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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
Anticipation...
liveTopics 1.0 release iminent.[Curiouser and curiouser!]Okay I've said it before, but barring major incident liveTopics should be released before the end of the week. My current target is thursday since I move house on Friday and I'm not sure what my connectivity is after that. Or, maybe that's not a good time to release... :)
Oh well, damn the torpedo's, full steam ahead!
Update: googleBox How-to
3. You do need to create an account with Google to get the key that's required by the Radio and Frontier glue They have a limit of 1000 calls to their server per day per user. For the applications we have in mind this should not be an important limit. And it's good that they've put the limit there, so that they can at some point make this a commercial for-pay service, which we believe it should be.4a. Radio 8 users: Update Radio.root. Bring the Radio app to the front and choose Quick Script from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu. Enter google.init () and press Enter. Then choose Jump from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu and enter user.google. You should see an item called key. Click in the second column, enter the key you received from the Google website.
First, the instructions for Radio.
<%google.macros.box ("your name here")%>
This renders as a box, like the one you see on Weblogs.Com in the right margin, or on my Radio weblog, here.
Here's a list of parameters to google.macros.box:
1. searchterm is the only required parameter. It's the search string you would enter through Google's HTML interface.
2. ctResults, a number, default 10, indicates the number of results you want to see in the box.
3. tableWidth, a number, default 191, says how wide the box is.
4. frameColor, a string, default #000000, it's the color that the box frame is drawn in.
5. boxColor, a string, default #FFFFFF, the color of the inside of the box.
6. helpLink, a string, is the url of a page that explains what the box is about. Default is a page on the Radio site that doesn't exist yet.
7. textClass, a string, default the empty string, is the CSS class for all text in the box. If it's the emtpy string we enclose all text in a element with a size="-1" attribute.
Update: I found this thread on googleBox parameter examples along with a note from Phil Wolff on passing the name of a category to the macro. Neat idea. No resolution shown.
A Choice Paul Shouldn't Have to Make
Paul Holbrook, who figured out how to shorten the RSS feeds in Limiting RSS Summaries to First Paragrah, has found his solution wanting and gone back to allowing full stories in his feed. I don't blame Paul. He doesn't like writing like a journalist -- head, deck, story -- and finds that sometimes his readers miss an important point.Or maybe even Paul doesn't know what the one most important point will be to his readers, and by filtering to his first paragraph he risks focusing on the wrong one and failing to get his readers all the way through.
I know. It happened to me.
But that doesn't mean I want to view Paul's entire story in my News Aggregator. And I should have the choice of how I want to get Paul's feed. The only way I can get through all the feeds I track is to do a quick scan. I currently have 60 news sources (I know, that's overkill) and I add a couple a week. Using "Mark Paschal"'s Kit News Aggregator keeps the display filtered down to a reasonable size, but if all my feeds included full stories it would still be too much.
The beauty of News Aggregators is the ability to provide a quick scan summary of the day's news, and I enjoy being able to scroll quickly through the list to see what I should pursue. I know that even if I miss something, someone else in the blogplex will pick it up. With full stories I can't get that quick scan, and I lose the spontaneity that is important to me.
But what is right for me isn't right for everyone. As Jon Udell says in RSS Truncation Shouldn't Be An Either/Or Choice, the reader should be able to choose how to get the feed. Paul shouldn't have to make an either/or decision about what his readers want.
There should be a simple mechanism for allowing readers the choice of having a full or truncated feed. Jenny Levine at TSL has accomplished this using some server-side scripting, but it's over my head until I can learn something about cgi and php. Paul also suggests a mechanism where the author could choose what to place in the feed on an item basis. Either of these is better than the situation now.
Until Paul gets his item-by-item feature, I hope he'll consider offering a dual feed, ala The Shifted Librarian.
I'm not going to truncate this feed anymore.[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]After championing truncating your RSS feed to the first paragraph, I'm going back to an untruncated RSS feed. Truncation works very well if you write like a reporter. If you get everything important into that first paragraph, folks can decide if they want to click further. But sometimes I feel more like telling stories than reporting the news. And in that case, it's very hard to get everything you want to say into that first 'graph.[...]
I Hate Typos -- Radio Blogging from MSWord
Using LiveTopics to beat typos. I hate typos, and I haven't the time or the inclination to figure out little accesso-checkers like MicroSpell. I'm sure it's great, and all, but I just don't have the time.So I was looking at Matt Mower's blog today, checking out the TopicRoll, and saw a link to Radio Blogging from Word (there's a Mac version, too.)
It is pretty technical for a pseudo-geek wannabee like me, and I have almost no tolerance for stupid MSWord tricks (I can't even make it do a decent outline) but if I can make this work, reliably, this will be a good thing.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Update: Well, this does work. It runs a little slow on my PIII 733 machine, but it does carry over links, colors, and basic styling just like Simon Fell said it would. Neat. Now we'll have to see just how useful.
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This Page was last updated: 11/28/2002; 6:41:26 PM
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