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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Tuesday, August 27, 2002Better Categorization
I installed liveTopics today. In a nutshell, it allows you to assign blog entries to arbitrary topics. liveTopics publishes an outline of all topics and links to their assigned entries. Add some macros to your templates that automatically link entries to their topics, and wham-o, all of your blog entries now one step removed from other related entries.
Advantages over Radio's Categories:
- No duplication of entries.
- Freedom from date-based navigation.
- Topics are arbitrary, no extra steps to create a new topic.
I'm still playing. Almost 1000 entries now need Topics, the rendered outline looks like crap under my template, and I'm tired.
Aggregator Mysteries...
I've been running Radio's aggregator in on-demand mode for a few weeks now, and generally am happy with it. That and another tweak have greatly reduced Radio's CPU utilization. Yippie!
Problem is, Radio is still a CPU pig during a news scan. Sometimes my scans take just a minute or so, and I don't really mind so much (especially if I remembered to set radio.exe's priority "BelowNormal"). Unfortunately, most of my scans take much longer than that, 12 and 30 minutes for today. During this time, Radio tells me that it's waiting on just a single thread:
What is taking this thread so long, what feed is it trying to download, and why doesn't Radio simply give up after some period of time (1 minute seems reasonable for a single RSS file, even on dial-up)?
System.Error.Emit: One final thought for the evening... Computers suck.
YARA - Yet Another Radio Annoyance
Radio sticks my name in the Title of every Category RSS feed. I understand the rationalization, most people's category names are not sufficiently descriptive. My categories, however, do not suffer from that problem.
system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.publishCategoryRss is the offender. I've "fixed" it, at least until Userland wipes my change out with an update...
Steve feels my pain and Simon notes my misplaced hopes. In spite of my grousing, the .NET CF is much better than Embedded Visual Basic. And the .NET CF is a Beta, after all. Most of my issues should be resolved in the RTM, except for the lack of XPath/XQuery, COM Interop, and Serialization.
