Radio Userland

UserLand Software's Shrinking Role in Blogging

Dave Winer wrote this weekend that UserLand Software's still in business: On this day in 1999, MacWEEK (now defunct) covered the introduction of Manila. Believe it or not, Manila is still a product, and UserLand is still operating. ... Sometimes I think Radio, which was initially a success, was another example of breaking users. A year after its release I wished instead we had produced a Manila that runs on the desktop. Creating a whole new codebase and design for a blogging CMS wasn't such a ... (read more)

2006/12/04

Weblog Mover For Hire

Cyndi Greening blogs about a programming job I did for her this month -- moving her filmmaking weblog from Radio UserLand to Movable Type: I have been complaining, whining and kvetching for over two years about how much I dislike using Radio UserLand as a blogging tool. When I started blogging in 2003, Radio was inexpensive and seemed easy to use. It had an automatic picture uploading tool. It had RSS features I liked. But then ... I started traveling more and wanted to blog from film festivals ... (read more)

2006/04/20

Turning Off a Radio UserLand Scripter

Last June, I published a 23-minute podcast of Juan Cole being interviewed on the Alan Colmes radio show. A Radio UserLand user on Comcast in Monterey, Calif., is apparently a big fan of Cole. His copy of Radio keeps requesting that 5.5-megabyte podcast over and over, as frequently as every 10 seconds. In the last week alone, he's consumed 12.13 gigabytes of my server's bandwidth by downloading the file 2,365 times. I don't know why this is happening -- it could be a bug in Radio UserLand or a ... (read more)

2006/02/11

Choosing a Programmer's Editor

A reader laments the difficulty of writing programs in a plain-vanilla text editor: I have a question that I can't seem to frame correctly. It relates to my inability to format nested punctuation (in any language, on any day). I would dearly love to see a quasi-visual editor which replaces the {{ ... }} with nested shading, and bold type used to identify classes, italics for variables, etc. etc. It clearly calls for a different approach to the text-bound, linear approach to coding. What would ... (read more)

2005/05/29

25 Will Enter, 5 Will Leave (with Books)

From around 25 entries received in the book giveaway, four copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start were mailed today to Rod Kratochwill, Ole Olson, Gary Secondino and Nick Starr. Steve Kirks is working with UserLand Software on Radio 9, a major upgrade to the software. Though I suspect that the upcoming release will affect weblog publishing features covered in early chapters of my book, Kick Start emphasizes two aspects of Radio that are important to learn and unlikely to change much in the future: ... (read more)

2005/05/13

Giveaway: Radio UserLand Kick Start

We adopted a kitten from the humane society nine months ago who thinks he's a dog, and there's nothing he likes more than the taste of a computer book. A stack of them make an excellent scratching post, as I learned when he shredded a dozen copies of How to Use the Internet Eighth Edition. This situation adds urgency to my need to give away more of my books, before they become either out-of-date or drenched with saliva. I'm giving away four author's copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start, each in ... (read more)

2005/05/03

David Raynes has released Workflow, a plug-in for Movable Type that adds fine-grained editing capabilities to weblog authors. As Anil Dash explains: Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer ownership of a post to other authors ... (read more)

2005/04/16

Making Buzzword.Com More Available

Manila, the software running Buzzword.Com, stores most weblog content and server data in Frontier's object database, a flexible and powerful database that I covered in Radio UserLand Kick Start. As objects are deleted, Frontier monitors their freed-up blocks so they can be reused, as Matt Neuberg describes in Frontier: The Definitive Guide: ... as the database is used, free space opens up in it, and pointers to the free blocks are added to a list called the "avail list," which must be traversed ... (read more)

2005/01/25

Turning Off the Radio

Because I wrote the book on Radio UserLand, my decision to stop using the software on Workbench has raised a few eyebrows.By tradition, the first thing a weblogger must do with new software is publish a vicious excoriation of the old software, warning others to keep away, like a courageous relief worker marking a land mine.Textbook example: When Mark Pilgrim concluded that a Movable Type licensing change would have cost him $535, he declared the software a dead end, switched to WordPress, and ... (read more)

2004/10/07

Deciding Whether to Drop Anchor

One goal in the move to new software on Workbench is to salvage incoming links from other sites. When you break weblog entry permalinks, you break links on every site that referred to your entries. Because I use weblog archives as a research tool often in my programming, I don't want to hose permalinks switching from Radio UserLand to my hand-coded LAMP software.I thought I could write a short PHP script to redirect each old Radio-style link to its new link -- just grab the anchor portion of ... (read more)

2004/10/04

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