b.cognosco
A quest to examine, inquire, and learn.
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Saturday, June 22, 2002
Things to do before the Demo expires
I have 11 days left on my Radio demo and I've enjoyed playing around with it, but there are several things I still need to accomplish in order to determine if I should shell out the $40 and keep this thing going.
- I need improved RSS functionality as noted below -- I want more control over what appears in the News Aggregator and I want to be able to generate clean, short RSS feeds from my site.
Update: Many thanks to Jenny Levine of TSL for sending me a PHP script to truncate my RSS feed. Now, if I can just figure out what to do with it.
Update... again: This is getting really interesting. I learned some things about authentication that make me think this RSS stuff could be really useful. I still can't use Jenny's script, but may now I'll try harder... - I need to understand categories. This feature seems critical to controlling information flow.
Update: I have now established some categories. A little experimentation and I think I now understand how the accompanying RSS feeds work. I'm still not happy with the Navigator Links in my theme and not sure how best to list the ctegories, but that's a UI thing, not a function problem. - I want to be able to include pictures
Update: Took about half an hour to figure this one out. I need to spend some time understanding the template -- placement of the pics isn't optimum with the default -- but at least it works. I'm still not a mechanic but I did figure out how to use this tool. I think... - I need to understand how to submit stuff when I'm not at my desktop computer
Update: Very Cool! I got this to work. I know it's nothing to you programmer folks, but I actually submitted a post to my weblog via e-mail and it went right through -- HTML formatting and all. It's nice when things work. - I need to understand how Radio would work with a non-public or password protected site
- I really want to better understand this outline thing.
Update: Jan Karlsbjerg gives an enlightened explanation of why the "outline thing" may not be for all of us.
Radio.Userland Questions from Steve Pilgrim
I just came across this Q&A between Dave Winer and Steve Pilgrim answering a bunch of interesting questions from Steve. This is good stuff for newbie and less technical users like me.
Shorter, cleaner RSS needed
I want shorter, nicer RSS descriptions -- both in the Aggregator and in my own weblog feed. I've been subscribing to some weblogs and some give a clean, short feed while others, like my site, create a verbose feed with everything in it. Decidedly Ungood.
Here are a few links I found for reference but none give a solution a non-programmer can use:
Shortening RSS Descriptions [Jon Udell]
Do it yourself RSS feeds courtesy of [Network World]
Display RSS Feeds on Your Page With Helper Site [Research Buzz]
Update: Maybe this one is usable: Description Filter Callbacks.
But I'd still like a little more control. Jenny at TSL and Howard Bashman at Appeal This get a nice short paragraph. Maybe that's more than is needed, but I'd like the option...
Update (again): Okay, here's a follow-up from Paul Holbrook on using the first para. I'm still not sure I can make this happen.
Semenal Knowledge
[Salon] reports in this article that a State University of New York -- Albany psychology prof interviewed 293 under grad females about sex and came away with some odd conclusions about just why they feel better afterward. Read all about it.
Opera, Radio, and the Comments Macro
When I first added the comments macro to Radio I couldn't get the comments counter to increment at all in my primary web browser -- Opera 6.x. Viewing in MSIE showed the proper count, but Opera didn't.An upgrade to version 6.03 seemed to fix the counter problem, allowing all the posts to show the proper count [0]. But now that I have a few comments it seems that it no longer increments the actual comment number. Opera will let the macro change from [0] to [1], but it goes no further. MSIE again reads the correct number.
This is a pain. I like Opera -- most of the time. There are very few things I need that it doesn't do. But this isn't working.
Update: I don't know why but this is working fine now. I think it had something to do with Opera's cache, or something... Who knows. More stuff in the toolbox you need a mechanic to understand.
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This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:01:06 AM
