Worker.digital.info

I finally get it, I really do. After suffering through the steep end of the learning curve with Userland Radio and spending the better part of three weeks playing with the program, I have finally come to understand its use and usefulness. Radio is very, very cool. It is not just a blog tool -- it is a dynamic web site tool. And a personal content manager.

Although Dave Winer uses these terms repeatedly in his user notes, support pages and discussion postings, it just doesn't gel up front because Radio is sold as a weblog tool. And, for better or worse, weblogs, or blogs, are not considered a legitimate application by many folks.

That's really too bad. Blogging is still in its infancy and like most infant Internet apps is done mostly by either young, unprofessional consumers or anti-social hackers. That leads to lots of digi-sputum in the blogosphere. And that leads lots of folks to confuse the message with the medium -- writing off blogging, and blogging tools, as useless toys best left to the youthful and unemployed.

What a mistake! Nothing could be further from the truth. For now, you do have to show some perseverance to dig through the first layers of bloggo-crap and familiarize yourself with the largely undocumented, geek-toy tools. But once you get past that a whole new world opens before your eyes. This is incredible!

It doesn't become clear until you're well into the process of blogging and have, by default rather than conscious intent, created a full web site with multiple pages, categories, etc. One day you want to change the way individual items are rendered -- maybe you now want to separate them with a colored line, or add a little icon to denote where each item starts, or maybe you want to change the background of your pages, or maybe you want to add a Google search macro to each item.

In Radio you edit a template -- item template, page template, etc. -- and wait for a minute. Voila! every item on the site now reflects the new design or content or element. You cannot imagine the wave of cool that hits your brain when you realize this is happening, especially if you have ever struggled with updating a standard, static-page site. This is definitely A Good Thing.

Radio's News Aggregator, once you understand it, becomes your daily dashboard. It brings you news and ideas from around the world and lets you save, annotate, and republish with ease. The RSS feature in Radio is outstanding. Don't get hung up on the fact that it's a geeky XML thing. It works for everybody , but its true usefulness doesn't come clear until you use it for a while. Combined with the aggregator, it connects you to others in a way that no mail list or web page can. It can even bring you yourself -- though you just have to try it to understand what this means.

Everything you enter into Radio is cataloged, categorized, and saved with hyperlinks in a transparent, user-friendly way. The more you use it the more you begin to realize what it means to have a personal content management system. You can certainly think about where to put things, but you don't have to. Radio creates catalogs and searchable archives automatically.

I have also begun to see people using Radio for their entire site -- although its functionality is somewhat limited -- and I can easily see how it could cover 80 to 90 percent of personal and small professional users such as lawyers, consultants, and educators. Radio doesn't give complete freedom over page design, support e-commerce, or other database driven functions -- users needing that level of sophistication have to move up to the $899 Manila site management tool or another product. But Radio's easy-to-edit templates, built-in RSS generation, and core "blogger" functionality make it an outstanding personal or small-business web site tool for all but the most demanding users.

Rather than competing solely with other Blog tools like Blogger.com, greymatter, and MovableType, Radio bridges the gap between blog tools and personal web site builders such as GlobalScape cuteSITE Builder (formerly TrellixWeb), or Macromedia's HomeSite. I've used both these programs and I like them a lot. It's been a couple of years since I used Trellix. At the time it was one of the first, and certainly the best, non-HTML web site tool around. I built some things that just weren't possible (probably still aren't) any other way. It's still a very nice product and current implementations are used by numerous ISPs and ASPs to provide user-friendly, web-based site builders.

I also use HomeSite regularly, and will continue to do so for special pages or more complex Radio posts (I'm writing this one in it). It has a spell checker and validates both tags and links -- something I can't do in Radio because my browser (Opera) doesn't support Radio's WYSIWIG editor. But I can see Radio becoming my primary interface to the web, news, and my own content.

Userland Radio is one Very Cool Tool. Once you get the feeling of making a single change and having it automagically parse through every relevant piece on your site you will never look at web site management the same way again. Once you start linking to the RSS feeds of the intelligent commentators and unique specialists in the blogosphere you'll never laugh at blogging again. And once you get hooked on Radio Userland you'll begin to resent the nature of static, information-free web sites.

Rick Klau, writing for the Law Library Resource Xchange (LLRX), said of Radio, "Radio is a fantastic application - it is, without exception, the best $40 I've ever spent on software." I have to agree. I have seen the future. It is Radio.

AmphetaDesk, FeedReader, and Personal RSS Aggregators

11:01:16 AM

comment []

If you feel like your drowning when browsing the overwhelming spew from weblogs or news sources you should try a Personal RSS Aggregator. By far the best way to track changing headlines from your favorite weblogs, RSS aggregators also give you a tool for quick-scanning headlines and summaries for any of the thousands of available RSS news feeds at sites like Moreover or NewsIsFree.

Jon Udell provides a more enlightened technical review of Personal RSS at Byte.com. But I've been experimenting with several personal aggregators and here's what I've found so far:

Radio Userland -- the built-in aggregator works well and has the distinct bonus of smoothly handling the posting of pertinent news items back to my own website. This is a nice feature, and will be even moreso when I can find (or develop) more industry-specific feeds for my interests. Radio's aggregator also allows the deletion of individual articles within a channel, and has display preferences for total number of items shown and auto-delete by age. These come in handy when you start to add a lot of different sources. Radio is available for Mac or Windoze.

FeedReader -- I've been using the pre-release version of FeedReader 2.0 and it is probably my favorite third-party aggregator. Its 3-frame interface is easy to manage, its mini-browser quite functional, and install is a snap. But it's only available for Windoze. And, like all the 3rd-party apps, I can't post directly to my website from FeedReader.

AmphetaDesk -- This is a new one I just tried and it's quite nice. AmphetaDesk runs directly in your web browser, making it quite familiar to anyone who's done some web surfing. Install is a breeze and it's available for multiple platforms. The whole thing is written in Pearl, so techies can modify to their heart's content. If you want to browse on several computers using the same app this is the one. The one feature it lacks is grouping. AmphetaDesk author Morbus Iff assures me grouping is on tap for the next version.

One I don't know how to do in any of the aggregators I've seen is user authentication. Allowing an aggregator to have simple userid and password login capability is critical to making private or confidential information, such as internal company postings, available. Hopefully, the vendors will add simple authentication support in the very near future.