Userland

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

Using PHP to redirect Radio URLs

Several people have asked how I'm hosting Radio UserLand comments and trackback with PHP. Although I plan to do this eventually, at this time I'm only pretending to offer this feature locally. Instead, I'm using PHP scripts to redirect requests to my real comment/trackback host, the excellent Python Community Server. I've written a short article on how to use PHP to redirect Radio UserLand URLs. ... (read more)

2003/12/03

Self-promotion begins at home

Self-promotion: Stephen Ibaraki has published the transcript of an interview with me regarding Radio UserLand Kick Start, weblogging, and Java. One question will be of particular interest to Radio users: "Could you provide five tips from the book?" Tip number 1 is one that I make often when talking about the software: Turn on nightly backups. ... (read more)

2003/12/02

Saving hoisted outlines in Radio UserLand

One of the more important gotchas in the Radio UserLand outliner occurs when you save an outline that has been hoisted. As I discuss in the Radio UserLand Kick Start chapter on outliners, hoisting causes a group of subheads to be displayed as they were the top level of the outline. Their parent and all other parts of the outline disappear from view. If you save a hoisted outline, it only saves the parts of the outline that are visible, discarding everything else. You can ensure that everything ... (read more)

2003/11/15

Weblog census finds 27,000 UserLand sites

A weblog census prepared by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education finds more than 27,000 weblogs published with Radio UserLand or Manila software. The two categories of weblog software -- "standalone tools" and "hosted sites" -- don't provide a place for Radio, which provides both functions. ... (read more)

2003/11/11

Changing file extensions with Radio

Radio UserLand tip: If your Web server does not recognize index.html as a valid name for a folder's home page, you can use the #renderedFileExtension directive to replace html with another extension such as php or cfm. ... (read more)

2003/11/05

Now available: Radio UserLand Kick Start

Radio UserLand Kick Start arrived in stores this week and had the highest first-day Amazon rank of any book that I've written -- it was at around 2,300 when I decided that three hours was enough time to spend reloading the page like a crazed day trader. I've sold around 30 copies on Amazon this week to Workbench visitors. I mention all of this because I'm eager to prove that UserLand Software's products are a viable topic for book publishers. This is only the second book on a UserLand product ... (read more)

2003/10/23

Pycs offers weblog search engine

Phillip Pearson has added a search engine to the Python Community Server, an open-source clone of Radio's hosting server written in Python. To support searching weblog entries, he's implementing a new XmlStorageSystem method, mirrorPosts, which Radio and other tools could use to add an entry to the search engine. If you're a Radio user who is outgrowing the Radio Community Server or Salon Blogs, changing to the Python Community Server is pretty simple. I'm using Pycs for comments and trackback ... (read more)

2003/10/14

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