Radio UserLand Notes

I contributed to a couple of discussions on the Radio discussion group and was disappointed. The people that are using Radio have greater expectations of Userland than what Userland can provide. One person vented their frustrations and I defended the product. As a reward, I was ridiculed. I now have a small idea of how Dave feels.

It hurts someone to insult them, especially when you don't know them and haven't met them. This person called Userland (and it's employees) "thieves"; I called him an "ass". Yuk.

Radio is not a perfect product--very few software products are. It works remarkably well considering it's age and every-changing code base. Radio comment hosting and the xmlStorageSystem servers are average at best. I regularly have problems getting comments pages to load and when I was on the "cloud" I had problems getting posts to upload. I solved that problem by going on my own for hosting and I'm glad I did.

I'd love to care about this more, but there are more things in life than software products. For me, I don't want to chase MT issues integrating modules or using the right version of perl, python, or whatever. I can and am capable. I have set up my share of Linux and Solaris servers to do just that. But for personal publishing, Radio can't be beat. It's easy to use and understand. It supports web standards and can interoperate with open standards like FTP, XML-RPC, SOAP and more. It's the only software that I would give my parents to use. It's the same reason that I own more Macs than I do PCs--my Mac is more satisfying to use and easier to maintain.

Six Apart makes a great product, but it's not for me, yet. Typepad is the best, web-based blogging software *I've* seen, but I can't afford it. To match the same flexibility as a single copy of Radio, you'd have to buy the high end product. No way, thank you.