Saturday, September 07, 2002

[Russ Lipton Documents Radio] QUOTE It's time to push Radio past the Star Techie crew that so ably helps Captain Dave navigate, and colonize a few of the Federation's planets. UNQUOTE [Russ Lipton Documents Radio] I think Radio Open Source is like the Ferengi, with many dreamers trying to figure out if there is a way to make money off of this stuff, when the answer is to make Radio work for the masses of the people on all the Federation planets, so that then the Star Techie crew can make money providing Radio services to all those end users. There will be documentation services, like Russ is writing about. There will be people doing consulting to help corporate intranets setup radio behind firewalls. There will be tools to enhance Radio, that people will download for trials, and while Radio Userland gets $40.00 a year from the end users, the tool users get $4.00 a tool sale, but multiply both by millions of customers. Various ISPs make money selling additional disk space to categories beyond what Radio Userland now offers. Perhaps one of my game designs can be played through Radio.  I would declare a game universe session able to handle X number of players, and here is url of the rules to that game. People sign up at a form where they give their credit card number, and are assigned a slot in the game. They post their moves to a private category, protected by Rick's code, whose name is assigned in combination with what game being played, and some accounting number associated with which cluster of X players, which the game moderator subscribes to, so that their moves are populated into the total game universe, whose results go out to the players via RSS. Some games would allow non players to subscribe via RSS so they can see the flavor of the thing to help them decide which next game openings to sign up for. 8:06:30 PM

Radio Wish Below our Home Editing Box is a chart of our categories, so we can click on which one(s) to get latest post, or click on link to go to preferences for that category.  I would like right below each category, or to the side, in that chart to have in black print: Date time of last thing published to that site. Some icon or flag to indicate if there is stuff in transit there that we posted but not yet published, or it not yet upstreamed. Also add a globe with a link directly to the home page of the Category. 6:01:40 PM

Radio Wish When we are on desk top with stuff we could edit, we have columns over at the far right with when first posted (date time) and button for EDIT some more and check mark if it is in any categories. I would like the date time column to have second line showing when we last edited this. some kind of indication as to status This has been edited and posted but not published We published an earlier version but this has been edited and posted since then have chart of identifications that it is in what categories I am sometimes looking at a post and thinking this or that also belongs in certain categories History of Technology Science Fiction Interests other categories as yet to be created But did I in fact put it there? That's why I want a quick way of seeing which posts went where. 5:47:18 PM

Radio Lesson Understanding the 3 buttons ... I do not know if this is correct or not, but it was the clearest explanation I have heard so far, within the Craig Burton Tutorial I recently mentioned, as compared to other explanations I have previously seen in other people Radio Documentation. Post This saves on your desk top PC your work, that was just in your Home Editing Box.. I do this a lot when working on a post, just in case my browser connection fails. Publish Send to the public site ALL your work that you might have posted but not published. There could be several pieces you been working on and not yet published. Your Home Editing Box could be empty when you do this. Post and Publish This does both. Anything in your Home Editing Box is saved to your desk top PC. Anything in your Home Editing Box is also published on the public site. Anything else you been working on but not yet published, it now gets published to the public site. 2:43:29 PM

Radio Dreaming (thinking out loud) My Radio Wishes are usually in the form of I wish Radio did this or that a bit differently, or here is an idea for a tool or other enhancement. This Radio Dream is more related to I wonder if I understand something well enough to craft a vision of what might be possible in the future. There is a concept in Think Tanks of Bridge Ideas ... sometimes one idea leads to a better idea, in which we would never have got the great idea were it not for the dumb ones on the road there.  I think I have a few dumb ones here.  It remains to be seen if there is a great idea at the end of the road. Warning: This particular Al thought process is a rather long post.   Some people (me at present and recently) want openness, not care if someone else noodling into any and all posts off my home page.  In fact welcome it, thinking that random contacts serve to enhance our continuing education in this wonderful medium. Other people seek privacy, not want general public looking at everything on their web site. Dave Winer Scripting News recently linked us to discussion showing a lot of end users oblivious to capabilities of other people copying stuff from their sites.  My opinions on these topics posted Sep 2. Rick Klau offered solution to prevent people browsing your weblog directories to find all your stories and categories etc. I have not yet tried it out, but it seems like the solution is, for any folder we want to restrict access to, to insert a text file into it with the naming and code supplied by Rick. I want to understand why this works. Is it because file name index.txt is used by various browsers according to some standards? If so, then a person who understands the standard behavior could have software that accesses folders by a different set of rules than those that Rick is foiling. I want to understand what this works for. Does it work for browsers, search engines, rss? If we want to keep something private, it has to work for both browsers and search engines. I think people with private categories might want them rss available to co-workers, family, etc. so we'd share starting link, but random public not find them by accident. Thus, once the word gets out about some url, people can rss subscribe to it. At some point in future I will want a combination. Most of my stuff open. A small amount private. Thoughts on whether that is practical, and if so how to accomplish it, assuming my understanding  of this reality is reasonably competent. First Thought: One way is to put open stuff on Nav Links on home page, with 100% private via Rick deal.  So people find out what I want to share, by using the Links, that I would provide, from home page.   There would also need to be a check list of other things to do, like not notifying Weblogs.com when stuff changes ... can you have different rules for stories vs. other kinds of posts? This means that newbies cannot go with private stuff until their learning curve is moderately advanced enough to do the Nav Links and Rick insertion, and also whatever else needs to be on the check list. We may need a service tool that helps us inspect how good a job we have done in setting up Rick security system and our cross links. It runs like Norton Utilities or other analysis tool on our desk top PC to identify all the Radio files we have and how large they are ... grand total site disk space count. It runs like a search engine spider on our home site to find out what links to what, and what folders exist not blocked by Rick technique, and what links found on those not blocked ... totalling up site disk space found. Now we get statistics - actual disk space vs. how much of that is public private. Get a tree of our directory, color coded as to which is public and which is hidden from public. Is that what we want, or is further tinkering needed? Well the above first idea would work, but I am not entirely satisfied with it, for several reasons.  A lot of maintenance needed to support it. Second Idea: I am thinking of an explorer of my directory, be it browser or search engine crawler, that goes part way through the directory in alpha sequence of the contents, then it hits something with a particular name in terms of first few characters, containing Rick's code, then the explorer gets no further because of Rick's idea. Let's just suppose the character was <!>. A post whose name was just that character would contain Rick's code. You'd have to use something generally available on any keyboard. It would have to be something that Radio software lets us use in our naming. You'd have to know what characters not used in web software, so as not to cause other problems. You'd have to know the ASCII or whatever sequence is used nowadays in web technology. I thinking that what you want public would have name starting with characters like digits and letters that come before the character in the ASCII alphabet, while if you want something to be private, you put the character in front of the naming. This could be spoofed.  A directory crawler might recognize Rick bounce back at <!> and next go looking for <!> 0 (or whatever next character of ASCII sequence) forwards. Computer Security does not want a standard that many people know about how to spoof. While I think I have come up with a clever idea here, it is rather complicated to explain, and it only provides partial security protection. Beginners won't be able to use it. Hackers will have no trouble spoofing it. So I am even less enthused with my second approach than with my first one. Third approach: I am dreaming of some plug-in tool to support a directory like categories except code categories code being something tied to Rick strategy We would set the precise code naming used in our preferences, for added security protection.  Different people use different code names, to enhance security, so hackers can't go looking for a particular code string. The first entry in the code directory would be Rick system to move any visitor beyond anything else in the code directory also code stories There would be a check box, on category page and shortcuts stories, offering swithc something between open and private. Our act of changing something between open and private publishes to replacement directory, removing from original if private, weblogger.com not told about updates there, so not on that page for anyone to see and link to Advantage of this approach is you not have to be a developer programmer to figure out how to work it.  Any newbie beginner could install the tool just by clicking on some box like in preferences to enable the feature. Now if someone developped such a tool, what would we'all be willing to pay for it? I think the third approach is the best for everyone. Al go back to sleep and dream up something else. 1:47:09 PM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.