licentious radio
Wednesday, January 30, 2002[11:21:08 PM]
Judge Orders God To Break Up Into Smaller Deities [theonion.com]: They left out the part about God embracing other gods' features like evergreen trees, and extending them with large, colored, blinking lights, and ornaments held on with paper clips.
[9:14:40 PM]
Heh, heh. CGI-RPC. What's the difference between a web page and ???-RPC? An RPC gives you back named variables. A web page gives you back a web page. So XML-RPC is pretty simple, and SOAP isn't as complicated as some other things around. But I gotta say, it's hard to get more simple than application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Ok, so there's no data typing. Strong data typing is what separates the programmers from the scripters; the people who release every three months, from the people who release several times a day. Heh, heh.
[6:52:41 PM]
One weird thing about the weblog story structure is that you're reading backwards. You're like Merlin in White's King Arthur story: say you've read part way through a weblog... you can remember the future, but you have no idea what happened in the past.
I can think of a few ways to hack at this, but the easiest thing to do seems to be to call it "art", and leave it alone.
The thing this suggests to me is that weblogs aren't "it". They will surely be used more widely -- perhaps pervasively -- in the future. But I suspect that some very large chunk of their current use is due to the difficulty of any other sort of web publishing. I want to put stuff on the web, and the only reasonable tool at hand is weblog software, so everything looks like a weblog.
The opportunities are tremendous now and for the next few years to build applications that solve problems we've been beating our heads against ever since we started using personal computers. Small teams, working in scripting languages at light-speed are going to do some awesome things. Go Userland!
[6:17:00 PM]
The templates that come with radio are pretty complicated. Stripped of page junk, a radio homepage template looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Mon, 01 Jan 1990 01:00:00 GMT">
</head>
<body>
<a href="<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>">
<%siteName%></a><br>
<%description%><br>
<!-- begin calendar -->
<table width="160" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#EEEEEE" width="100%">
<div align=center>
<%radio.weblog.drawcalendar ()%>
</div>
</td></tr></table>
<!-- end calendar -->
<br>
<%radioBadge%><br>
<%rssLink%><br>
<%navigatorLinks%><br>
<p><%bodytext%></p>
<%radio.macros.weblogEditBox ()%><br>
<%radio.macros.weblogRecentPosts ()%><br><br>
© Copyright <%year%> <%authorName%>.
<br>Last update: <%now%>.
<p><%radio.macros.editThisPageButton ()%><br>
<%radio.macros.staticSiteStatsImage ()%>
</body>
</html>
[3:51:49 PM]
Some notes on trying to use radio.
<rant>The Macintosh os x absolutely stinks as an interface for doing more than one thing at a time. Perhaps using radio amounts to doing only one thing, but figuring out radio and tweaking settings -- that uses a bunch of windows. Switching between windows is pathetic in os x.</rant>
So I switched to my regular desktop.
I deselected the setting to require login from remote computers, but it still required a log in. Since I hadn't specified a password for the visitor login, I couldn't get in. I thought maybe I just had to exit from radio and restart, but that wasn't enough. I don't mind that it requires a login. I mind that it lies.
There's also something broken in radio about the settings to cache web pages. When I Post to Weblog now, Netscape 4.76 just displays an http "302 FOUND" message. Mozilla (very old) redisplays the page without updating the content. This is despite the meta expires tag in the source. I think both of these browsers have the cache setting: "check once per session". But changing NS 4.76 to "every time" didn't help about 302 FOUND. I hit reload.... Seems like if you own the server, you might as well do cache control from there.
The upstreaming setting doesn't seem quite right. I don't want it to check the directories every ten seconds in case I added a file. If I add a file, I'd like to click a button and make the file go exactly when I want it to. Meanwhile, it sure looks like if I have upstreaming on, radio doesn't wait for the ten second mark to come around before it uploads changes I make through the browser interface. So what I'd like is a setting that upstreams changes from the browser interface automatically, and let's me initiate upstreaming for other sorts of changes.
It seems very strange to me that I can edit a template through the file system before starting Radio, but Radio continues to use the previous version until I call up the page to edit the template in the browser. When I get to that page, the changes I made in the file system are already there. Seems like Radio might as well just reload (or check for a date stamp change) the template(s) for every page. It's not like there's either a scalability or a performance problem with that. I guess you're just supposed to not change templates much.
[3:40:12 PM]
One of the problems is that there are some freaky bugs in the works.
[3:39:22 PM]
One of the joys of a Radio as a web application is that I don't have to sit at the Macintosh.
[1:17:18 AM]
Yesterday's news, but still entertaining: Bush on encroachment.
[1:02:29 AM]
Puttering. The web is good for puttering.
The good news is that editing templates worked just fine in Netscape (6.1). It's a little odd how different the desktop looks, but I ain't complaining.
I took a good whack at the homepage template. Pruning.
© Copyright 2002 john robert boynton.
Last update: 9/27/02; 10:58:46 PM.