version of your WWW folder to your new version - #template (the same as the 'main template' in your Radio user interface); #homeTemplate; #desktopWebsiteTemplate; #itemTemplate; #dayTemplate; #navigatorLinks.

You can say 'Yes' when prompted by Windows for each file unless the file sizes and dates created for a given file are identical. In my case, the #dayTemplate remained the same even though the themes were different. Then, 'No' will work.

8. Now, turn upstreaming on by right-clicking the radio icon in your Windows status bar and clicking on the Upstreaming choice. Answer OK to 'enable upstreaming'.

9. Wait a minute. Another minute. A third minute. When you can't stand the tension, check out your public weblog again to make sure your home page looks like it used to. If it doesn't, you can try this instead:

9.1. Select Open Radio by right-clicking the radio icon in your Windows status bar.

9.2. Select 'Publish' and then 'Weblog Home Page' from the Radio menu in the Radio desktop application.

9.3. Select OK.

9.4  Wait a minute ... and another minute. This should definitely do the trick. If it doesn't, the most likely reason is that you didn't actually copy the files correctly from the old WWW folder to the new folder ... or you didn't actually copy your WWW folder from your older version of Radio.

Re-Enter Your Serial Number

Whenever you do a complete reinstall of Radio, you will need to enter your serial number again into the software. Otherwise, Radio fools itself into believing you have started another trial subscription period.

For a review of that concept (or if, like me, you have lost your serial number). consult How To Retrieve and Enter Your Serial Number.

If Murphy hasn't intervened, you have now successfully reinstalled Radio. Despite all my verbiage, this really shouldn't take you longer than five minutes. Once you understand the process, you can indeed do it whenever you wish.

 <-- Return to Home Page