RSS MAD

New feature: Mail-From-Aggregator. "Some people like to read the news that the aggregator gathers in email. This can be useful if you travel a lot, or want to share news with a group of people who may not use Radio."

I have my instant outliner going again. Radio users can subscribe using the OPML coffee mug on DHRB. The new thing is that notification happens via instant messaging, not polling. And there's something really new in there. A remote procedure invocation protocol. They are not remote procedure calls because they don't return values and are asynchronous. But you can pass parameters, complex ones, using the encoding of XML-RPC. It's the loop-close on the work we did in Keystone with the Jabber folk last August. Works with AIM too. We're bootstrapping on the Radio-Dev mail list. [Scripting News]

A tiny change in Radio's aggregator makes referer logs more interesting. Please read this if you have a site that's a source for Radio users, and you watch your referer logs. This change could be confusing if you don't read the doc carefully. Thanks!

A new macro and howto shows Radio users how to add a link element to weblog and category home pages, pointing to their associated RSS feeds. The equivalent feature is also available for Manila.

Jon Udell: Personal RSS Aggregators.

Announcing: "The RadioPoint Tool turns the outliner into a presentation authoring program."

Washington Post on Radio: "The program, its templates and other elements work smoothly, and you can go from downloading the program to publishing your thoughts on the Web during a coffee break." Thanks! [Scripting News in RSS]

WebMonkey: "Radio manages to create a dynamic environment for the exchange of information without asking too much of each individual user. They've made it simple for beginners to get involved in a kind of active network that would've required much more know-how a few years ago. If you're looking for more than just a tool, but an effortless way to get a site launched and incorporated into an online community, Radio may be your best bet."

This is a test. Please ignore.

CNET reviews Radio 8. Nice review. We need a spell checker. They like Blogger better, but gave it the same score, 8 out of 10. But the best part are the user comments. You guys really like us. Wow. Thanks!

New feature: Google-It! Macro for Item Templates.

New Feature: Titles and Links in Radio-generated RSS.

Last night, as part of the mop-up on Radio Community Server, I did a rewrite of the notification code on the server-side. Some people had asked what the Please Notify entries on their Events pages are about. Here's the scoop. Some RSS feeds have an element in their header called "cloud" that tells a reader how to subscribe to the channel. When you're subscribed to such a feed, Radio automatically requests notification. That's what Please Notify is about. Then when it changes, if everything goes well, the cloud sends a short message to Radio saying "Hey this resource changed." Then again, Murphy-willing, your Radio reads the feed and if there really are new items, it adds them to your News Aggregator page. Until yesterday, this feature of the community server was turned off, now it's back on, and appears to be working.

David Berry: Working with FrontPage and Radio.

New Radio 8 feature: Web Bug Simulator.

New Radio 8 feature. Now you can post to categories without posting to the home page. If you have categories enabled, there's a new checkbox, the first one, called Home Page (it effectively becomes a category). By default it's checked. Now you can easily publish multiple weblogs, going to lots of different locations, from one edit box. Screen shot. 

We released a set of changes that improve the generation of RSS in Radio 8. Includes support for the and elements in RSS 0.92; macros are now processed as feeds are built; a big speed bump; a bug fixed. The code also got a lot more maintainable.

Robb and Scoble: Radio UserLand for Webloggers. 

NewsIsFree supports publish-subscribe. "Now the excellent NewsIsFree network, spearheaded by Mike Krus, a gutsy Frenchman who's always up for something new, includes a element in their RSS feeds and if you subscribe to those feeds, and if you're not behind a firewall or NAT, you can get instant news from those sources, not just at the top of the hour."

David Davies has SMS posting to Radio 8. He's taking a plane trip today and testing out the feature. No kidding.

Hey what do you know. We shipped. Damn. Now I'm watching Weblogs.Com and it's just like well it's not like anything I've ever seen. So many friends are showing up. This is so coooool. I love you guys. The community server seems to be handling the load well. Thank you Murphy so far so good.

Radio 8 essays: Adam Curry, Mark Paschal, Meryl Evans.  [Scripting News]

Lawrence: "Being part of the development of Radio 8.0, it's awesome to see there are going to be lots of people who are going to be playing around with a CMS (at under $40 US) and with an entire weblogging system already in place."  [Scripting News]

Garret: "Dump anything in Radio's www folder, and it's been filed, uploaded, backed up, statically rendered, content managed, diced, chopped, ground, and served on a platter."  [Scripting News]

Dan Shafer: My First Review of Radio 8.  [Scripting News]

Stapler is a "tool for Radio UserLand that creates RSS feeds from sources you select, scraped hourly (or every N hours, variable for each source) from HTML web sites."

Craig Burton tutorial: Radio Remote Access.

Joshua Allen verifies that Radio works on Windows XP. [Scripting News]

Today's Craig Burton tutorial is on channels in Radio. It's by far the best docs on our software. I hope everyone runs his latest tutorial, it's a Java window, he presses all the buttons and narrates. Craig talks very slowly and explains everything. His tutorials are eye-openers. [Scripting News]

The editor of soapbox, which I admire, posted a newbie intro to Radio as a weblog tool. Gotta love it. [Scripting News]

Here's the most interesting Radio Blog I've seen so far, but understand that I've been looking for something like this ever since we released the beta of the decentralized blogging tool in Radio. It's the zig to Blogger's centralized zag. (Or the blig to its blog?) As Blogger has grown, it's climbing a scaling wall, and the performance has suffered, much as the performance of Weblogs.Com has suffered as it has grown. [Scripting News]

Marty Heyman warns: "Radio is an Insidious Plot for global domination by Userland Software!" [Scripting News]

Oliver Wrede: Golden Rules for Newbies to Frontier and Radio UserLand.

For tomorrow's press release. "Radio UserLand is at the sweet spot of the next generation of the Internet, bringing together XML-based web services, a decentralized approach to computing and the power of software," said Charles Fitzgerald, director of business strategy in the platform strategy group at Microsoft. "This next generation of the Internet promises more control for end users and renewed opportunity for developers."

It's not hard to find programmers to work on Radio, though. This evening I added a feature for our friends the bloggers, making sure that it's easy for people to credit their sources. This should emit a loud sigh of relief in Radio UserLand and perhaps elsewhere. The Supremes are singing You can't hurry love, no you'll just have to wait. We're figuring this stuff out in real-time, as always. [Scripting News]

Interview: Dave Winer on Radio Userland. We interview Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Software, about his newest creation, Radio Userland. Thirteen years in the making, Radio Userland puts an industrial strength Web server on your desktop. Designed to be extended by developers, Radio will also appeal to the masses with its news aggregator and weblog features. By Andy King. 0312

Well, it looks like everything got published. Cool. I'm going to release it. Wish me luck! ";->"

OK, it sure came back a lot faster. Now let's see if everything got published. For that I have to look on the Events page to see what got uploaded. Back in a minute or so.

This is a test. I am going to publish this to my blog and route it to my Radio UserLand channel. The difference is that all the uploading will happen in a thread running in the background, so the page will reload a lot faster than it would if I had to wait for the FTPing to finish. Let's see if it works.

BTW, did you notice the product shot near the top of the page? We had some fun. Radio doesn't actually come in a box. But we wanted to imagine what it would look like if it did.

Tip for Radio newbies. If you want your channel choices to be reflected in the Top 100, you must turn on upstreaming.

Yesterday I did a feature for Radio called Magic Folders. A router for folders. Now if you plop a file into the images folder it goes into the images folder (via FTP) on My Blog. I think stories are going to work the same way. Just a little bit of glue to create a workgroup. They're magic because there's almost nothing there, like any good router it's just a glue-bit. "When you see one of these, do this."

Sean Elfstrom has Radio glue for Apple's new iTunes music player app. He says "I 'borrowed' a lot of it from the original driver for Sound Jam (since they are built on the same codebase), but the scripting support is pretty broken."

Sometimes things work just like you wanted them to.

Pfieffer Report: "In a funny way, we are back to where publishing was before DTP came around: content creation and management is once again the playground of larger players, and requires heavy investment, just as publishing technology did before XPress arrived." Amen.

Two-Way-Web: SOAP meets RSS.

inessential.com: Radio UserLand 7.0b34 is out. Among the bug fixes is one that has annoyed me for a long time -- on Windows 2000, when you click the Edit With Radio button, Radio actually comes to the front now rather than just flashing in the taskbar. AFT.

DaveNet: Desktop Websites.

DW: mySubscriptions.opml contains the RSS channels I'm tuned into.

Radio is the first Web server to do upstreaming, a necessary feature for servers running on users' desktops.

Sometimes a picture makes the difference. When I started the MUOTD project I also made a resolution to organize my document work using Radio's Bookmarks menu. Now before I close a window I think "Will I want to edit this again?" or "Is this part of some project?" If the answer to either question is yes, I bookmark it, and then drag-drop it into the category it belongs in, or create a category for it. It's made a major difference in my writing work. Note that some of the documents haven't been released yet, that's good -- less shooting from the hip, and hopefully the projects will make more sense when they're rolled out.

Radio: "When accessing a server on the local machine, MSIE/Mac doesn't yield enough processor time to allow the server to do its processing. The net result is a glacial pace, when it should be lightning fast. The addition of a single system call to the loop that's waiting for a response from the server would probably cure the problem."

Radio bug report. Open an outline stored locally. Bring it to the front. Choose Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu. Close the window. Choose the file in the menu. Error. The filename in the generated script is incorrect. On Windows the path delimiter is backslash, which must be escaped in string constants. (It was probably only tested on the Mac.)

Susan Kitchens provides the kind of first-time user feedback that we need. "Radio displays the links as underscores. But I haven't yet figured out how to access the URLs." Yes, that's something we need to call out on the outliner page. To see the HTML behind the links choose the Format Text command in the HTML menu. It toggles.

Teaser screen shot. It'll probably be under the Christmas Tree shortly after Christmas Day. (It's a Web app that runs on your desktop. You get the source code, of course.)