Radio.active

It's really good to see Matt Mower back at work. I feel like I've been gone a month and I really need to get caught up on the progress with liveTopics and the Radio TrackBack implementation.

Let's see what's on the slab....
Well in the last couple of days I have been working hard on the liveTopics 1.0 release. It's so close I can almost feel it. We're testing and hopefully will have the kinks worked out in the next couple of days then I can finally get this sucka out the door.

Also I'm really besotted with TrackBack but haven't seen it work the way I would like yet. So I've rolled a TrackBack server in Frontier that comes with a Radio client. The two communicate with a simple XML-RPC interface that would allow any klogging system to join in.

At the moment the Radio client automatically harvests each posting for links (when you submit it) and automagically pings each one. The ping contains the permalink for the post, the Url of your weblog, the title of the post, your name & email address. But you can drop most of this information you don't want to pass it. I guess some people will also want fine-grained control over what they ping. That shouldn't be too hard.

Along with this are some macros to show your TrackBack information against each item.

At the moment the server is hosted on my laptop which isn't ideal but is good enough for testing. The next job is to find a better host and then look at adding a simple federation mechanism. That would allow lots of different people to provide TrackBack servers and share the results.

More on this later. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

More Flexible News Scanning Needed

8:54:32 PM

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This really hits the mark -- I've been traveling for two weeks with very limited connectivity. I come home and it's clear lots of good things have been going on in my absence, but the Aggregator has automatically both generated a huge backlog and deleted things that may have been useful.

Radio Wishlist - Tune news aggregation intervals up and down..
Bryce Yehl tossed a coin in the fountain:

Radio Wish: Finer configuration of aggregation frequency.

One thing that sucks about falling behind in Radio's news aggregator: new items will continue to flow in while you're still dealing with the old ones. The "sticky" checkboxes in myRadio help to cope with this problem, but that only goes so far (especially when you have a serious backlog).

I'd like to configure Radio so that it automatically runs the news scan less frequently, perhaps once per day. Coupled with that, I want buttons in the browser to scan immediately and temporarily disable automatic scans.

Why make news collection a quiet background activity? Resources, for one: you don't want syndication confused with denial of service.

klogging calls for more frequent updating of select partner/colleague feeds. Sometimes polling every three minutes is the right thing to do.