Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Sunday, June 08, 2003What makes a weblog a weblog? [Dave Winer, Weblogs at Harvard Law]
Re: How Do I Archieve?. There are several ways that you can allow others to look at your past posts without having to scroll through the calendar dates...the easy way, is to setup a navigator link for your monthly archives...mine looks like this in my navigator links..
<item name=Monthly Archives pagename=""/>
<item name="May" pagename="http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/2003/05/"/>
where you insert your url in place of mine http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318
another way is to enter a "recent posts" macro inside your main template that looks like this in my template..towards the very bottom of the template... <%radio.macros.recentTitledBlogPosts()%> I currently am using blogrolls instead of navigator links but the concept is the same and you can see my recent posts if you scroll down to the bottom of my main page.
Also you can check out some of my newbie tips for additional info/help..
How this helps... Julie http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/ By Julie Wiggins. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Re: Radio Roadmap, Wishlist. With my assetManager tool you can set up email notification on a post-by-post basis. Use it to send an email to a yahoo group or other email list whenever you post to your weblog.
Check it out, it might do what you want:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001161/stories/2003/02/26/assetmanagerTool.html
Cheers,
David. By David Davies. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Re:. You might want to bookmark to my collection of links to people doing subsets of Radio Documentation http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/08/23/radioDocSources.html
Answers to most of your questions can be found by exploring my various links. I suggest you plan on participating in Radio FAQ ... notice the multi-author content, where different people post questions and wishes, then other people post answers and solutions.
To get there, you will want to learn how to subscribe to other people Radio posts, including this one; understand categories; then create a category that DWS will subscribe to, where you will post your questions ... one question to a post ... and be prepared for an educational revalation voyage.
DWS suggests that you call your category that is aimed at him "Radio Questions" but notice that I labeled mine "Radio Ideas" and other people also labeled theirs using other terminology. Some suggestions are easier than others to implement.
A common area of confusion for people starting out with Radio is what they see ON THEIR PERSONAL COMPUTER HARD DISK and what can be seen ON THE PUBLIC WEB SITE. Many of the screens LOOK virtually identical depending on your browser. This was hard for me because I had come from a reality in which the appearance of things changed more noticeably depending on WHERE the stuff was. I try to clarify that whole topic in my story on the Radio url number system.
Another area of confusion for newbies is knowing the right terminology to describe the problem they are experiencing.
There is a place for settings (I not have the link handy) so you can set what goes into your Events Log, how frequently things get updated. It is a trade off. If you not have a lot of bandwidth or PC resources, you may want less frequent or less intensive upstreaming. We tinker with this stuff, then forget what we told it to do. By Al Macintyre. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Re: No StaticSites tool?. Several people have added documentation in addition to that supplied by Userland. You can find links to some of those people at http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/08/23/radioDocSources.html Sorry I have not been keeping this current ... some day I shall return to it and you will see more links. By Al Macintyre. [Radio UserLand Messages]
Blogroll macro and CSS codes.
So I'm no longer using the navigator links macro <%navigatorLinks%> for the left side of my blog..just because it got to cumbersome to keep using the navigator link page and a blogroll is easier to deal with at this point...so I had to insert the CSS Style Code into my main template, my desktop template and of course my home page template so that my text would left-align and be the small text
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold;
padding: 0px 0px;
padding-top: 2ex;
}
.blogrollLinkedText {text-align: left;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;
padding: 0px 0px;
}
Then I also had to insert the blogroll macro <%radio.macros.blogroll("http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/gems/blogroll.opml")%>
I'll write more detail instructions soon on how to add a blogroll and where exactly to insert the above info into the templates..but I didn't want to lose my info...
[Julie Wiggins: Newbie Tips]Changing the Look and Feel of Titles.
I finally figured out how to change the look and feel of my titles for my posts..this was pure accident..I thought maybe I need to insert the HTML tags into the title.
This could be quite confusing if you are a newbie to HTML code...so here is a simple way to create a title inside the WYSIWYG mode of the post and then copy and paste the title into the field/box underneath your post if you have item-level title and link turned on in your preferences in Radio. (the item-level title and link has two text fields that appear on the Desktop Website Home page)
1. Create your title such as "Changing the Look and Feel of Titles"
2. Change the font color, make it bold, make it italic, etc... for example:
Changing the Look and Feel of Titles
3. Change to SOURCE mode and look at the code for your title, here is what I got:
<FONT color=#8080c0><STRONG><EM>Changing the Look and Feel of Titles</EM></STRONG></FONT>
4. Copy and paste this code into the Title Box
Now you have italized, bolded and changed the color of your title
[Julie Wiggins: Newbie Tips]Calendars for weblogs. Jarno Virtanen doesn't like calendars for weblog navigation (via mpt).
It looks like he'd find a table of contents more useful.
Mine also has topic summaries, which make the search for 'posts like this one' much easier. It doesn't quite make up for the lack of a search engine (although I've been hacking on one, bit by bit, for about six months now).
Thanks to Doug Landauer for the idea.
[Second p0st]
CSS support revisited. A handy chart detailing CSS2 support in just about every browser you can think of, plus a few you never think about. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]
CSS based Tabs (and simple too by gum).
Joshua Kaufman - CSS Tabs. How to create tabbed navigation with CSS.
I really need to make a CSS category.
Excellent. I had just been wondering about this very thing this morning.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]Dave's new search software is cool. But, it's down right now cause Google doesn't like having more than 1000 visits.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]The business of RSS. How do you count subscribers in the RSS network? Tim Bray meditates on the question in an essay on the subject. Dave Winer says that Radio's Web Bug Simulator (WBS) solved the problem last year. There a few different issues here to tease out, but in the end I'm not sure there is, or ever was, a problem. ... [Jon's Radio]
ZDNet [NewsIsFree: Recent Additions]
SF Bay Area Bloggers. SFBayBloggers.com is now live (after being on the back burner for months)! If you are a blogger in the... [geeky chick dot net]
MicroDoc reviews SocialDynamX FM Radio Station. "I can safely leave a partially finished blog and go see a news item, or surf to a site in the browser without the fear of losing my partly completed log. This is one of the best feelings I have had since beginning to use FMRS." [Scripting News]
A Sincere and Honest Thank You to Simon from Incutio.
A Sincere and Honest Thank You to Simon from Incutio
Man I have to hand it to Simon. I don't think there's a time I don't stop by his blog and learn something. Often several somethings. He's starting a new series of blog articles on CSS and here's an excerpt:
One of the aims of this course is to show how relatively simple CSS can be used to make dramatic improvements to existing sites. Today, I'll show how CSS can be used to reduce the amount of code needed for a small part of the design of Scripting.com.
Scripting.com presents the main blog entries as a series of paragraphs under a single header for each day. Here is a screenshot from today's edition of the site:
Now that's both a ballsy approach and a damn good one -- its something that we can all relate to and it spikes an anti-css advocate where he lives (like I should talk given some of my recent postings although I do have a "why css is hard" analogy soon to come).
Now if I was an editor at a book publishing company, I'd strongly look towards signing Simon up. Damn but he's good. Thanks once again Simon, you done good. Very good.
[The FuzzyBlog!]Radio Discussion Group RSS feed. You can now subscribe to the Radio.UserLand.Com discussion group RSS feed. This feature will be included in Frontier 9.1. [UserLand Product News]
Simon Willison is doing a makeover of Scripting News using the latest CSS technology. [Scripting News]
Vibe looks like a cool way to share your photos with your friends.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Jason Cook: Sharing Your Site with RSS. [Scripting News]
Last night I demo'd the viewRssBox macro at the Thursday Berkman Blogatorium, part of the demo of macros. [Scripting News]
WHO WAS,WHOIS, AND WHO WILL BE: Domain Name Ownership Research Tools. Professional Reading ShelfWHOISSource: Online"WHO WAS, WHOIS, AND WHO WILL BE: Domain Name Ownership Research Tools"Mark Goldstein takes a comprehensive look at fee and free services to search WHOIS databases. One tool that Mark doesn't mention in his article is a free software app called Sam Spade. [ResourceShelf]
Radio UserLand tech support via RSS. The Radio UserLand discussion group, the best place to receive user-to-user technical support on the software, now is available as an RSS newsfeed. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Help filling a Radio weblog's sidebar. Julie Wiggins has written up some useful Radio UserLand newbie tips on "how to use the blank space under my calendar for phrases, other links, mysubscriptions (and anything else that I didn't want to put or couldn't figure out how to put into my navigator links) and how to align/center the text and change the font size of mysubscriptions.opml with a little help from the discussion boards and a friend at radio." [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Displaying random XML data with UserTalk. Peter Backx has created a UserTalk script that displays random pictures on the homepage of his Radio UserLand weblog.
I created a modified version of his script to display random text links and am using it here on Workbench.
If you're new to UserTalk, Backx's script is a nice short example that demonstrates how it can be used to read XML data. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
CSS Zen Garden.
Graphic artists can flex CSS muscle in Dave Shae's new CSS Zen Garden project. Read the introduction over at Mezzoblue. Via Stopdesign.
Chris Lydon has mastered the art of text wrapping around pictures. Scroll down. There's a lot there. [Scripting News]
CSS based Tabs (and simple too by gum).
Joshua Kaufman - CSS Tabs. How to create tabbed navigation with CSS.
I really need to make a CSS category.
Excellent. I had just been wondering about this very thing this morning.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]New Spring Clothes for that Old Blog o' Mine.
New Spring Clothes for that Old Blog o' Mine
Yup. New templates for the blog finally. Why? a) tired of the old one and b) wanted a blog that more gracefully handled changes in width and was more "laptop friendly". Please let me know of any issues.
This change wouldn't have happened without a generous donation of a template I could hack on. Thanks man.
[The FuzzyBlog!]Glue for Technorati API. Glue for the Technorati API for Frontier and Radio is now available. "Dave Sifry has kindly provided a way to access the data in Technorati using XML over HTTP." [UserLand Product News]
Technorati API 0.9. David Sifry announces the Technorati API 0.9. It sounds good. Very good. Technorati is by far the most valuable blogging tool I have found so far. I wish I'll find some time to play with the new API soon. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Something new for Radio users.... Rogers @ Workbench: "Peter Backx has created a UserTalk script that displays random pictures on the homepage of his Radio UserLand weblog." [jenett.radio]
CSS Zen Garden. If you would like to see an amazing demo of CSS in action, have a look at the CSS Zen Garden, which showcases what can be done with just CSS. Truly beautiful! [Thanks to Simon Willison.]... [Column Two]
Andrew Grumet: Deep Thinking about Weblogs. [Scripting News] [dws.]
A Radio macro to display category links. Radio UserLand tip from Mark Paschal: How to add category links automatically to your home page. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
New Howto: "We back up all the sites on the Harvard Law weblog server regularly, but you never know what can happen, and according to Murphy's Law, the worst thing will happen at the worst possible time, so it's best to be prepared." [Scripting News]
How to do server-side includes in Radio. Radio UserLand tip: There's a way to do a server-side include on a Radio page before it is published. To include one file within another, call <%file.readWholeFile(...)%> with the name and exact location of the file as the only argument.
For example:
<%file.readWholeFile("C:\\Program Files\\Radio Userland\\www\\footer.html")%> More information on file.readWholeFile is available from DocServer, a reference to Frontier and Radio verbs. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Kick starting my Radio UserLand book. I'm getting lots of useful feedback since announcing Radio UserLand Kick Start last week. The response was insane -- around 50 weblogs linked to the news within a day, putting this site briefly on Popdex alongside Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, iTunes, and other targets of transitory weblog love.
The book now has a home page on this site with a table of contents and some of the spiel I used to persuade Sams Publishing to green-light the project. If I get their OK, I'll put another chapter online later this week. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Shirley Kaiser has a great summary of RSS resources on her weblog. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]
Corante Goes RSS!.
I'm going to have to find a new site to pick on because the Corante posse has hopped on the RSS bandwagon! Full feeds for all of their great blogs, which I will now actually read! Thanks, Corante!!
[The Shifted Librarian]"In news we hope you'll appreciate: Corante now offers RSS for its blogs!
Ad Hominem
Amateur Hour
The Bottom Line
Brain Waves
Connected
Copyfight
Corante on Blogging
Got Game
IdeaFlow
In the Pipeline
Living Code
Many-to-Many
Moore's Lore
Open MindWe'll be adding links to them from the respective pages over the course of the day - please alert me to any hiccups you encounter. Huge thanks to the WebCrimson crew!"
Great primer about RSS/RDF on the Ariadne web site. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]
Another Nice Collection of RSS Links.
Friday Feast #42: The World of RSS Feeds
"There is a plethora of information available about RSS (RDF Site Summary), feeds, feedreaders, and tools. Today's Friday Feast lists some of the more helpful ones I've recently found." [Brainstorms & Raves, via WebWord]
My new must-have link for RSS presentations, with some resources I hadn't seen before.
[The Shifted Librarian]Why I blog?.
In Adam Kalsey's latest post, The Agenda of Professional Blogs, I'm reminded of why I started weblogging, and realize that I've gotten away from it.
Why do you blog?
[inluminent/weblog]Blogging for Links. Attention new bloggers & those who just want to get more links: Eugene Volokh has some typically excellent and thorough advice for you on how to promote your weblog. I agree with basically everything he says, especially the following: ...pitch... [The Truth Laid Bear]
InfoWorld: Are you ready for RSS? This is the second publication that has recently given me (appropriate) co-invention credit for RSS. Thanks. [Scripting News]
Emergent Report:. The Emerging Technology Weblog [News Is Free: Recent Additions]
SocialDynamX releases FM Radio. After their preview release in March, SocialDynamX has released the final release version of FM Radio today. It offers the following: 1) Spell check. 2) A slick Windows editing surface. 3) Tabbed browsing. 4) Outlook style news aggregation. 5) Simple image insertion. [UserLand Product News]
I haven't checked out the O'Reilly weblogs in a while, but they really have built up a great group of folks. You should check out the list.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Here's Steve Gillmor's new CRN weblog. Now, Steve's a guy who gets it. He knows more people in the Enterprise space than any human should be allowed to know. He's bright and nice and gracious on top of it.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]Fixing Bad Word Output With 'HTML Tidy'. Copying text from Microsoft Word and Pasting it into your WYSIWYG equipped Manila website used to work perfectly, and still does if your version of Word is older then 2000 or XP. For some reason copying text from MS Word 2000+ produces a ton of very useless, and I would consider poorly formed HTML. The usual result of this poorly formatted HTML is to have your page peppered with weird tags and odd characters. Most people who run into this problem spend a lot of time fixing the anomalies that show up in their source code by hand. A friend of mine pointed out this site to me today... and it might be a solution for those people who have battled this problem. I have put together a small tutorial on how you might use HTML Tidy to help Windows users who run into this problem. now you can't say I never did anything for Windows users ":)" [BryanBell.com]
Check out all the Microsoft weblogs. [Scripting News]
RSS redirection and regex/Frontier/XSLT XML hacking. After I posted yesterday's note about RSS redirection, Dave Winer wrote to remind me that there is a mechanism known to work for both Radio UserLand and NetNewsWire. It looks like this: ... [Jon's Radio]
The FeedRoom is "the world's premiere broadband news network, gives high-speed Internet users the video news they want, from the sources they trust, anytime they want." Lots of RSS feeds. [Scripting News]
More RSS Resources.
More RSS Resources
Boy the RSS stuff just is popping out of the woodwork. Here's another good page of RSS resources. And here's a new aggregator, Awasu, I've never even heard of. Awasu doesn't seem to be .NET which certainly appeals to me. But Awasu does get the "I don't care about people linking to me so I'll build my website with frames so they can't link to specific pages" award. That's silly -- and from a company that understands blogs enough to write an aggregator? Go figure.
And anti-mega has a great rant about RSS usability. Its titled "RSS. Sucks." and in a lot of ways he's not all wrong. If I was writing an aggregator, I'd definitely be looking at his points. He also has some good comments on .NET and a comparison to Java. Just these two points were good enough for me to add his blog to my (growing) blogroll. Recommended.
[The FuzzyBlog!]CSS Columns Wizard.
CSS Column Layout Builder -- a very cool wizard for those of us that are falling behind on the CSS curve. [via Daypop Top 40]
[The Shifted Librarian]Very nice introduction to RSS on Fagan Finder, with links to directories, search engines and more. There is also a cool page which allows you to enter a query and send it a search engine of your choice, very nice indeed. [FS Consulting Inc's Weblog]
Great Resource: RSS Aggregator Directory.
Great Resource: RSS Aggregator Directory
Hebig put together a great directory of available aggregators. Thanks man. There are even two native aggregators for Linux which I know people have been looking for as well as a series of cross platform aggregators.
[The FuzzyBlog!]Best practice URL design. pixelcharmer has brought together an excellent list of resources on best practice URL design. Excellent stuff...... [Column Two]
Lockergnome Windows Daily. http://windowsdaily.lockergnome.com/ via voidstar.com [News Is Free: Recent Additions]
Netcraft [News Is Free: Recent Additions]
Presstime: Syndication Made Simple. [Scripting News]
Incredible overview of RSS.
How to make an RSS feed
Scripting News -> "Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch explains how to make an RSS feed. He walks through all the version confusions, but it's much simpler than that for most people, since many weblog tools these days automatically generate RSS feeds. 
" [Scripting News]
[Audioblog/Mobileblogging News]
This is an incredible overview of what's up right now by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch. It's important for folks to know what you have to do to "build" an RSS channel. Dave is right - most blogging tools do it for you automatically. That doesn't mean you don't need to understand how it works and what's up.
Right on to Danny. This goes into my "Important Statements" roll. And right on to Dave Winer and Netscape for creating RSS in the first place!
Much RSS Goodness Today.
Library Stuff found "three new articles from Search Engine Watch about RSS and weblogs:
- RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content
- Making An RSS Feed
- Loving Each Other More: Search Engines & Blogs"
- Plus, Steven reports that OCLC Research news now has an RSS Feed.
Scripting News overflowed with news of new RSS feeds today:
- "Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features.
- Apple has four new RSS feeds.
- Fast Company has an RSS feed too."
- Even Microsoft has hopped on the bandwagon!
Methinks I see a tipping point approaching....
[The Shifted Librarian]Matt Carter at Fawcette sends a pointer to their new RSS feed. He says it contains "all of our magazine articles, online stuff, code, interviews etc, updated twice a day." The subject of the message is Bandwagon Jumping. The bandwagon here is Microsoft, and I think I must write a DaveNet piece about this. A remarkable movement, and a remarkable move by MS. They didn't reinvent RSS as they jumped in. This is a new idea for a BigCo. Of course there's still plenty of time for them to reinvent it. Praise Murphy! [Scripting News]
Apple has four new RSS feeds. Thanks to Steven Garrity for the pointer. [Scripting News]
Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features. [Scripting News]
Somewhere, Over The Rainbow...
... lies a place where this author does not suffer from severe news aggregator overload and blog block. I want to update this from notes I've made in my Handspring/PalmPilot, but somehow never do. Then I face the task of backdating everything, which isn't easy to do with Radio UserLand. I use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to backdate, but have not modified my template to fix the permalink problem this creates. Probably not a big deal, as nobody in their right mind would link to my posts, but I like to be complete. <pronounced "anal">.
For anyone reading this from my RSS feed (probably 2 people, maximum), my various categories will probably receive a flurry of updates. There exists:
RadioFun for Radio UserLand / RSS / Blog stuff
ToReview as misc. news aggregator backup brain
MacPile to stash Mac / OS X stuff so I can learn enough to help my wife
There, that wasn't so bad; blog block broken. Yeah, right. Don't hold your breath...