Andy Edmonds: Radio Notes

A week with Knoppix

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 00:23:50 GMT

Whoops, a recent hard drive crash destroyed my Radio.root and wiped out my old templates. Just a matter of time I think, but the old HTML was pretty crufty, so I might make a fresh start.

I spent the last week using Debian, and particularly a nice distro that boots of cd called Knoppix. It ran just fine on my HP laptop, autodetecting and configuring my cisco wireless. Very handy.

For more, see the ZenOfKnoppix for more on the hdinstall for knoppix. Samba is set up, the new box has all of our mp3's, and I'm working on a jukebox system.

Sat, 21 Dec 2002 21:09:56 GMT

John Robb: "Why can't email have a shortcuts feature?" [Scripting News] -- How about making shortcuts work in outline rendering first?

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 19:19:38 GMT

So wouldn't it be cool to be able to navigate Radio daily archive pages via link rel=next|prev ?

Fri, 06 Dec 2002 03:47:29 GMT

Blog titles as defacto-categories -> Extend the glossary item (in geek speek) to be a array of pointers, not a single one. Not quite a category, but a new rendering for a glossary could include a list format. Outline, hypertext style.

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 01:14:12 GMT

I finally got frustrated enough with having all my pages titled the same and hacked up a html-title with last post title hacked in. It slows down the page a bit... but this site is no speed demon :)

Sat, 23 Nov 2002 13:38:35 GMT

Ack! My aggregator.root had grown to 80mb when the file was corrupted. I've lost my subscriptions, but all else appears ok. Radio's error message were not very diagnostic alas.

Sat, 09 Nov 2002 16:52:48 GMT

Playing with Aggregator API

using http://www.vcdn.org/Public/XMLRPC/documentation.php
Current status

Houston, we have liftoff

Caveats

security restrictions? or vcXMLRCP issues prevent this from working in Mozilla (even from chrome)

I had hoped for a cross browser solution
will likely switch to Mozilla's xml-rpc implementation shortly

security restrictions also prevent it from running on the web and accessing your aggregator
Mozilla is going to be the way to go.

aggregator.getRecentItems (numberOfItems, username, password) returns struct

result = XMLRPC.call(displayNews, "http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/xml-rpc/server.php", "meerkat.getItems", oStruct);
Blogger example on vcXMLRPC site useful

Looks like security restrictions will kick in

Thank goodness for the "keys to the kingdom" -- dammit, still need glossary expansion in the outliner

Get the zip file to run on your local web server at ie.zip

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 20:55:39 GMT

Mark's Radio Kit is a rare open source addition to Radio Userland and a quite useful one. In a recent post, Mark comments on the lack of code submissions to his project. My experience with creating open source Mozilla projects has been the opposite. In the early days of Optimoz, the project had so many submissions we had to hold back on including some of them so that the code grew with a vision.

I don't know what the chances are that I'll stick with Radio... Userland's made significant strides in end user docs but they just can't compare to a open source project for responding to developer and user needs.

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 15:53:53 GMT

I'm experimenting with LiveTopics as a auxilary classification method for my blog posts. Since I have topical categories, I've focused on attributes and a few topics which cross my standard categories. Check it out.

PRWeb RSS

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 15:31:14 GMT

PRWeb, a press release distribution service has rss feeds for internet, open source, and lots more.

Revamped Blog Search here at Surfmind

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 01:44:54 GMT

A quick update to the blog search available in the top left column of /musings/ -- a dramatic approvement, but still lots of room to go. I'd love to switch to the recently made available monthly archives but don't want all the linkrot. I may use my verity search to provide monthly archives... A search for 2002/8 yields an approximate snapshot of the months activity, in both stories and blog posts.

For relatively recent readers, it may not be obvious that there are 2000+ handpicked sites in my local web search engine, accessed with the default "web" radio button in my search field. Redoing the presentation style of the engine is on my list, but it's still a powerful full text search with some innovative search UI aspects.

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 03:06:48 GMT

Big news! A scant two hours ago, Mike Lee added support for the MetaWeblogAPI to mozBlog. This may give composite a run for it's money in my posts to Radio Userland, though I'll keep it going for the ability to edit in MT/BBS systems. See my aging post on configuring mozBlog for Radio for the configuration settings.

Mike's also looking for ideas for the news aggregator. I'd love to collaborate on a feed-to-repost system that incorporated link types and perhaps automated source tracking.

What good is a content disposal system?

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 23:32:44 GMT

Robert Boyton nails it, and uses log data to back up his claim (which is the right way to do it!)

Radio as Content Disposal System: Splitting the archived content by day is terrible. Only a desparado will search for content by clicking the calendar.

[john robert boynton: Usability/Usability humor] I wrote about this in "hypertext in the blogdom".

Addendum: Radio also promotes useless hyperlinking between repeats of the same content. I'll flesh out this issue later, but it's a big negative.

Tue, 04 Jun 2002 03:09:18 GMT

Welcome to the neighborhood eh?

Mon, 03 Jun 2002 03:12:31 GMT

I'm poondering a mozilla sidebar for intelligent quote abstracting from the page your currently. It could work based upon text selection or click (and drag perhaps) and would post the quote to Radio. I could abstract permalinks out of many Radio blogs. Ideally, this should be done in a more principaled way. My container approach (nested divs) to structural markup in this blog would be much easier to DOM walk than the default Radio html.

Radio's strength in ease of use via content-item level macros is it's downfall for evolution. I'm sure it's actually easy, but it's not clear how to change the permalink macro or write a new one with the same data. Perhaps linked RSS versions are a better place to do post extraction.

Sun, 02 Jun 2002 16:23:10 GMT

There's some serious community impetus behind incoporating the LINK tag for RSS in weblogs. Mozilla has a link toolbar that's not quite complete. Alas, Google did not add the LINK tag to their site during the last 4 or so months of it being deployed in Mozilla -- if it had, the "site navigation bar" as it's called might be in 1.0 (note, next/prev links are in one of the experimental google toolbars).

In any event, job well done! In less than a week, support for a new form of metadata was added in a standards aware fashion across hundreds of websites and a handful of publishing/aggregation tools. It will be interesting to see the future push and pull between the practicing community and the w3c's slew of standards.

Fri, 31 May 2002 03:03:09 GMT

The draft functionality in Radio is a bit impoverished for my purposes. This blog is often about brainstorming and inspiration, offering a locale to draft a quick note for later expansion. A recent experience of editing a rather critical blog numerous time to convey my intent resulted in numerous slight variants of the same content in my RSS feed.

I would have likely left the post as a draft for several iterations if Radio's support for drafts were better. A top ten user heuristic, inform the user of of system status is violated. Draft posts are not easily distinguished from published items. Because of this I am hesitant to post but not publish an entry for fear that it will slip through the cracks and never see the light of day. Nothing gets me to the posting screen quicker than reading one of my blog entries and realizing that I haven't communicated as intended.

In the long run, for blogging to become a enterprise knowledge management tool, better support for revision will be required.

Andy Edmonds: Radio Notes

A week with Knoppix

PRWeb RSS

Revamped Blog Search here at Surfmind

Recent Posts with Publication Status

What good is a content disposal system?