October 2002
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Feeds I Read

I really need to get liveTopics installed here at Rdwood Asylum. Really!

liveTopic 1.0.5 released.

Today I am releasing liveTopics version 1.0.5

This is a minor upgrade and bugfix from version 1.0.3.   The documentation in this release is slightly worse than for 1.0.3 in that it is now out of date.  Documentation will be a priority for the 1.1 release.

If you do not have automatic updates enabled you will need to update manually. You do this my opening the Radio application (using the Open Radio option of the Radio icon in the system tray (or mac equivalent). Then from the Tools menu, choose the liveTopics submenu and from that "Update"

The ZIP file of v1.0.5 is posted on the Novissio website.

Whats new in this version:

1) Tools.

The liveTopics page now has a Tools section with the following tools:

• Topic Editor (basic info, rename and delete)
• Category Converter Wizard (turns categories into topics)
• Table of Contents Publisher (re-publish the Table of Contents via the web)
• XFML exporter (create an XFML export of your weblog suitable for facetmap.com and other sites)

2) Multi-word Topic Phrases

By enabling the preference here you can enable the use of multi-word topic phrases in liveTopics.

With this feature enabled you can use ' ' spaces to separate words in topics.  When entering topic phrases they should be surrounded using '"' (double-quote) character as in "a multiword topic phrase".

For more information and to see which bugs have been fixed, check JIRA.

 

[Matt Mower: liveTopics]

 

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Running out of Radio disk space. I was running out of Userland disk space. I got several tips for conserving disk space. I eliminated 7 of my 11 categories, and this helped a bit.

The biggest reason for the large disk use was my blogroll, which I had listed on the home template using the blogroll macro. Because there were 133 news sources in the blogroll, the size of the HTML files grew up. I cut down my disk use a lot by creating a separate "story" of my blogroll. In this light it is somewhat suprizing that so many sites carry listings of the blogrolls on their pages.

With these modifications I have some blogging time left until disk space becomes a problem again. Now I have 71% free of the available 40 MB. But I'm looking for a nice-looking template which would minimize the disk use even further. [Universal Rule]

 

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I made another small modification to the map page of this weblog. Now the page lists 300 latest titled postings. Perhaps that is too much. On the other hand, that amount of data shouldn't eat too much bandwidth. [Universal Rule] 

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Mapping a weblog. I made a map of this weblog using the Radio macros. On the map I have

• a Google search form
• pointers to the channels (categories) of this weblog
• a list of longer texts
• links to the most recent titled posts (currently 150 most recent)
• links to ranking sites to follow the use and linking to this weblog

This page was rather easy to do, and especially I like the list of longer texts, which helps in finding older relevant postings. [Universal Rule] 

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Question: How do I post my stories to my alternate categories? I want to have bios, short excerpts, etc. appear as a clickable link on the left hand side of my private, internal web site, not on my public Radio blog. Is this possible? Is this the best way of doing this? Answer: You currently can't post stories to categories. If you navigate to the /www/categories/nameOfCategory/ folder, you can just create new text files in this folder and it will be upstreamed to the server and rendered as an HTML page.[Lawrence Lee] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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Radio Tip: This template reconstruction process is more difficult than you would think. Apparently others are going through the same struggle that I am. I just rediscovered this resource which I have overlooked because the title threw me off - thanks to Dog Newsie for pointing it out. How to Create a Theme is a good resource for people reconstructing their templates. Even if you have no interest in creating a theme for others to use, this tutorial provides a useful checklist for home template, item template, desktop homepage template macros to include. [Alison Fish: Radio Questions] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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The Circle Of Life #2: Surprise #2.

[RadioFAQs]

Radio Tip: Mark Pilgrim has a new innovative use for RSS. He accumulates inbound pointers to specific articles on his site in an RSS 2.0 feed. It's so twisty it drives my mind crazy. In a few minutes this comment will appear in his feed. [Scripting News] [Bruce Zimmer: RadioFun] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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The Circle Of Life #1: Found this reference to Redwood Asylum (Bruce Zimmer) while reading RSS feeds. Surprised.

Yes, I'm an RSS bigot too. I confess. I'm an RSS bigot as well. I've discovered that Radio's news aggregator is at least as important as it's tools for editing and posting. I find that I can more than fill up my reading time with content in the aggregator. The first thing  I look for in a new site is whether there is an RSS feed available. Second choice is to figure out how to use RssDistiller (or equivalent) to generate a feed I can route into my news aggregator. [Seblogging News] [Bruce Zimmer: RadioFun] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]

 

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Question: I tried installing radio on a different computer. On that installation I had radio point to a different domain. Now any permalink reference on my original radio site has the domain for the other site, so all sorts of links are broken. How do I manually change my permalink back to my original URL? Answer: You should be able to fix the problem by running the script on this page: http://radio.userland.com/stories/storyReader$14904 [Lawrence Lee] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 

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