Posting to Radio Userland from Different Places

A visitor to Workbench asked how you can post to a Salon Blog from Radio Userland on several different computers. There isn't an easy way to do this, unless you have an always-on Internet connection and can keep Radio running on it.

When you post an item, Radio saves it on your computer in a database file called weblogData.root in the software's Data Files folder. Any time your weblog is published, Radio reads data from this database, produces HTML files from it, then uploads those HTML files to the Salon Blogs community server. If you set up Radio on two different computers, they will have different weblogData.root files.

I don't have an always-on Internet connection. If I wanted to post from different computers with Radio, I would run the software from a folder on some kind of portable storage device, such as a ZIP disk, USB microdrive, or the like.

If you can stay connected to the Internet, there are two ways to post to a Radio weblog from multiple PCs.

Posting Remotely to Radio Userland Using E-mail

Turn on the Mail-to-Weblog feature. Radio can read an e-mail account and post everything sent to it with a specific subject line. All other mail will be ignored, so it should be an e-mail account you're not using for any other purpose.

This feature only reads mail while Radio is running and connected to the Internet. If you shut down Radio and go on a trip, any weblog entries you e-mail while traveling won't be posted until you run the software again.

Connecting to Radio Userland Remotely

If the Remote Access and Security feature is turned on and set up with a username and password, you can connect to the computer running Radio over the Internet and use its browser interface to work on your weblog.

You must know the IP address or host name of the computer. To load Radio remotely, type this address in a Web browser's Address bar followed by the port number 5335. For example, if I was running Radio on cadenhead.org, I would connect to http://cadenhead.org:5335.

Phillip Pearson describes both of these options in more detail on his Salon blog.

Radiouserland · 2002/07/25 · 0 COMMENTS · Link