Last week, a new reader asked, "What got you started with Radio UserLand?" The exact details are hazy, being over a year old, but the story goes something like this...

I started a backup brain in weblog format around May 2001. Almost exactly a year later, in May 2002, I considered posting the less personal material on a public site, permitting friends and family to witness the train wreck. I researched several weblog packages to ease the pain. Hand-coding a site wasn't difficult, but site-wide design changes were tedious. Microsoft's FrontPage had a proven track record as a piece of garbage. It was notorious for generating abysmal HTML, and constantly breaking any clean HTML that you wrote yourself. The product is still junk. I hope the development team has trouble sleeping at night. But I digress... I read reviews of several blog packages, but the details are no longer relevant. 

In June 2002, a long-overdue visit to Byte for Jerry Pournelle's latest column led me to Jon Udell's column Personal RSS Aggregators. (Original Byte link is dead. Jon's archive. My archive.) Being a tech-info junkie, this sounded like a great way to mainline the latest and greatest. I downloaded FeedReader and was tending to my news jones within minutes. Jon also mentioned his earlier column Radio UserLand 8. (Original Byte link is dead. Jon's archive. My archive.) Sounded pretty sweet. On the evening of June 16th 2002, I downloaded an evaluation copy of Radio and Redwood Asylum was born. I purchased a Radio license a few weeks later. The rest, as they say, is history. Thank you, Jon Udell, Dave Winer and the UserLand team.

This is my second post from SocialDynamx's FM Radio Station. Found some bugs and noted another enhancement request while preparing this post. However, since it is 3:20 a.m., I'm going to bed instead of documenting anything in detail right now.