Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Sometimes Radio Userland drives me crazy. As much as I like Radio Userland, sometimes it drives me crazy. I depend upon this program for managing several large websites, a couple of which are over 1500 pages. There is a massive amount of power in this program and I don't know any other way I could manage such sites so easily. But, now and then, I find something that just doesn't work the way I want it to. For example, I was just now adding new categories for my blog. There are several pre-configured categories that really didn't apply to what I plan to write about, so I edited them. I changed the name of the category and entered the new information, only to learn later that they retained their original name and sort order and only allowed me to edit the display name. This isn't what I wanted at all. One little note that it isn't advisable to change the pre-configured categories would have been sufficient. I would have left them as they were and would have added all new categories. Now, I have to find a way to go back and fix what I changed. Sigh... This program does so much that I really want to overlook these things, but they're the little issues that take a bit of the polish off the final product. They won't stop me from using it, however. 9:53:20 AM    comment []

Testing several tools for maintaining weblogs Over the last couple of weeks, I've been testing a variety of tools for maintaining weblogs. I've started a blog on Blogger.com. It's basic and does the job, but without the Pro version, there's no provision for syndication via RSS. I've been testing Coranto on DilbeckConsulting.com and JohnDilbeck.com and it's working well. No problems, right out of the box. But, it takes a long time to configure. I still don't have all the profiles set up for multiple categories. I decided, last week, to update from Radio Userland version 7 to version 8 and ran into all kinds of problems. This morning, I decided to scratch the old version and make a new version 8 installation. It's taken some time to get it going, but it seems to be working. I haven't set up the categories I want, yet. Radio Userland has the advantage of including a built-in RSS news aggregator which makes it easy to catch up on my news and post what interests me to my blog. I'm not sure which of these will eventually win out, and it could very well be that I'll continue using several of them. I've been using the Manila server at editthispage.com to maintain the original version of John Dilbeck's Ramblings at johndilbeck.editthispage.com. It does much of what I want. I'd like to edit this blog in RU, post copies to editthispage.com and then syndicate to other sites using javascript. I think it's going to come together. Coranto has the advantage of creating static pages of each blog entry on a server to make it easy for the search engines to find them. There's a lot to experiment with here, and I'll continue discussing this as I learn more. 8:52:56 AM    comment []