Radio UserLand Notes

Peter writes a short post about Radio features he'd like to see. I found it after reading his post in Radio's aggregator, then I found the original here.

He asks some valid questions, some of which are easier to answer than others. Points 1 and 3 relate directly to the aggregator's HTML, so that's easy to address.

Peter, I've had the same frustration that you've had with checkboxes, but I read from the top down using the keyboard to move from page to page. I read 100 stories at a time with all of the boxes checked, but I uncheck as I read. If it is *remotely* interesting, I uncheck it at that time. When I hit the bottom of the page, I press "Delete" and I'm left with the stuff that I want to post, link to, or read and ponder. Point 1 would take some JavaScript to do, but that's a minor feature add at this point. The mantra: upstreaming, comments, application stability. I'll add it to the list of considered features, though.

Point 3 is a bit trickier. Radio generates each News Aggregator page as you read it, so it's not current possible to add this feature. It would require a rewrite of the aggregator code and other scripts to make Radio generate all of the HTML at once. An alternate way to view your content is to use the "Channel View" icons in the aggregator--the magnifying glass. Here's an example of the link it generates for the PVRBlog:

Link

Radio's innovative webserver/responder framework takes the XML URL from your request, passes it to the correct script in the object database (radio.html.viewNewsItems) which then changes the display to show you only items from that channel. When I have over 200 unread items, I usually view by channel until they go under 100, then view normally. Very fast, very efficient. It's one of the reasons that I still prefer Radio's aggregator over web-based versions like Bloglines or stand-alone apps like NetNewsWire. I use NetNewsWire when I need items to persist but don't want to post them to a public weblog page.

Radio has all of the infrastructure that you need to have a web based RSS aggregator without leaving your own computer. Executing that feature is a wish of mine, but first comes the Roadmap: upstreaming, comments, application stability. Feature adds will happen, but not at the expense of the roadmap. If we can do it along the way (like cleaning up HTML) we will.

Keep the questions coming...