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Saturday, October 16, 2004
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Radio UserLand 8.1 release. Radio UserLand 8.1 has been released and a new installer is available for download for new users which includes all the latest changes since the last 8.0.8 release. Note: There wasn't an application upgrade in this release so the application version will still read 8.0.8.
If you are an existing users, you just need to update Radio.root to receive the latest updates including the most recent changes released in September. [Radio UserLand Messages]
2:08:35 PM 
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Radio 8.1. Radio UserLand 8.1 is available for download. This page explains how to upgrade if you are already using Radio 8; otherwise please follow the instructions on the Download page.
How to upgrade 
The Radio 8.1 release does not include a new application file to upgrade. You just need to update Radio.root.
New features and fixes
New feature: This release includes the previously released beta for Atom support for the Radio news aggregator.
New preference: You can now change the sort order using a new preference from the default to display the oldest news items first.
New macro: radio.macros.linkToStyleSheet that you can use this new macro to link to a CSS file instead of directly including the style sheet in each page.
Bug fix: Four scripts changed from nested tables to paragraphs: radio.macros.cloudLinks, radio.macros.statusCenter, radio.macros.statusMessage, radio.macros.supportCenter.
Bug fix: Corrected the HTML generated for some of imagesin radio.macros.blogroll, removing the valign atribute from the img tag since it's not HTML/XHTML compliant
Bug fix: Three text area changes to make themes a bit easier to create. The title box, URL box and URLs to ping box all changed to 55 columns wide. That one box would sometimes cause the entire left or right column to appear beneath the bodytext.
Modified the newMediaObject MetaWeblogAPI RPC handler to make Radio check if a new media object is an image. If so, place it in the images directory. If not, put it in the gems folder.
Bug fix: Added the name of the form for several macros to prevent the form from posting and loosing all of the text entered. radio.html.editTextFile, radio.macros.newStory and radio.shortcuts.editor
New feature: Radio's built-in News Aggregator supports RSS Auto-Discovery. This means you can subscribe to an HTML page, and if it has a suitable <link> element in its <head>, the aggregator will subscribe to the RSS feed it points to.
New feature: Links for Blogroll, RSS and Subscriptions which generates a sensible set of links in the heads of the home page HTML.
New tool: Weblog Neighborhood
New callbacks: Two new weblog post form callbacks that make it easy for Radio developers to add their own form elements to the weblog post form on the desktop website home page
New feature: The comments feature was updated to include a link back to the original post when viewing the comments for a post
New macros: radio.macros.previousDayLink and nextDayLink
Bug fix: A fix was released for a bug which happened when making the first post in a new month, when using the Titles and Links feature.
New macro: radio.macros.commentOnThisPage
New feature: Monthly and weekly archives lets you maintain monthly and weekly archive pages for your Radio weblog.
Bug fix: A fix was released for a bug which would cause some HTML entities to be doubly decoded when Radio's aggregator reads the feed
New tool: RSS Explorer
New feature: Support in the aggregator for the RSS elements skipHours and skipDays.
New feature: Mail-From-Aggregator
Bug fix: Set of fixes to radio.weblog.drawCalendar
New feature: Callbacks for Writing RSS files to make it possible for scripters to write callbacks that add namespace elements to feeds that are created by Radio
New feature: Support in the aggregator for the RSS 2.0 comments element.
New feature: Depending on the proxy server's configuration, Radio may not be able to connect with hosts inside the local network without first turning off Radio's proxy server support. The proxy exceptions feature allows you to specify domain names and/or IP address ranges which are not accessed through the proxy server.
New feature: Support for RSD a new format that allows weblog software like Radio UserLand or Manila to tell a tool how to create and edit posts
New feature: TrackBack for Radio
New feature: Redirecting an RSS feed using an XML level redirect.
New feature: Support for GUID element in RSS 2.0 feeds
New feature: XML-RPC Interface for the Aggregator: an interface that makes it possible to create user interfaces for UserLand's engine in any language or environment.
New feature: Backup and restore your weblog
New feature: Purchase additional storage space for your Radio weblog.
New feature: WYSIWYG editing in Mozilla
New feature: Added comment notification via email.
Previous Changes
8.0.8 change notes are here.
[Radio UserLand Messages]
8:50:23 AM
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Wednesday, July 7, 2004
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NECC Webcasts Online. If you missed NECC, you can now access some of the workshops and presentations via Webcast. Included is Anne's Weblogs workshop, all of the keynotes, and about half-dozen others that pretty much run the gamut. You need to go through a quick registration process to see the videos. [Weblogg-ed News]
8:35:20 AM
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Tuesday, June 15, 2004
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PC World Review of RSS Readers (guess my favorite). Two-Way RSS for Bloggers
If your job--or passion--is to keep up with the news and comment on it, you'll appreciate an application like Userland Software's $40-per-year Radio Userland, which puts a full Weblog system on your desktop. Radio Userland (or Radio) descends from an aggregator that helped launch the RSS format in 1999, but it's much more than a feed reader. Its subscription price covers, among other things, hosting at Weblogs.com. All feed reading and blog editing are done in your browser.
Each element of the interface is a Web page that lets you control Radio through menus, buttons, check boxes, and text-entry fields. The aggregator page stacks the latest feeds in reverse-chronological order, each with a button that enables you to delete the item or post it to your Weblog. Preference pages let you set how often to poll sites and how many items to display on a page. New items on feeds you subscribe to appear chronologically on the same page: You can't reorder the items or sort them according to source.
A subscriptions page shows your feed list; a preinstalled collection includes New York Times and BBC pages and a sampling of blogs. You can subscribe to a blog from another Radio user with a single click, instead of performing the multistep process of copying and pasting into the subscription page required for outside feeds. With RSS 2.0, Radio supports feed attachments. For example, early adopter Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ, has been experimenting with many-megabyte video clips in his RSS feed. Radio sets the clips to download after midnight. [PCWorld] [Scott Young's Radio Weblog]
12:28:17 PM
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Friday, March 12, 2004
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Presentation Slides. Just finished my presentation at the Internet @ Schools East conference and a number of people asked me to put the slides up for viewing so here they are. Be warned that it's a 4MB file, so it may take some time to load up.
All in all I think it went pretty well. I'm guessing there were about a 100 people in the room, about three had their own sites, and it seemed like most understood both blogs and RSS well enough at the end. It is, however, a lot to throw at people in just an hour. (If you were in the audience and want to leave a comment, just click here to join the site and then come back and click comment under this post. All feedback welcomed!)
I got a chance to meet with David Carter-Tod who was a real help to me when I first started poking around with blogs and such, and I'm hoping to meet up with him and some other bloggers later tonight. That's always the best part of these conferences anyway. And I'm about to take in a series of Weblog and RSS presentations including Jenny's dedicated to RSS alone. Should be pretty interesting.
Just one story: I was sitting in the lobby after my presentation listening (ok...eavesdropping) to a conversation one of the other conference speakers was having about a panel he was on, and he started mentioning RSS. I guess at one point, his panel had been talking about RSS for about 20 minutes when someone in the audience asked "Can someone please tell me just what that is?" A number of people applauded. This still must seem like Greek to most... [Weblogg-ed News]
10:48:11 AM
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Friday, March 5, 2004
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Wiki Activities Catalogue. Well buy me a syrup and call me 'ginger', here (.pdf), pointed to by Doug Holton (presumably this guy rather than this one :o) is a rather natty collection of educational activities (non-subject specific) using Wikis.
Good plans too! With teacher feedback! I might as well give up and go home (or hey, I could quietly steal them... d'oh too late ;o)
A MUST HAVE if you're thinking of teaching with or are teaching using a wiki...very very very cool! [incorporated subversion]
8:55:43 AM
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Thursday, March 4, 2004
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Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School. English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It[base ']s 6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the [base "]Furl it[per thou] button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student[base ']s personal site and adds a positive comment to the assignment post. He also [base "]Furls[per thou] that site, putting it in the Best Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It[base ']s 7:00.
After taking a sip of his coffee, Tom takes a look at his research feeds. He[base ']s been asked to keep abreast of the latest news about technology and teaching writing, and this morning he sees his Google search feed has turned up a new version of [base "]Write Outloud.[per thou] He clicks the link, reads about the new version on the site, and then clicks on a different [base "]Furl It[per thou] button that has been created for his department to share. When the form comes up, he writes a couple of lines of description about how it might benefit the department, and then saves it in the Technology folder which automatically archives it to the tech page of the English Department Website. Later that day, all the members of his department will see his link as well as any others his colleagues may have added as a part of their daily e-mail update from Furl. He also decides he wants to create another search feed for the words [base "]journalism[per thou] and [base "]weblogs.[per thou] With a click on the toolbar, a dialog box appears and he enters his terms, then clicks on the Feedster radio button (one among four choices.) He hits ok, and a new feed headline box is added to his portal.
At around 7:05, Tom uses his personal Intrablog to upload an assignment on symbolism for his major American literature class. When he opens up the document online to check it, he Furls that too with his English login and it gets sent to a separate Web page set up on the English site for American Literature Best Practices. The rest of the American Lit teachers will get an automatic e-mail later in the day notifying them of his published [base "]learning object[per thou] that they can use in their own classes. Then, he creates a post for his Lit class portal that has a link to the assignment, and he publishes the post to the class homepage. Automatically, parents who have requested it get e-mails that their son or daughter has homework to do that evening. E-mails also go to a couple of counselors who are tracking at risk students.
About 7:15 Tom decides to scan the latest school news feed which aggregates all the new posts from the Weblogs he is subscribed to. He sees that the basketball team won the county tournament, the new edition of the school paper is online, and that the superintendent has posted important information about an upcoming safety drill. He clicks through to read the entire post, and then leaves a comment suggesting a way to alleviate crowding in the hallways during the drill. (He sees a parent also has a suggestion about the timing.) Back at his page, he decides that he doesn[base ']t want to scan the library news any longer, so he goes to his subscription page and unchecks the feed. He does notice, however, the [base "]New Feeds[per thou] section lists a new [base "]Tech Deals[per thou] feed that the tech supervisor has created. He clicks to subscribe to it.
With just a few minutes left before his first class, Tom opens the personal journal part of his portal and types in a few notes about an idea he had for the lit project his students are completing next week. He files them into his Lit department so that he can pull up relevant notes all at once if he needs to. Now that his volume of e-mail has been drastically reduced, he scans the few messages in his in box , takes a last gulp of coffee, and opens his classroom door to the sound of happy students. Well, maybe. [Weblogg-ed News]
9:08:32 AM
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Wednesday, March 3, 2004
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Someone I Want to Meet at Bloggercon II. I took a few minutes to click through some of the 150 registrants for BloggerCon II next month and up popped this great post from Ejovi Nuwere:
blogs.edu
Some remember summertime free lunches as a social program created by the Black Panthers in the public schools. Since I was one of those kids eating the free lunches I remember it a little differently. It[base ']s a great example of a program that makes use of public schools infrastructure to help the disadvantaged. Blogging has that potential too.
Blogging can accomplish several things in the public school system, especially for the poor.
- It will give 3 millions passionate, poorly paid and highly educated public school teachers a chance to speak up about the issues they face everyday.
- It gives teachers, a thankless position, a chance to communicate with other teachers across America and debate issues among themselves (prayer in schools?) while the public participates.
- Gives disadvantaged students a voice. A chance to communicate with the public, other students and feel as though someone is actually listening.
- Allows students to express themselves through writing. Blogging at a young age will develop better writers through parent / teacher assistance and eventually more intelligent and thoughtful adults.
A program like this would need national governmental support. There are a few small blogging communities for public educators but without a national effort, and national participation the voices won[base ']t be diverse enough to be a real discussion. Children need to be able to communicate with other children in America and understand that they are not alone the same applies to teachers and parents.
The easiest way to do this is to eliminate the traditional pen pal system and replace it with blogpals. Then give all public school teachers access to the national blogging system and have the unions encourage teacher participations to have their issues heard.
Who can help make this happen? Does it have potential? I[base ']d like to hear more thoughts on this. [Weblogg-ed News]
7:15:26 AM
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http://kairosnews.org/
Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy, 2/28/04; 1:51:20 PM.
Blogs about Teaching. I've been meaning to post some links to the fine blogs I've noticed lately that deal with teaching. First is Revising Teaching, a community blog devoted to reflective teaching practice. Their motto is, "In teaching as in writing, revision is the road to excellence." Anyone can participate; see their posting page if you're interested in joining.
Michael Arnzen, in PEDABLOGUE, touches on his own teaching practice, but also writes responses to education stories in the news and the state of teaching in general.
7:09:37 AM
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© Copyright 2004 Skip Dodson.
Last update: 10/16/04; 2:08:42 PM.
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