September 2002
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
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15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30
Aug   Oct

Feeds I Read

Radio Tip: How to email to a category. [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: My Radio docs list now includes Andy Fragen's scripts [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Question: As I've become more comfortable with Radio I've begun using Categories to manage mini-websites -- for clients, special interests, etc. Currently, there is no way to propagate changes all the way through a specific Category except to "publish -->entire site". As my site gets bigger, this takes longer and longer. And it is pointless to republish stuff to the Userland cloud when all the changes are intended for an ftp server somewhere else. Adding the ability to publish all the pages in a single Category would greatly enhance Radio's effectiveness as a desktop website management tool. Answer: You should be able to do this using a Quick Script. Mark Paschal has instructions here: http://radio.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$10882#11024 (Quick Script, open the Radio application and choose Tools->Developers->Quick Script. Copy and paste the script into the window and click the Run button.) Question (follow-up): From reading Mark's post, it appears the way it works is I would create a script for each specific Category, and then run that script each time I wanted to publish that Category. Yes? Answer: Yes, you could always setup bookmarks for each of the scripts so you could just choose them from the menubar. [Lawrence Lee] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: Al's Radio Doc Sources got some additions thanks to Lycos search engine finding stuff that Google and Tecoma did not.  Here are some highlights of the revised connections.

Clark Venable

• Downstreamer Tool for Radio Userland - the opposite of upstreaming - send other people stuff for you to analyse on your desk top PC.
• This software was written by Seth Dillingham at Macrobyte Resources. (See Unknown)
• Hmm, I wonder if this could help with backup recovery?
• Your PC had a melt down and you not done a backup recently, then you trying reconstruction.  You might be able to use this to Publish in reverse from web site to replacement desk top???

Unknown

• Macrobyte Resources offers Form Generation Tool for Radio and Frontier sites.  See Clark Venable.
• Oh! Radio is a collection of links to Radio aids: Tutorials; Articles; some I have seen before, and some more places to explore.

Craig Burton

• Documentation Directory
• Tutorial on Radio Userland Channels
  • This is one of the best tutorials that Al has ever seen, and in this case also heard.  The interfaces are a bit different than Al accustomed to, which is a combination of Craig settings and the fact this was created over a year ago, and Radio has been upgraded since.  But Craig explained a lot of stuff, including stuff that was not previously clear to Al.  This may be worth viewing again some time, like going to a favorite movie or novel, and picking up more nuances on later trips.
  • He has done several tutorials: 
    • Click on the globe to get at the simple text;
    • Click on the hyperlink to experience the education.
• Define the word Blog
• Build a Radio Directory

I periodically reprint my Radio Doc Sources for reference review.  It is now up to 8 pages.  I may need to move my stuff to a separate page, so the explanation (just over 1/2 page) out of the way for regular visitors, and my elementary efforts at documentation don't pretend to be the equal of the worthies who came before me.  The count is now up to 48 sources of tools, tutorials, tips, documentation, examples, inspirations, and lots of stuff I do not grok yet as well as I desire.

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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Radio Tip: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing Accordingly, I have decided to down a healthy swig of geekola which I now share with the world as it was shared with me. Say you hate the idea of another site using your eminently marketable blogstuff to draw traffic and dollars that you never see, but you want your URL to be as widely passed around as possible. The syndication feed put out by Radio Userland can be customized, as it turns out. Here's all I know, though I haven't tried it yet. First go here and see if this makes sense to you: http://radio.userland.com/descriptionFilterCallbacksNo? Me neither. Then a white dove descended on a heavenly beam of light and delivered the following unto mine eyes: "That page says it in Radio-developer-speak, so not really. But you can: 1. Download this file: http://markpasc.org/blog/gems/rssFilterDescription.truncate.ftsc 2. Open the Radio application by selecting "Open Radio" from the its dock menu. 3. Select the File -> Open menu option and open the downloaded file. 4. Assent to saving it as weblogData.callbacks.rssFilterDescription.truncate. 5. The script will open; click "Compile" then close the script window. 6. Select the Radio -> Publish -> Weblog Home Page menu option. 7. Close the Radio app. On Windows File -> Exit actually stops Radio rather than just closing the app portion, but honestly I'm not sure how that works on Macs. The descriptions for your RSS items will be only the first sentence of each item instead of the whole thing. You could get more creative with deciding what to put, but it'd take someone else writing the script to be quite as easy as above. I hope that helps!" Hah! Well, I'll see. Thank you Mark, stay tuned, and pass me that geekola... [FarrFeed] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: RSS tutorial. Mark Nottingham: RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. (42 words) [dive into mark] [Don W Strickland: software] 

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LiveTopics Tool Waiting In The Wings
I hope this is finalized soon because I'm looking forward to using the liveTopics tool. The more I blog as "backup brain", the more I need organizational aids.

Radio Tools Licensing. Matt is looking for the perfect license model for his Radio tool. If you want to get your hands on liveTopics 1.0 before Hell freezes, you'd better join the discussion at http://www.quicktopic.com/16/H/tVkeJYmT2Wr/p-1.-1 and help Matt make up his mind fast. [read more] [s l a m]

 

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I updated the Radio weblog archive feature to include support for weekly archives. Starting the week on Sunday, each archive page displays the entire week of posts. An example of the weekly archive page for this week. [lawrence's notebook] 

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Weekly Archives for Radio Weblogs. One week ago, I released some code Lawrence wrote to enable Radio to generate Monthly Archive pages for your Radio weblog. Today I released some parts, also by Lawrence, that let you do Weekly Archives. Here's my weekly archive for this week -- week 35 of the year 2002. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 

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Radio Tip: Latest major addition to my Radio Doc Sources:

Scott Loftesness

• Notes on Customizing Radio with links to the various tools he found, and links to Radio Userland documentation that he found to be particularly helpful, and other people like I have listed here.

Do I really have 50 different sources there or am I miscounting?

[Al Macintyre: e Radio Ideas] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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Weblog as my backup brain.

Blog This at Con Jose.

Towards the end of the panel, Bill Humphries said "The web log for me is a research tool," and pointed (verbally any way!) to Cory Doctorow's reference to Dorie Smith's explanation of her web log as her "Backup Brain." Teresa Nielsen Hayden said "One of the reasons I have a web log is to keep track of all the things I find incidentally." The Live Journal folk said the same thing, and so I'm going to point (yes, again) to the commonplace book as a close relative if not a distant ancestor of the web log.

[Instructional Technology]

This nicely captures some of my key goals with keeping this weblog. It's the primary reason that I tend to take advantage of Radio's news aggregator to post mostly complete copies of the items that I want to remember. I also use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to search my weblog archives. I can usually manage to remember some fragment or key phrase about something I've posted. I can then usually find the original item in my archives.

The notion of personal knowledge management hasn't been explored enough. Maybe I'm sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can't see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible.

[McGee's Musings] 

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Radio Tip: Al Macintyre's Radio Doc Sources.

A great collection of links to Radio documentation, tips, tools, experts. I keep finding new, juicy things and ripe, proven resources. High editorial value. Thanks, Al.

[Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Adding navlinks to all Radio desktop pages.

After adding the radio_navlinks outline to my desktop website, I realized that only solved part of the problem. The other was getting the same navigation options for all Radio pages - the Aggregator page, the preferences pages, etc. If you add the activeRoll to the #template.txt file, you'll end up publishing it to the rest of the world.

That's when it hit me - all of Radio's "private" pages (i.e., the pages that only you as the user see, not what the rest of the world sees when reading your blog) are served up from the www/system folder. I copied the #template.txt file from the www folder into the www/system folder, and then modified the #template.txt file to add the activeRoll macro containing the radio_navlinks.opml file. Bingo.

This makes my own internal use of Radio far more effective.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Radio NavLinks.

Radio users only:

Just created a Radio outline called radio_navlinks.opml. The idea was to take all of the desktop Radio functions and put them into one outline. I then used the activeRoll macro by Marc Barrot (it's part of his activeRenderer suite) to put the outline in my desktop website template. The result? All Radio navigation options are available on my desktop website home page. I no longer have to navigate to two, three or four pages before getting to the one item I want.

If you want to do this, there's a couple steps:

• Save radio_navlinks.opml in your gems folder.
• Add <%activeRoll ( "file:///C:/Program Files/Radio Userland/www/gems/radio_navlinks.opml" )%> to your #desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt file wherever you want the navlinks to show up (I added them to my top-left corner).
• Make sure <%activeRendererHeader () %> is included in the head section of your #desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt file.

Please note: if you use this format, then you will always have the navlinks displayed whenever you load the desktop website. The downside: if Userland updates the navigation options, then you won't have those new menu items included in the navlinks outline. You can always point the activeRoll macro to the file that lives at my site - but if you're working offline you won't see the outline. Your call which makes more sense.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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myRSS "enables anyone to build custom RSS channels for virtually any news site they desire." [Scripting News] 

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Old-Time Original Weblog Directory
This resource does not get mentioned enough. It was where everyone went in "the good old days" to find the latest blogs. It is sad that some of the trail-blazing sites are taken for granted by many of us. So much so that we forget to mention them to newcomers...

Are you listed?. eatonweb portal.  A major improvement was implemented recently that adds bigtime value to Brig's alternative portal -- a new database is in place and all listed weblogs are now being tracked by "weblog name, url, description, country, state, region, language, category(s), keywords, birthdates, parent/children/sibling weblogs, author's sex, author's birthdate, ratings and reviews" -- needless to say, the site is now one super resource which will get better and better as more weblog authors respond to Brig's campaign to get people to edit their listings.  [Coolstop Daily Pick] [jenett.radio]

 

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