How To Open Your WWW Folder

Your www (World Wide Web) folder lives on your local desktop machine. It contains important folders and files that Radio checks and publishes to your public weblog location if upstreaming is turned on. (A mirror of your www folder is stored on your public site.)

To be more precise, Radio broadcasts the content of some files from this folder directly to the Community Server or another location you have designated.

In other cases, Radio processes short macro scripts to find content elsewhere in its file system - your posts, for instance. Either way, upstreaming (publishing) is managed through the contents of your www folder.

The www folder offers you opportunities to publish files or pictures directly to your weblog, including file types not normally supported by Radio. You can also customize the files in this folder by adding directives or other programmer-like commands. You should create a back-up copy of the www folder before you do any serious messing around.

Open The WWW Folder

You can open your www folder by selecting 'Folder' from the Radio menu at the top of your local weblog pages.

Understanding this folder's role within the Radio universe will give you a better sense for the way Radio works - and thereby increase your confidence and productivity.  However, you need never open this folder nor understand what is going on there to post routinely and regularly to your weblog.

Once open, your www folder will look something like this:

WWW Folder Structure

Your www folder includes these subfolders:

Gems - Place files here that you did not create through your weblog browser interface. You will experience a few restrictions in the file types permitted if you want to upstream to the Community Serve (xml, html, htm, opml, txt, text, rss, ftsc, fttb, root, gif, jpg, jpeg, png, ico, doc, xls, pdf, ppt, css, wav, swf, zip, sit, hqx, gz, svg are supported) - so uploading Star Wars trailers won't work. Upload anything at all you wish to your own FTP location.

Images - This is the default location for storing graphics needed to assemble your themes. You may place your own graphics files here as well.

Stories - Radio creates this folder once (if) you create stories as well as posts for your weblog. It contains a 2002 subfolder with the actual texts of your stories - in HTML format - as well as a Radio macro that launches the list of your stories when you ask for it in your local weblog home page.

System - This contains subfolders of use to the Radio application such as images, pages (macros for processing your weblog) and short files with macros to manage upstreaming and preferences.

WhoIs - The WhoIs tool allows you to find information about other domains across the Internet. This folder points Radio to the place in the application storing requests that you have made for such information.

2002 - This folder contains subfolders with macro instructions that alert Radio to upstream new and edited posts (or delete posts) at your public location. The actual content of posts are not stored within this folder. A new folder will be created on January 1, 2003.

Categories - This subfolder is created when (but only when) you decide to use categories within your weblog. Categories allow you to divide your posts by the type of content they contain or the audience for which they are intended. They pave the way to publishing multiple weblogs to multiple public locations.

You may see other folders than this for additional Radio tools or to support new Radio features over time. For instance, my www folder above includes a 'MyPictures' tool created by Dave Winer.

Faithful to Radio's open architecture, you can add folders and subfolders of your own within the www folder just as you would elsewhere in Microsoft Windows. For example, you might want to collect certain types of graphics or story-like articles into subfolders that match your own content management style.

You may link to these files after they have been upstreamed from your weblog, just as you would link to anything else on the Internet. Be sure you link to their public URL, however, not the one in your local www folder.

Edit Some WWW Files Directly

You will notice that the screen capture also shows some files at the top level of your www folder: #dayTemplate, #prefs, etc. You may open the ones with the little notebook-style icon directly into the Windows Notepad application for editing.

    For instance, the #template file corresponds to the 'Main Template' file that is displayed and editable within the Radio Prefs menu from the Radio Menu. If you save your changes, they will be applied by Radio.

  Items showing an Internet-style 'globe' can be opened to your Web browser for inspection but can't be edited or changed there.

See also How To Inspect Your WWW Folder for complementary information on your www folder.