Saturday, January 12, 2002

Now that I've gotten a little sleep and come back to play with Radio again, I'm finding the news aggregator to be a really great feature. When you first start it up and subscribe to a bunch of channels you really do need to go through and clean out all the old headlines. Otherwise it's a bit overwhelming because there are so many. Once you do that you just get the new headlines as they come out which is very handy. 2:27:15 PM     Nice to see Dave is on top of things. You have to give him a lot of credit for really paying attention to what's going on. 7:29:55 AM     Now that I've gotten a little venting out of the way about my full night's worth of Radio induced pain. I should say there are quite a few things to like about the product, of course there's also a lot to not like about it but... Anyway, I like the idea of a database with built in scripting for just about everything. It's also nice that you can automatically dump your posts to XML and the way you can target different portions of the tree to different servers is pretty cool. I'm still feeling my way around the category setup, but I think it will work pretty well. Obviously the theme support is cool though there aren't very many of them right now. I'm disappointed that there is no way to preview a post before sending it to the server. Oops, I just remembered a pref setting to turn on some additional buttons that might help in that regard. I don't remember there being an actual preview, but you can at least save with out publishing which should help. At first I didn't like the way the News feature worked because there were about 500 headlines, now that I've cleared the queue I'm starting to appreciate it. Time to play a little more. 7:16:51 AM     I'm kicking the tires of Radio 8 now that it runs native under OS X. I'm trying to decide whether or not to use it instead of the simple PHP system I had been using for XMLDatabases.org. So far the experience has been, well ... pretty painful. I've encountered numerous bugs and inconsistencies with it so far. This included not being able to publish to the Userland servers. I also tried FTP to my existing server, boy was that a mistake. It couldn't get through my NAT box and Radio goes into a tight loop and consumes all available CPU while taking like a minute to time out on EACH file. You'd think it would be smart enough to realize there is a problem and just give up after the first file. The first time it happened I just let it run and it took almost an hour, pegging the CPU the whole time, to finally spit an error out to the event log. I wasn't ready to give up tough, I also tried using the local backup option to write a copy to my server through a locally mounted WEBDAV share. For some reason that didn't work either. I could get it to write to a directory, but pointing it to the WEBDAV mount resulted in the content just disappearing. I finally did get it to publish by using FTP into to my local box and then specifying the WEBDAV directory as the location to write the files. Yuck! Anyway, userland did eventually fix their servers and I'm back in business with the regular XML-RPC based publishing. That seems to work pretty well as long as the servers don't get confused. I'm going to try things out for a week or so before making a final decision. Fortunately it looks like most of the functionality is provided through scripts so if there's something that really annoys me I can probably fix it. Overall it just looks like some teething pain for a new release and the product overall seems well worth the $40 price tag. I've actually been waiting for the native OS X version of this for a while so I'm going to stick with it, get Userland some feedback and hopefully add a good tool to my collection. 6:36:20 AM     Ok one post worked, how about two. 5:38:07 AM     Testing to see if upstreaming works now 5:36:48 AM

© Copyright 2002 Kimbro Staken . Last update: 2/2/02; 8:16:59 PM . This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.

Resume:

Sites:

Inspirational Technology
XML Database JuJu
Mac OS X Divinity
Xindice Realm

Software:

Xindice (Formally dbXML)

dbXML XML-RPC Interface

XML:DB API Reference Implementation

Jive XML Database Port

FreeDB CD Database to XML Data Generator

Writing:

Introduction to Native XML Databases (xml.com)

Introduction to dbXML (xml.com)

An Introduction to the XML:DB API (xml.com)

dbXML Users Guide

dbXML Developers Guide

dbXML Administrators Guide

XML:DB API Specification

XML:DB API Use Cases

XUpdate Use Cases

ICEPick Peer to Peer Personalization

Presentations:

Native XML Databases Why Bother?
(HTML) (Powerpoint)