Salon Blogs

Exploits found on UserLand comment server

Two security exploits for Radio UserLand were published last night on the Radio customer support board. The first exploit allows an attacker to execute scripts on a Radio weblog's comments page. This can be used to redirect visitors to another Web site, transmit cookies to a third party, open pop-up windows, and the like. The second exploit allows an attacker to post a comment to an entry that doesn't exist yet. These exploits affect users who host their comments on UserLand servers. If you'd ... (read more)

2004/03/11

Rebuilding the bridge from Radio to Blogger

Radio UserLand's Manila-Blogger Bridge tool can be used to mirror weblog posts to a Blogger or BlogSpot site. The tool stopped working last month, as described by several frustrated Radio users on the software's support forum. The problem was caused by a change on Blogger's servers that moved it to a new URL. To fix the problem: Open the Manila-Blogger Bridge preferences page. Change Server from plant.blogger.com to www.blogger.com. Change Path from /RPC2 to /api/RPC2. Click Submit. New posts ... (read more)

2004/03/07

Translator converts Atom feeds to RSS 2.0

The RSS portal site 2RSS offers an Atom-to-RSS translator that enables Atom feeds to be read by RSS software that hasn't been extended to support the new format yet. Here's an example that turns Anil Dash's new Atom feed into an RSS 2.0 file. ... (read more)

2004/03/05

Changing comment servers in Radio UserLand

Radio UserLand tip: If you offer comments on your weblog, your pages will load slowly when UserLand's comment servers are experiencing high usage. One way to eliminate this bottleneck is to change comment servers to Pycs, an open-source clone of the Radio Community Server. Pycs can be used as your comment and trackback server even if the rest of your weblog remains on the UserLand or Salon servers. Because Pycs.Net hosts dozens of weblogs instead of thousands, the response time is usually much ... (read more)

2004/03/04

Publishing Multiple Sites with Radio UserLand

I'm using Radio UserLand to publish several Web sites: Workbench, Orlando Vacationer, and the Bizarro-world news site Drudge Retort. The latter two sites use Radio's categorization feature -- posts sent to Orlando and Drudge categories are upstreamed to their destination, the former as rendered HTML files and the latter as RSS feeds. This system works pretty well, but one drawback is that posts sometimes end up in the wrong place, as a few did this morning. I'm beta-testing the UserLand editor ... (read more)

2004/03/02

New editor for Manila and Radio UserLand

SocialDynamx is developing SmartManila, a Windows program for editing Radio UserLand and Manila sites: Once setup, you can quickly switch between different services and not lose any data retrieved or the connection established to communicate with each unique server. SmartManila brings the same benefits to Manila that FM Radio brought to Radio. Some of the highlights are: Drafts, Spell-checker, Seamless image support, Integrated multi-tabbed browser with undockable tabs, Increased ... (read more)

2004/02/26

Deleting a Radio UserLand weblog

Radio UserLand tip from the customer support forum: How to recover a lost password and delete a weblog from UserLand's server. ... (read more)

2004/02/17

Publishing a second weblog as a Radio category

I've been experimenting with the use of RSS to publish Web content: Writing entries in Radio UserLand that are stored in an RSS-only category, using a cronjob to retrieve that RSS data every five minutes, making a few search-and-replace changes to the RSS with Perl, turning the data into an HTML file using wget and PHP, then including the file on a Web page. Radio makes it easy to route entries to several categories that are published on another site. The entries also can be collected in an ... (read more)

2004/02/05

Radio UserLand inspires remix artists

A recurring theme among Radio webloggers is how to take data in one form and render it in another. The software handles this task so well that it either turns people into information-remix junkies or attracts that kind of crowd. Radio supports text, HTML, XML, OPML, and RSS as input and output formats and can be extended to support others -- Atom, OCS, you name it -- with scripts written in the UserTalk language. One such junkie, Richard MacManus, will be replacing an OPML-to-HTML ... (read more)

2004/01/27

Reviewers rate Radio UserLand Kick Start

Two reviews of Radio UserLand Kick Start, a book I'm promoting relentlessly because it needs some help getting onto bookstore shelves: Dave Winer: If you've been wondering about the programming and content management environment behind the blogging tool and aggregator; the object database, verb set, outliner, debugger, website framework, get this book, it's great. I'm really excited about this. David Wall, Amazon.Com: The user-level coverage is comprehensive and patient enough to get you ... (read more)

2003/12/12

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