Salon Blogs

Restore a Radio weblog from a server backup

I'm working on a Radio UserLand Kick Start chapter about backing up a weblog and restoring it over a new installation of the software. I ran into a Catch-22 problem: You can't restore a weblog without updating Radio.root so that it is current, and doing that prevents the weblog from being restored correctly. As it turns out, Radio creates a new www/backups folder when Radio.root is updated. When you try to restore a weblog, Radio sees this folder and uses its files, rather than looking on the ... (read more)

2003/05/21

Radio UserLand tech support via RSS

The Radio UserLand discussion group, the best place to receive user-to-user technical support on the software, now is available as an RSS newsfeed. ... (read more)

2003/05/13

Help filling a Radio weblog's sidebar

Julie Wiggins has written up some useful Radio UserLand newbie tips on "how to use the blank space under my calendar for phrases, other links, mysubscriptions (and anything else that I didn't want to put or couldn't figure out how to put into my navigator links) and how to align/center the text and change the font size of mysubscriptions.opml with a little help from the discussion boards and a friend at radio." ... (read more)

2003/05/12

Displaying random XML data with UserTalk

Peter Backx has created a UserTalk script that displays random pictures on the homepage of his Radio UserLand weblog. I created a modified version of his script to display random text links and am using it here on Workbench. If you're new to UserTalk, Backx's script is a nice short example that demonstrates how it can be used to read XML data. ... (read more)

2003/05/11

A Radio macro to display category links

Radio UserLand tip from Mark Paschal: How to add category links automatically to your home page. ... (read more)

2003/05/08

How to do server-side includes in Radio

Radio UserLand tip: There's a way to do a server-side include on a Radio page before it is published. To include one file within another, call <%file.readWholeFile(...)%> with the name and exact location of the file as the only argument. For example: <%file.readWholeFile("C:\Program Files\Radio Userland\www\footer.html")%> More information on file.readWholeFile is available from DocServer, a reference to Frontier and Radio verbs. ... (read more)

2003/05/07

Kick starting my Radio UserLand book

I'm getting lots of useful feedback since announcing Radio UserLand Kick Start last week. The response was insane -- around 50 weblogs linked to the news within a day, putting this site briefly on Popdex alongside Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, iTunes, and other targets of transitory weblog love. The book now has a home page on this site with a table of contents and some of the spiel I used to persuade Sams Publishing to green-light the project. If I get their OK, I'll put another chapter online ... (read more)

2003/05/07

New Radio tool reads RSS on WAP phones

David Davies has developed a Radio tool that enables RSS subscriptions to be viewed with a WAP-enabled mobile phone. To see how it works, load his subscribed RSS feeds in WML format with your phone. ... (read more)

2003/05/02

Back from two weeks of Radio silence

An out-of-town trip last week highlighted the downside of a desktop-based weblogging tool. Though I'm happy with most aspects of Radio UserLand, I was in Dallas and couldn't connect to Radio remotely or recreate Workbench over a clean installation of the software. Manila, Moveable Type, and Blogger were looking pretty good while I was maintaining Radio silence. For my next world tour, I'm looking for the easiest way to publish a Radio weblog from any location. Chris Double's use of Radio under ... (read more)

2003/04/28

UserLand offered an object database API

Snappy the Clam challenges UserLand on the subject of open standards: Ask UserLand sometime how many competing UserTalk implementations there are. Also ask them where the documentation for the Frontier "object databases" are, so that you could write programs in a different language that access the root file. UserLand offered an object database API with the release of Frontier 5 for MacOS and Windows. There's no telling if it still works today, since it was released more than six years ago, but ... (read more)

2003/04/09

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