Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Instead of the usual format with someone asking a question and getting some answers, here is something intriging in an answer that leads to questions. tag board. Radio Answer: how to add a free 'tag board' to your weblog. [Dog News: radio questions] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] Radio Question: How does this compare to comments and e-mail?  Is it easy to see when someone has added something, can we easily POST a reply, and can we delete one we do not like, or that is an error duplicate? I tried Quick Topics first because it seemed so simple to implement for someone who is not an HTML Guru.  But I was disappointed when it did not send me an e-mail notification of Alison posting something there, contrary to the setup documentation ... I only found out about the post when I was exploring my referers links to what sites people visiting who were also visiting my site. There has been some discussion of problems with various commenting options, some of which I share in my Enhanced Radio Tools story. It is a standard on most Themes that someone can click the back of an envelope and it sends us an e-mail.  When I changed my e-mail address, I had to jump through hoops to get that stuff working correctly to the new one. 5:19:47 PM

This problem that dws describes below, is sometimes I have contributed to with my blogging, that people who do not heavily participate in News Aggregation might not see.  It is also something that a lot of newbies, which Doc obviously is not, might get in a habit of doing without realizing how it can aggravate many of their site visitors.    The main reason it happens a lot with me is the whole business of a flaky OS connected to a flaky internet connection ... at any moment our browser connection might crash, so we want to key a little, save it, key a little more, save it. The first suggestion is to have the 3 buttons activated so that if you think you might want to tinker with a post some more, you do not use one of the publish options until you no longer think that way.  However Radio Wish, we also need some additional buttons to save something longer while posting the stuff around us, and also being able to clearly see what has not yet been posted, and what has been updated since that last publish. My second thought is if Radio Outlining can be done in stories (I do not know if it can), then as we get into something that calls for some further re-write, such as in my mini-essay on the plight of a Nigerian woman that my Google referers tell me a flood of people think is a hoax, then perhaps it is time to move that stuff to a story, and leave a pointer at the old permalink redirecting visitors to where it went, with a variation on John Patrick's technique. But a Radio Wish that would further enhance this mutual Knowledge Management would be to have a public url that has our stories alphabetized by title, that is to our shortcuts what the public stories page is to our stories directory.  Your radio application has to be running to access the our links.  To the extent that we can make it more user-friendly for people to navigate our stories, and also incorporate outlining and everything else, the more we will put in stories that which some of us are now putting in the date navigation area. [dws.] QUOTE Doc, I love ya man for all you've done and said so well for years. But I hate the way you blog here; Doc Searls Weblog. Am I the only one? Maybe it's something at my end but I don't think so. What I get through my aggregator looks like Doc keeps changing the same item all day long (maybe in an outliner of something), reposting it time after time as it grows throughout the day. This produces two problems at my end: I see the same stuff over and over in my aggregator, each time with something added at the top. If I want to post a reference to a item from Doc I have to dig through the whole days mega-post to find and edit out the one item I want to reference. If you know Doc personally, please gently tell him that a blog should be one item, one post, next item, another post. Thanks, dws. UNQUOTE [dws.] 4:09:30 PM

I'd like to take this Technology Wish a bit further, Radio Tip thanks to a hassle I had posting this, and figuring out how to handle it.  Background: I hope you do not get duplicate posts because I had macro errors until I Prefs / News Aggregator / Where to go after Posting / turned it off ... basically I used the magnifying glass on dws.Radio.FAQ to locate the post I had remembered from earlier, then did my POST from there, but on the way back there is a bug in Radio, that I just discovered today, where it can't find where it came from when we not use standard path posting from New Aggregator, giving us a Macro error.  At this point it lost what was on my home PC and only published to my public site, where I copied that to my home PC and tried again.  Solution: Thus the tip, so that others can avoid the same hassle ... if you plan to use the magnifying glass to gather all of one News Aggregation source together, then POST from there, turn off that Preference first until you are done with any POSTs from that particular source or by that route. [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] QUOTE Radio Wish: [John Robb] Wouldn't it be interesting to have an RSS variant (new name obviously) for subscribing to personal contact data off of weblogs?  Name, weblog name, weblog location, physical address (or as much as you want to provide), spam free e-mail account location, IM link to username, location of RSS feed, Bio info, bio pic, resume, etc.  To a large extent this would replace my bookmark and e-mail contact list.  I truly think that weblogs are starting to become global 24x7 business cards.  This would help me collect them. Answer: [Kunekt] Kunekt Cards make your contact information available as an RSS or RDF (News) feed. UNQUOTE [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] One Dream: I want to be able to take business cards to a scanner to put the info in a personal contact place on my PC ... for those of us without specialized scanners connected to our PCs, think one of those full service photocopy places & the data going onto a CD Rom, in which I might go to the place with my CD Rom of old business cards and get some more scanned in.  Part of the process might also include providing links to software places that process this contact information various ways, just in case we not already happy with what we have.  Companies might issue to their corporate customers and vendors a CD Rom that has on it a company directory of business card like contacts, their web site map, some company brochures, etc.  everything needed when doing contacts with that outfit.  I think business people on the road might like to have a mini-portable business card scanner that would capture the data into a form to later plug into their laptop.  My vision is a box perhaps the size of a pack of cigarettes that can store scores of business cards for several days, then you plug it into some port of your PC to download what it has accumulated. Another Wish: Perhaps the people who do Themes and advice on Navigation Links can guide us into a specialized form for About Us, that has many suggested things we could fill out, but if we leave them blank, they do not eat up space where someone looking at the results.  We might want to have several versions / copies of this.  One that anyone visiting our weblog can click on to get what we publically share with anyone.  Another to be sent with our configuration when we have need of tech support.  Some of the form could be filled out automatically by some software that looks at our PC and our Radio settings, much like the Weather Link now does (Your Radio Application has to be running for this link to serve you). Yet another future desire: When I am using my telephone, I want to be able to verbalize Call Jay in Columbus Call IBM Tech Support Call Susan in Cincinnati Call John in Australia Call Papa John's Pizza And then the telephone would automatically dial whatever the phone # is that is associated with that person or place that I call regularly.  I don't have to look up the number, I don't have to remember a speed dial directory, vastly reduced risk of a wrong number.  Whoever can figure out how to make this work has got a potentially very large world wide audience of people who might want that technology.  I can see several possibilities for getting there. PDA type interface to a box attached to home or office telephone where we can key in stuff, then speak into a microphone that this # we just entered is associated with whoever at what company.  When the voice input to phone switch is flipped on, stating the word Call in immediate proximity to the phone, triggers the voice input to match the next words with its directory.  This would serve people with standalone phones. Have the kind of wire running from PC to telephone plug that we used to use for modem dial up before high speed internet, but now this wire would be used to get data from PC to the phone's voice input box.  We could download updates from John Robb's vision into our phones. Mobile Phone users when they push some button, that connects them to Wireless Internet Telephone Directory that is their personal voice recognition system like I just described.  Then when we use this, the last step in the matching who we want to call in the directory is to actually make the connection. Growth in this industry will mean dimunition of us getting calls that are wrong numbers, although I will still get calls from people who read tiny print ads in the newspaper classified and misdial and get me instead.  Perhaps the newspaper can come with an electronic plug-in for your voice recognition phone system, like a CD Rom except designed to reply to the ads. 3:26:05 PM

Radio Wish I echo Alison Fish's interest below, where I think she is calling for a new preference option in how the boxes on News Aggregation function.  For example, I might be going down the list doing some deletion checking off, then come to a post I want to react to right now, before I lose my place, but that means I lose the fact I just checked a bunch of boxes, so what I really need at that point is the delete box riding along with the scroll bar, and when I am done, my window returning to exactly where I was, like often happens with posting news aggregation stuff, after I found the preference to tweak to get that. Something that is a bit annoying to me are posts where someone has got their underline color right justified etc. turned on to the point that in WYSIWYG I cannot put regular text alongside without it also being the same way, no matter how much I use the top buttons to try to undo it.  I want to be able to put the cursor some place, and push a button that returns that place to the defaults without any of the modifications, but without undoing the adjacent text that I am quoting. An earlier Radio Wish thread was on the topic of editing styles, where we clearly distinquish who said what, using a new icon on the Radio editing box. [BlogFish] QUOTE  I love the cross-posting feature in Radio (when you click on the Post button to the right of every rss item Radio will copy the item and author to your desktop homepage for posting). I try to edit these crost-posts before publishing them to indent blockquotes and correctly credit the original author. Is there a way to tweak the code that handles the Post button's click action? I imagine this involves editing a form handler. UNQUOTE [BlogFish] 1:06:34 PM

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