Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Monday, August 26, 2002Site update: more topics added.
I have grown to really like liveTopics. Converting from Radio's categories to liveTopics has been cumbersome (as it matures, I imagine Matt might offer a conversion utility), but worth it. You can now browse a topical outline of all posts on this site here; it is now complete for July and August. I will periodically go back and add past months as well.
Even if you're not very interested in sharing your topics (you can keep them entirely private), I've found they're a great way for keeping track of past posts. When I want to pull up a post I made in the past, I just need to open the allTopics.opml file on my desktop and can immediately see when I made the post (and link to it from the file).
Of course, the advantages to your readers - if you're interested in giving people an easy-to-navigate road-map to your posts - are big as well. In all, liveTopics is a great tool.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
[Ernest Svenson: Radio Questions & Tips] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
Answer: How to put boxes around those cool news scripts by Dave, Jim and others.
There are at least two ways: 1) use css formatting thanks to a hint by Lawrence Lee and 2) use Dave's Going Even Crazier: Frames Macro (thanks to Alison Fish, who sent me an email). I prefer the first method because I can have even more control: include colors, etc. example: my DC Dog site is formatted by css formatting. All I had to do was just copy a couple of my already created css over to the Radioland home template and then call them when I needed to:
1) in the style section of my header in the html (Home template), I added these two from my DC Dogs: (When you get to the site, just view the source code)
.sidetop {
text-align: center;
font-size: .95em;
padding: 2px;
background-color: #FFAA00;
border: 1px solid #000000;
}
.sideelse {
text-align: left;
padding-left: 8px;
font-size: .9em;
background-color: #EEEEEE;
border-width: 0px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
border-color: #000000;
}
then I called them like so:
2) "Question [snip]... I 'd like to know how to put boxes around these
links and make them look organized like Jeff did... )"
Did you see the frameIt macro?:
http://radio.userland.com/goingEvenCrazierWithMacros
1) contributed by Dog News: weird, inspiring dog tales
2) contributed by Alison Fish at: http://radio.weblogs.com/0111198/
[Dog News: RadioQuestions from Dog News] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]liveTopics and Categorization.
Ernie asked me what the big deal was with liveTopics. In explaining it to him, I figured out why I was excited about it. (Interesting lesson for KM - you can't share what you don't know, and you don't know something until you can explain it.)
liveTopics makes it easier for me to add meta data to my posts. This alone is useful - because context around content is critical for others to benefit from it. But liveTopics closes the loop by automatically creating an outline of all posts to my blog, sorted by topic. The result is a far better navigation tool for my blog - because it increases the likelihood that anyone interested in a particular item (myself included) will be able to find it quickly.
The outline contains the item title as well as any other topics associated with the item. That alone gives the reader context - this is a post that's about liveTopics. But if you only really want to know about liveTopics as a KM tool, then only follow links to posts that also contain "KM" associated with them.
For Radio users, there are some critical advantages (as I see it, your mileage may vary) to liveTopics:
- No duplication of content. If I posted one item to three categories, it created three copies of that item. This always bothered me - not only does it create duplication at Google, but it also means that multiple people could link to the same item but use different URLs. Tracking inbound links (and thereby creating some map of who's reading what) is difficult when the content is duplicated. Besides - I work for a CRM company, and we're pretty religious about single instance of a record... categories just rubbed me the wrong way.
- Categories should route content. Using preferences files in Radio, Radio can easily take care of posting to multiple sites. But categories create duplication (see above) and can bury relationships among related blog entries. liveTopics, by contrast, highlights those connections and makes it easy to drill down into more "related" topics.
- Cross-referencing becomes easier. I had used a categories macro to highlight what categories were included in a post, but your ability to browse by category was limited to the calendar. If you posted only periodically to a category, you forced users to adopt a non-standard navigation scheme in order to find your content. (Translation: it required additional effort, therefore it was less likely that they would actually dig deep enough to find anything of value.)
- Less rigidity in categorization. By the nature of the categories implementation in Radio, you are effectively reduced to a fairly rigid list of categories to post to. Yes, it's possible to create new categories - but as a practical matter, Radio really wants to limit you to pre-existing categories. liveTopics allows you to create topics on the fly - just type in any word and liveTopics will associate the post with that new topic.
I've already updated all of August's posts by removing category information and replacing categories with liveTopics. I'm very impressed with Matt Mower - extremely speedy replies and even better patience with me as I got my legs under me. There are still some rough edges, and Matt's already identified some things that will get further work. Rest assured, however, that liveTopics is big. If there were any doubt that Radio could really serve as a powerful KM platform, liveTopics goes a long way to erasing that doubt completely.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog][Ernest Svenson: Radio Questions & Tips] [dws.]
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As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio. You'd think that I'd want people to just buy the Essential Blogging book and NOT give content about Radio for free. You'd think that but you'd be wrong. I really want to see Radio do well along with great people like Jake and Lawrence. And more documentation is pretty much always a frothy good thing for products. So... Inspiration struck me yesterday when I was digging through the 240 gigabytes of digital bile that I call a hard drive(s):
A quick demand (ok gentle request) to my partner, Gretchen, for "A really cool cover" and within about an hour, she IM'd me the graphic at left. And I've been in hard core content massage since 3:37 am on this oh so soggy Boston day. I won't tell you that this content is perfect -- there are clearly some broken links and other editing style things that need to get done. But there is a lot of content and it's useful. It'll get improved more over time but following the Open Source mantra of "Release Early and Release Often", I give you: Scott's Radio ==> Read Stories <== |
Playing with liveTopics.
Just downloaded liveTopics, an interesting extension of Radio that adds potentially valuable meta data to weblog posts. This is a tool developed by Matt Mower, and represents an important "next step" for Radio as a KM tool.
From Matt's site:
Topics are used on your weblog to provide cross-reference links to related items and can also show what you are and have been talking about in your postings. Cross-referencing is further enhanced by the ability to publish a Table of Contents (ToC) for your weblog (note the ToC uses the excellent activeRenderer by Marc Barrot). The two-level ToC liveTopics creates shows all the topics used in your weblog. Under each topic is a chronological list of each posts associated with the topic. In turn, under each post is listed the other topics associated with that post. This is a powerful addition to your weblog and greatly enhances it's navigability.
Here's what I love. Marc Barrot builds activeRenderer, a great UI enhancement to Radio. Matt takes that and builds on it to extend the UI by creating new ways of navigating through weblog content and adding meta data to boot. I haven't learned all the ins and outs yet, but I think this is big.
Stay tuned.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]