Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Friday, March 14, 2003Well, enough of FM Radio
I've given the FM Radio stuff a try -- very nice user interface, but missing integration with my templates. It did not, for example, know to post white text on this black background. For those of you following along at home, not one of the comments received in response to my "Radio or Movable Type" question has come down on the Radio side. Overwhelmingly, the voice of the bloggers says to move to Moveable Type ASAP.
[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]Radio tip: Getting tools to use the default template. I've just been working on a Radio tool, and one thing that's been bugging me is that it has been refusing to use the default template.
When you create a new tool and give it a page of its own (http://127.0.0.1/5335/myNewToolName), the template you get is really plain - just enough HTML to get your page to validate (maybe ;).
Deleting the
#template node in the myNewToolNameWebsite table in your database and refreshing the page in a browser, the template changes to a very very old template (like the one on this page).Just found the solution (in this message from 2002): you need to reinstall the tool to get it to pick up the changes. Selecting the
.root window for the new tool, then Tools | Developers | Re-install Front Tool... will do this. And now you have a tool that fits in nicely with the rest of the desktop website![Second p0st] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
RSS Autodiscovery.
I totally missed this the first time around, but it's brainlessly easy and adds a nice little enhancement to your blog. A quick review - many blogs publish two versions of their site - HTML, which is what you view when you look at the blog through a web browser. At the same time, many publish an alternate version of the site in XML. This is known as an RSS feed (for Really Simple Syndication) - and allows other programs (most notably, news aggregators) to periodically monitor your blog to look for new content.
Last year, a couple people wondered if there would be an easy way for the HTML versions of your blog to point to the XML version. Turns out it can be done quite elegantly - and most blog vendors built it into their application in a few hours.
Why is this important? Well, when you're visiting a weblog whose RSS feed you'd like to subscribe to, it's now simple to click a button in your browser that will "discover" the RSS feed and send it to your aggregator automatically. It's nice.
If you're a Radio Userland user, all you have to do is follow the instructions here; it's a one-line macro that goes into your template. Once published, it adds the little snippet of code that allows web browsers to auto-discover RSS feeds. (Movable Type users can go here; others should follow the instructions for doing it manually here.)
The slick part comes next - adding the "auto subscribe" bookmarklet to your browser that will discover the RSS feed (assuming the site you're visiting has auto-discovery enabled) and add it to your aggregator:
One really nice feature if you're a Newzcrawler user - it has auto-disovery built in; whenever you're at a site with auto-discovery turned on, it automatically pops up a hint that lets you know you can subscribe to the feed. Nice!
Bottom line - add the line of code to your template and make your visitors' lives a lot easier. Win-win.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]