Tuesday, February 12, 2002

How about this? What if I figure out how to build a weblog that contains permalinks to a Newbie's Radio Tutorial (we could call it Radio Playing for Dummies)? Is there a need? Clearly, it would move from where the Help & Prefs leave off to things like I've been facing as I attempt to build a decent site. I have other ideas about things I want to write about, think about and discuss, but most of that is dependent upon my becoming proficient with Radio as a tool - and, not just to post a message! Style issues, channel issues, newsfeeds, categories, integrating a weblog into a web site and vice versa are things that we all need to know how to do. So, until that stuff is understood, the serious content will just have to wait. I'd rather try to help a certain subset of Radio Users as a personal learning exercise. I wouldn't know a CSS from an RSS from an XML-RPC right this instant, but I'm willing to learn and determine where each of these topics fits into the 4 phases of development I discussed this morning. Any thoughts out there? (I've got a hunch there are others who are willing to help!?!) 4:38:18 PM     Comments[]

Here's an aha! (A mind bomb(?), at least for me!) Dane Carlson has figured out a way to find (with Google) sites that offer RSS feeds. As I understand it these are the sites that Radio users can add to their news aggregator. I'll be experimenting with this. Another important goal for me is to make the Web Services examples work! 7:33:41 AM     Comments[]

Email regarding yesterday's Newbie Questions and Dave's & John's answers was overwhelmingly positive. I'm a little surprised. It seems that the community of users who want to do some of the things I want to do with Radio is quite a bit larger than I realized. It appears to me that Radio users may fall into at least three groups as users - or perhaps users pass through three phases in their use of Radio. Some may stop in the phase they need or want and move no further. The fact is that the lines between each of these phases are blurred. A rough summary of what I heard is: BASIC USER: Downloaded Radio, made it work, love it for posting ADVANCED USER: I want to enhance the look of my site and really exploit Categories, News Feeds and the like WEB DEVELOPER: I'm redesigning my site to use CSS; I wish I had done this to begin with; there's a lot more I haven't figured out, yet. PROGRAMMER: Radio is moving me into XML, Web Services, SOAP and other cool stuff All the messages were encouraging. Most people made it clear that there's no problem stopping or pausing in any of these phases, other than possibly the last. That's where enormous change is happening. I'll continue to share my questions, the answers and some trial-and-error methods I've gone through as I get things nailed down. A hearty thanks to everyone for their positive remarks! 7:11:49 AM     Comments[]

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