Joe Friend: Radio Userland

joe.weblog.or.id

If all worked, then this post should be on my new site!

Switching to my new domain

I'm getting ready to move over to my new domain. If you wind up on this site http://radio.weblogs.com/0103361 and are wondering why it's stale, I've moved to http://joe.weblog.or.id . If all works out right, you'll be automatically redirected to my new site. At the suggestion of our man Lawrence, I've added a create a meta redirect that looks something like this:

You have to replace the < strings with a <

Here's hoping this works!

Spell checker for IE

I tried this spell checker earlier, but it didn't' work with Internet Explorer rich edit boxes. Now it does, which means it works with Radio Userland. Very cool add-on. Maybe I can quite doing the copy/paste/copy/paste into/out of Outlook to spell check each entry. Well, it's working so far.

ieSpell is a "free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage." [Scripting News]

Honesty and blogging

This is a good piece from Scott about honesty in blogging. He trumpeded (sp?) his new deal with Paolo/evectors and I pretty quickly IMed him and reminded him about stability issues he had with Userland Radio. Well, he told me that, yes he has issues with Radio. However, he believes that Paolo and company are dealing with them. And Scott is right, everyone's got bugs. It isn't fair to beat up Dave & Co. too much for the same problem everyone has.

I'm glad that Scott dealt with this issue publicly. It reconfirms what I've come to believe about him, he's got high credibility.

Radio Randomizer Weblog Ring

I just joined Joe Jennet's Radio Randomizer project. It works much like a webring. Just click on this icon (the one you see just like it to the right!) You then get to visit a random Radio weblog that has joined the ring. Cool huh? I also use one of Joe's Radio themes for this weblog. Joe's a great guy with a great name! ;-)

RSS/Weblog based Ads

Have you seen the first RSS ad? Well, it's the first one I've seen. Glennf is now featuring an add on his 80211b news weblog. It comes through the RSS feed too. First one I've seen. Here's what it looks like:

Today's 802.11b Networking News is sponsored by IIR's Public Access Wireless LANs conference, 1-3 October 2002, Lisbon

The above is a paid, sponsored link. Contact us for more information.

Comments back on

Comments are back up and working! They got lost in the testing of activeRenderer. Some of you Kuro5hin folks please leave a comment, ok?

Click on the sideway triangles

I've turned on a tool that allows you to collapse old posts. Only the new ones will be visible by default. So, do as the title of this post says to see the old stuff. Also, let me know if you have problems using this or see weird things on your computer.

More strange Google hits from my referer

I'm number six for "watching soccer in seattle," even though I'm watching from Indonesia. Someone else found me via "indonesia linux penetration," even though I didn't seem to show up on the list.

Today's Google hit

Someone from another country (not the US or Indonesia) searched for Channels Islands soccer and I'm listed as number two! No one reads my weblog?!?!? Why am I number two?

No one reads me.

However, every day I get at least one strange hit from Google. Some one searches for something and I show up high enough on the list that they come to my site. Strange and very cool.

Shortened RSS feeds

"Ziv Caspi of Y. B. Normal thinks that "Aggregators should bring more, not less, information", and I'm inclined to agree."

I find it interesting that this quote is on decafbad.com, since there own rss feed is truncated (as is Jon Udell's and Slam's). I'm beginning to hate truncated feeds. For most of them, I just end up bringing up the site each time new posts come in so that I can read the entire post. People should always have the choice of a complete feed or truncated.

Active renderer

I've just installed v. 1.04 of Marc Barrot's active renderer. I think a much earlier version was causing my upstreaming problems. If that's the cause, it is the second time i've been bitten by a radio tool. Take caution.

Radio Docs, finally

Thanks to Dave for posting the new Radio docs. Thanks to Russ for the blood sweat writing them.

Undecided

Radio would be great for publishing a weblog if it was more stable. I have constant problems with upstreaming. I know that Radio is tuned for a broadband connection, but can't it work on a bad dialup too? If I decide to change platforms, then this page should come in handy. It is a comparison chart of various weblog tools.

If I only knew how

A Plea to Blog Template Designers Everywhere! I've read and agree with Scott's plea. I'm 38, Scott is 35 (right?) My eyes are fine, but I can't tell that they're starting to fade. I looked at my template and it does use PX values. I'm not a template designer by a long shot. So, I borrow someone elses and make my changes (ever so slowly feeling my way through the mine field.) Scott specifies using 90% for 12px, but what do you use for all the others? Don't you want to change them all???

Upstreaming, ugh

I really hate Radio some times. I can't get upstreaming to work reliably to the Userland RCS server for anything. I'm going to have to try a local (Indonesia) ftp option.

Stupid gripe

I'm old fashioned. I still like to read from paper. Particularly if it is something that I need to think about or annotate with questions/comments. Here's how I work. I scan through stuff on my aggregator and delete like a mad man. Then I go back to the interesting stuff, read more carefully and open some of the links. The really interesting stuff I often print out. I hate web pages that don't print right. Note, I print stuff out on a HP LJ 1200. Usually I print two up (two pages to one A4 page), less paper to deal with. But all of these problems occur even when I print one page up.

This page of Dave's doesn't fill the paper.
This page on Userland doesn't wrap right, so text gets clipped on the right side.
But this page of Dave's prints fine.

I'm not picking on Dave, he's just one example among many. Most of Scott's pages print fine, but the other day I printed one that exhibited the clipping problem (whish I could remember which one.)

Designers Steve likes

Steve lists some of his favorite website designers, all very cool. But only these make the cut for me:

Gail Armstrong
Scott David Herman
Alexis Massie

Why? I really wouldn't want to use a design that is oriented towards a specific window size. I don't mind reading them, but I prefer text that wraps to the window size I'm using.

OPML outliner for Windows

Rick Klau had success in his search for an outliner with OPML support for his Palm handheld. I'm happy for him, but I'm looking for something so much easier. I just want one for Windows! Yes, I know Radio does that. But I'd like a standalone, freeware/open source outliner that supports OPML. Does such a beast exist? I want this piece so that non-radio users could edit an opml file that would later be rendered for the web. I've found this one, but it requires installing python and a bunch of other stuff. Boy is it a pain. I may get it working some time soon, but I can't imagine any regular user doing so.

Alexa web search beta

This is a pretty cool search engine combined with reviews of websites. It is a strange combo of search and Amazon.com's interface. However, for my site it lists Userland as the contact. I'm sure that this is a by-product of using the Userland server, but it is kind of weird. Also, the picture is of someone else's Radio website and the page they are finding is actualy an old catagory that I've already deleted. Weird!

Ugly site, Mine

Is this site ugly or what??? I wish that Userland would pay someone some money to create cool, but simple new themes. I hate all the ones that come with the product but am too graphically impaired to do anything about it!

Groove vs. Radio

"The larger the group, the more you need Radio (Groove only scales to 32 participants)." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

John makes this statement, but nothing to back it up. I'd love to get more info on this. I'm testing Groove for clients that need the security. This is a major missing piece for Radio. I've mentioned it to John before. Not all knowlege sharing takes place behind a firewall. So, RCS is cool, but some people need to build knowlege sharing networks out in the wild and wooley open internet AND have them be secure. Groove solves this problem. Radio doesn't.

I'm trying to update to Groove 2.0 as I type, but that isn't easy via dial-up from Indonesia.

UGH!

Oh my, Dave linked to me and I'm still in the middle of trying to debug the categories problem with Lawerence. Well, hope you all like reading all my test posts! As we say in Indonesia, Saya malu sekali.

My claim to scripting fame

Regarding why the Google API is signicant, Dave says: "Google is the leading search engine. When the Macintosh platform went through this layer of technology in the early 90s, a simple utility called Stuffit got it started. Then Pagemaker, Filemaker, Quark, the Finder; and from there, scripting interfaces became commonplace. Some may want an orderly deployment of common practices, but leaders can move more quickly, and they will, and that's good."

I was the program manager responsible for scripting in PageMaker at Aldus (now Adobe) back then. I remember going to dinner with Dave one night to talk to him about scripting. We wanted to get it right and knew he could help. Dave probably doesn't remember any of that and I'd forgotten that we were on the bleeding edge then. It was over 10 years ago. Man, can't believe it's been that long. Well, I live in another world now (literally) and am happy to be a consumer of Dave's team's work. Keep it going guys. (And thanks Lawrence!)