Well, I bought Radio.  9:31:54 PM    

JP Brown's Serious LEGO. Damn, I want to do this kind of thing...  8:30:41 PM    

'Use It or Lose It,' New Alzheimer's Research Concludes [Scientific American] I heard about this on NPR on my way to work this morning. Very interesting though not completely unexpected.  8:24:30 PM    

Dave Winer writes: "Thanks to Zeldman for the pointer to a table-less three-column liquid CSS-based site that degrades gracefully (that's a mouthful). Now I've been trying to figure out why this is so important. I wrote XML-RPC for Newbies, to help people understand why it's so important to geekish Web developers. Would a designer please write a Table-less CSS Templates for Newbies, to explain why tables are evil. I don't get it. Or is this just gymnastics, which is cool, but tell us so, please."

Here's my take: tables are fine for layout if your readers are not in the least disabled and are using browsers over fast connections (most browsers wait for the closing table tag to render the page which can take a very long time over slow connections.) But if your users are on slow connections, are disabled, or simply have their own needs for viewing content (more on this in a sec), tables are very limiting. The original intent of HTML was markup, that is, taking content and defining what it is, not necessarily how it was to look. This latter decision was left up to the user (remember those horribly complicated style preferences in the old web browsers?) We've drifted from that and now people are marking up their content full of styles and rules for display and making their pages largely a single thing which cannot be altered.

Tables do not degrade well for blind users. They are read row by row, left to right. For most users it means that they have to sit through useless information which is horribly repetetive. Take Dave's own Scripting News site. A blind user would have to sit through the entire left blogrolling column before getting to the content, every single time they load the page. What a nightmare! With CSS, this information can be placed last in the HTML and yet displayed in the same place making the content come first.

Of course there are workarounds (invisible skipnav techniques, for example) but these are kludges. Table-less design allows for pure content leaving the look and feel to a separate file and making the content far more accessible. If the Web is truly the medium for all people, then we need to be aware of all users, including the disabled.

One caveat: it's not a panacea. I still use tables for layout if I cannot achieve a goal using CSS. There are times when it makes sense. But I still design so that I am following all of the guidelines of Section 508 and the WCAG 1.0. To do less would be a disservice to the web community.  8:20:51 PM    

Toddlers Cannier than Scientists Thought" One-year-olds are supposed to learn by copying adults - but now it seems they only copy us if it what we are doing makes sense to them."  8:10:20 PM    

TidBITS: Printing Digital Photos, Part 1 Excellent article!  4:49:40 PM    

So, I haven't linked to my friend Donna's website in awhile, so here she is. Donna is one of the many great reasons to like Canada. Skating is another. But let's not go there.  1:22:15 PM    

Design for Community  9:19:20 AM    

Three magic little words "Whenever a phone solicitor calls in the middle of dinner, don't get sore. Don't slam down the receiver. Don't hang up. Just say, "Hold on, please." Then gently set the receiver on the table and go about your business." Brilliant.  9:17:08 AM    

So, today is the last day of my Radio demo. Do I purchase or do I let it go by?

Pros

• News aggregates automatically in my chosen RSS feeds. One stop shopping (of course, I can do this via other sources, notably NewsIsFree.com, which also lets me post directly to my blog)
• Through services and Radio Express, I can post directly to my blog from almost any app under OS X and from any website. (of course, I can do this using AppleScript and Blogger's own javascript popup box)
• I can easily theme my site using a variety of looks and feels (then again, Radio's templates make it somewhat difficult to design my own site the way I want it through a somewhat convoluted interface and with blogger I have much more full control which has worked well for me).
• An RSS file for my site is automatically created and weblogs.com is updated when I update my blog. (So what? What, exactly, does that get me? My readership hasn't changed as far as I know and I never really did this for a wide audience but friends, family, and interested parties. I am not interested in becomming a popular blog so what do these features really gain me? And I can still achieve both of these goals using blogger pro.)
• Neat little calendar on my site to go to past days (and I can do the same thing, less attractively, with blogger.)
• Posts are mirrored to my blogger-based blog. (So what? Why do I need two blogs at all? In fact, it would be much easier if I *only* had the blogger blog and not the radio-hosted one.)
• Ability to build my own services (so what? I can't think of a single one I need or want. This is a neat idea which I have no need for.)
• Extremely handy method of adding images to my blog. (I know HTML, I did fine doing this manually before).

Cons

• Yet one more application I have to leave running and one which spikes the CPU ever 5-10 seconds. Just watching in top and with a load monitor running, I see a 20%-40% hogging of the CPU ever 5-10 seconds. (So what? It's UNIX. I haven't noticed any slow-downs on the front-end and UNIX is designed to handle these situations gracefully and does. And leaving another app running means little. Again, UNIX handles this just fine and I have a boat-load of RAM.)
• I cannot make the aggregator run when I want it to. Sometimes I get a free minute and want to see what's new but it's been less than an hour since the last run and I have to wait. I have found no way to make it go manually. (I'm sure there is a way or there is a way to hack this functionality in. And there's nothing stopping me from still using newsisfree.com and so forth.)
• It costs money while other things which do what I need are free. (Well, true, but $40 isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things and to achieve the same functionality I have to cobble together a number of other resources into a loose confederation of software packages which is a pain. And Radio is being actively developed. New features are coming out all the time.)
• Very hard to find certain items in the documentation. For example, I remember an announcement for a spam-free email link but I cannot find it at all at Userland's site. I've done searches for "spam-free" and "spam" and "email" in radio userland's site, I've wandered the discussion boards (I did find a message about someone having trouble with it but nothing about it itself). For the life of me, I can't find it at all. OK, I finally found it by searching scripting.com's archives. Why is there nothing about this on Radio's site?

The Bottom Line Honestly, I don't know. I do know that I have been blogging more and reading more since using Radio so it is clearly making my blogging-life easier but it's not clear to me if that is Radio's doing or the fact that I never bothered to get the other tools doing what I need them to do.

If I can find a way to NOT have the radio blogger and only have this publish to my blogger blog (or if a reverse bridge allowing posts made to my blogger site to come over to the radio site existed) then I'd be truly content.

Any thoughts out there? I'd love to hear from you.   9:02:24 AM