house of warwick

Radio Tools

I found this while stumbling through a set of links from the manila-dev mailing list. Posted here for posterity. Why don't we have a Radio community evangelist? Dave is weblog evangelist. Who's the Radio equivalent? Tell me in comments or trackback.

I spent some time today trying to fix my server Mac. It's display is a little worn, causing flickers and random shutdowns. It turned out to be corrupted system software, fixed by a clean installof MacOS 9. I wasted two hours that I shouldn't have--yuk--and missed two phone calls because I get bad cell service in my basement. Life happens, eh? -- Sent using One-Touch Mail by JP Mobile.

RSS 101. Every so often I get questions from people interested in figuring out this damn RSS thing. These days, I point them at: What is RSS? and RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers. Good references for this stuff.... [Teal Sunglasses]

Chuck points to two great sources for RSS background.  Here's some other links:

RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard

Zeldman on RSS

On this day in 1999, I stated my vision for RSS, and asked others to express theirs. [Scripting News]

What's funny is that Dave asked for comments and got 3.  Now, he'd get 30 and several trackbacks, plus the occasional "Dave is trying to control us!" rant.  Thanks, Dave, for starting this whole thing.

I also went back and read the first three messages in the archive from 1998.  Dire Straits?  Music and programming always seem to go together.

A List Apart redesign. Behind closed doors, secret servers, and firewalls, A List Apart Magazine is undergoing a redesign on its front end and back. When it relaunches in a week or two, ALA will be pretty to look at, easy to read, and far more usable, and will be powered by a standards-friendly custom publishing system. [Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

I've been living without NNW for two days now.  I've got the old Powerbook wiped and ready for delivery and my server Mac doesn't run MacOS X, so I'm back to using Radio's aggregator.  There are plenty of things to like and dislike about it.  Mainly:  grouping and layout are dislikes, display of posts, inline content and comment links are likes.  Still trying to fix it myself, but failing due to lack of education.  I'm reading Matt's book, too.  Patience, I tell myself.

Pito says that he's trying to reinvent the RSS aggregator.  Hey Pito, read this and I'll be a customer if you can match these features.

Enriching Blog Calendar.

Most blogs have a calendar for navigation but not for much else.  I was thinking how nice it would be to enrich it automatically with other information like birthdays of people on blogroll, anniversaries, schedule of conferences I am planning to attend, etc.

Size of the calendar will have to get a little bigger, but mouse-over sensitive date specific details can be displayed in an area immediately below the calendar.  FOAF and iCal/vCal formats can be useful here.  Calendars are also amazing yet under-utilized advertising medium IMHO.

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Don writes about something I hadn't even thought about:  my calendar.  I don't use it and don't see why others would.  I read weblogs for two reasons:  topical content and continuing stories.  I'd be more interested in a good category list rather than a calendar.  I'm considering removing mine.  Can anyone out there educate me about the calendar's benefits?

Chuq on RSS and mailing lists. Here[base ']s a great post by Chuq Von Rospach on RSS and mailing lists. If I had to name the world[base ']s expert on mailing lists, it would be Chuq.

(One of these days I[base ']m going to implement Trackback... but until then, it[base ']s the old-fashioned method.) [inessential.com]

My post will echo Brent's.  I met Chuq via email back in 1997 when he was running the Evangelist for Guy Kawasaki.  Chuq is the first person I think of when I think mailing lists.  I had subscribed to his feed before (months ago) and lost it during multiple computer moves.  Chuq, consider this an apology and I'm resubscribing.

Brent:  get your Trackback working.  Don't you use Radio?  [wink]

Dave's piece on weblogging and the Presidential candidates.  Read it, then read it without a political context.  It's a good outline for how to build a consensus in the modern world--within your workgroup, office, peer group or professional group.

How to Organize Feeds. Via Paolo Valdemarin: "When publishing on a weblog or any other kind of site, authors could define their posts as part of a "channel", such as technology, politics, etc. Newsreaders able to parse this kind of information could provide users with additional tools to organize what they read. A shared taxonomy to define categories would make this process much more useful to the user."... [Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Chris' post doesn't show the parent link from Paolo's site:  http://paolo.evectors.it/2003/08/28.html

Not much to comment on here, just catching up on past posts...