Userland

The PyCS developers have a nice tip for programmers communicating with Radio Userland or Frontier via XML-RPC: "Always send with US ASCII (to keep Frontier happy), and always put the encoding='iso-8859-1' bit in the ?xml element, to keep strict XML parsers happy." ... (read more)

2002/12/23

Radio Userland has been upgraded to support Really Simple Discovery (RSD), an XML-based protocol that enables weblog editing tools to easily find the Web services they can use to read and write a weblog. This ought to provide a nice boost to weblog editing clients -- especially if they are designed for non-technical users. A prospective weblogger would only need to know three things to get started: his or her username, password, and weblog address. This can get even simpler on Radio-style ... (read more)

2002/12/14

I've run into a strange error today when using Radio Userland to subscribe to the RSS feed for Ingo Rammer's weblog: "Can't open named stream because TCP/IP error code 11004 - Valid name, no data record of requested type. (DNS error)." ... (read more)

2002/12/09

Radio Userland tip: When referring to the URL of your weblog in a new post, use the macro <%radio.weblog.getUrl()%> instead of the actual URL (even in HTML tags). That way, if you ever move your weblog to a new URL, all references to it will automatically be updated when you republish the entire weblog at its new address. Watch out for one thing: Radio weblog URLs always have a trailing "/" character at the end of the URL (example: ), so you have to account for it when employing the macro. ... (read more)

2002/12/09

When you're tinkering with the design of your Radio Userland weblog, you should occasionally save it as a new theme so you have a backup in case you completely hose the tables or some other element of the design. I save versions of Workbench periodically with the current date in the name because I frequently screw up this site's table-heavy design when tinkering with it. Once you have saved the design, it can easily be restored by choosing it from the themes page. Last night, I made the mistake ... (read more)

2002/12/06

Lisa Guernsey, a relatively new Radio Userland weblogger, wrote a piece for the New York Times last week about launching a weblog and finding herself in a community where male voices predominate (via BlogRoots). ... (read more)

2002/12/05

Phillip Pearson runs down the early history of Radio Userland using cached UserLand pages from the Internet Archive, answering a question that's probably on the mind of many current users: Why the name Radio? I was a heavy user of Radio Userland's original MP3 queueing and playback features, broadcasting a Live365 station and using it to randomly cycle through my CDs. I may be digging out Music.root again to turn my copy of RU into a radio station -- I bought a U.S. Robotics SoundLink at a ... (read more)

2002/12/04

Andrew Bayer asks, "if Salon really does blow out all of their cash by the end of the month, what happens to us? Will we get moved to Userland's servers?" Migrating to a new Radio Userland server is easy. You fill out the software's Change Community Server form with the new community's URL and the password you want to use. Radio Userland will upstream your files to the new host. I don't think it will be necessary, but if Salon ever went belly-up, UserLand could offer the original Radio Userland ... (read more)

2002/11/20

Footbridge, a Radio Userland tool released as shareware by Mark Paschal, makes it easy to mirror a category to Advogato, LiveJournal, and services that support the Blogger API (such as Moveable Type). I'm using it to publish an Advogato diary from Radio Userland. Any post I publish to my Advogato category shows up on Advogato. ... (read more)

2002/11/19

Now that I'm puttering around with XML-RPC and the Apache XML-RPC Java class library, the most common problem I encounter is XML that Apache's XML-RPC client can't parse (usually because of problems with the XML). On the radio-dev mailing list, Matt Croydon of PostNeo recommended a great Windows utility that can spy on XML-RPC, HTTP, and other networking operations: TCPTrace by Simon Fell. The program runs as a proxy server, passing requests to the right server and port, receiving the response, ... (read more)

2002/11/19

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