October 2002
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Feeds I Read

Bootstrap: How to Redirect an RSS Feed. "You've just moved your weblog or news site, and the RSS feed has moved too. You want people who are subscribed to your RSS feed to automatically start reading the feed at its new location. This document explains how to do that." [Scripting News] 

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WebReference has another sample Radio chapter from the O"Reilly blogging book. This one is about the technology, the object database, scripting language, networking, content management, XML, SOAP and XML-RPC support, and upstreaming. Thanks! [Scripting News] 

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My Top Five Blue Sky Radio Wishes..

The top 5 really big improvements I'd like to see in UserLand's Radio.

Support the blogging of other objects besides a post.

• Calendar events, resumes, forms, etc. This includes making it easy to:
  • Define, add, and share definitions of new types of objects (e.g. events), and
  • Create, store, publish, permalink, annotate/comment, syndicate, and aggregate instances of those objects (e.g., my birthday).  
• Radio's support for RSS 2.0 is a good step in this direction.
• This also implies the ability to group and sort the posts in a category by attributes other than post date. Calendar events need to be grouped into present and future, sorted by the date of the event instead of the post date. Book listings might be sorted by Dewey Decimal. résumés by occupational category. Travel notes by region.
• A note on this to Garth. News Item templates. vCalendar and Radio. Calendar standards and Radio. Keyless klogging for the rest of us. Multi-payload klogging: a world of content. Macromedia audioblog object.
  
•  Click here to add this event to your Outlook or Netscape calendar.

Better news reading for scale, efficiency, and smarts.

• The current design is practical for only 20-30 active feeds.
• Help me read thousands of news feeds. RSS subscriptions are like active bookmarking; a stronger link. I'm subscribed to about 500 feeds after 9 months of using Radio, about 8,000kb of fresh html news daily, about 200 pages to read. Multiply by 10.
• MyRadio, Kit, and other add ins help a lot and illustrate various ways to tackle the problem. But this should be core functionality and more natural.
• Meme tracking. You have all the data and the spare cycles: give me more intelligence about what I'm reading.
  • Show me posts that are related, across sources.
  • Posts that cite each other.
  • Posts that cite the same source.
  • Trackback/Threading. Here are posts that cite the one you are reading.
• It would be interesting if I could access my newsreader from anywhere on the net.
• More specific suggestions. Rick Klau's May 2002 requests. Jenny's wish. Bryce Yeh's tuning of new aggregation intervals up and down.

Double User Success on Top 100 Tasks.

• Too many opportunities for a first time computer user to muck things up. Calendar navigation sucks.
• Start from scratch without an outside usability team. Rethink the metaphors and core behaviors.
• Specifics. LiveJournal screenshots.

Config and Theme subscriptions.

• Tweaking look and feel, tools, macros, etc. is too error prone and time consuming for newbies and kloggers.
• Let me subscribe to a trusted source (perhaps the IT or marketing department in my organization) for ever-fresh, well-tested, and enterprise-standard Radio setups. Radio configuration themes. Themes with Code.

Rework the Radio Outliner's user experience from scratch.

• I love the outliner, but this is this is an outliner only a nerd could love.
• The command surfaces are not intuitive, I found it awkward and error prone (its behavior not conforming to my mental model) and very hard to learn. Hard to get information out easily without learning ideas like "rendering" and "html" and "rules" and XML. I should be able to edit as smoothly and naively in the outline as I do in Word or in the IE edit box control. I want to be able to drag and drop things between open outlines (like dropping a Manila post into a Manila site structure). I want autosave and spellcheck and for it not to break html when pasted from RTF. I want more http://dijest.com/aka/categories/blueSkyRadio/2002/09/10.html#a1998  on the Prefs page. 
• It needs serious user experience analysis and redesign. Target the person who just knows basic Windows/Mac, email, and MS Office.

Those are the big ones. Heavy lifting. Big impact.

Here are 30 lighter ones, in on particular order:

1. A Radio toolbar for IE like the ones from Google and Yahoo!
2. Give every new Radio site its own domain, so Google works on a per-site basis.
3. Keep new themes coming: pretty counts and differentiates.
4. The portal idea: keep working on it.  
5. klognet in a box (radio, manila, RCS, RadioComments, a search engine)
    
6. Federate RCS: I should be able to both run my own stats and choose to share them with other aggregators. You can't now.
7. Run selective RSS feeds through Google's API for the translation. Let me read an Italian feed in machine translated English. 
8. Improve the post-to-email features. A checklist.
9. Include permalinks in syndicated body
10. Linkrot spider, reporter, and healer.
     
11. mailThisItem macro.
12. More than one multi-authored synthetic category per Radio.
13. Geocode posts and RSS feeds. Blogmapper.
14. Backlinking.  
15. Can Radio detect Astroturfing (fake grassroots blogging) in feeds it reads?
     
16. Re-Publish Commands from the browser UI
17. Outlook calendar to OPML and RSS.
18. browser bookmarks to OMPL and back
19. Show and let me manage the publishing queue. (like a print queue)
20. Declare fiction. When I post, let me checkbox if I don't intend this post as truthful reportage. It is an intentional fiction. I've seen several situations where someone is blogging in character, is writing satirically, or is just blowing off steam. Useful to keep memes straight.
     
21. Secure blogs. Enterprise grade blog security.
22. Localization.
23. Measure and watch the unintended ways people use your tools.
24. UserLand jargon file.
25. RCS Referers as an RSS feed.
     
26. Referrers in a rolling 24 hours.
27. Let me float my Radio RSS news as a Windows screen saver. Make it fun.
28. Finish cleaning up the archives.
29. Do more for attachments, including more formats and format conversions. Details.
30. Continuous writing (autosave to web)

What do you think? <A title="Add Phil Wolff to your AIM Buddy List" href="aim:addbuddy?screenname=evanwolff">AIM Y! @Ryze

[a klog apart Blue Sky Radio] 

[a klog apart] 

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