T Bryce Yehl: Bryce's Radio Stuff

Moving

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 20:15:07 GMT

I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to "MT". I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.

My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.

For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.

Not moving Radio

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 03:55:10 GMT

Lots of things blew up while I was trying to move Radio to another PC. I'll give it another shot once I figure out why Radio is crashing whenever I try to compress weblogData.root.

Moving Radio

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:52:50 GMT

I'm about to try moving my Radio installation to another computer, including moving Radio.root.

Crossing my fingers that this doesn't blow up...

Pingback Follow-up

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 06:14:50 GMT

The other day Ian Hickson dropped by and added a comment to my post calling for a Pingback Retrieval API. My response is that the Radio community loved Pingback, but I still don't see any implementations for Radio users.

Having a Pingback Retrieval API, and encouraging the creation of stand-alone Pingback servers supporting that API, would accomplish several things:

Random CMS can integrate with Random Pingback server. The end-user is empowered to choose whichever Pingback server best suits their environment (Perl, ASP, Cobol).
Provides a clear path for certain classes of CMS, especially client-based tools like Radio, to integrate Pingback. The CMS folks can focus on integrating pings with the CMS instead of having to re-invent the wheel by creating yet another Pingback server.
Third-parties would be able to provide Pingback services to end-users.

The Pingback Retrieval API doesn't require many methods: Register, List, and Clear would be enough. Everything else is an implementation detail that can be left to the developer. Better implementations might provide a web interface for managing pings and offer additional services, like ping-forwarding via email/RSS/Trackback.

If you build it, they will come...

I'll put my money where my mouth is: Add a Pingback Retrieval API to the official spec and I will commit to building a reference implementation and hosting it until such time as it can no longer be supported by my web host.

Newz Crawler, Part II

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 20:24:55 GMT

The .NET Guy points out that Newz Crawler nags because it's not registered. I knew that, but the nagging is notably pervasive and annoying.

It can be a pain to trigger scrolling on the Channels pane during drag-n-drop.

Most operations occur in-memory, if Newz Crawler crashes you lose whatever has happened during that session.

Doesn't respect system locale settings for dates.

Newz Crawler, Part I

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 03:20:20 GMT

To blockquoteth myself:

The only thing holding me back is the aggregator. I like the reverse-chronological view, the grouping functionality that "myRadio" provides, the ability to retain items in the aggregator indefinitely, and of course, the weblog integration.

I'm giving Newz Crawler a try, and initially posted this entry from it.

Pros:

Native UI.
Feed grouping (Folders).
Folders can contain other folders.
Granular on-demand scanning -- scan feed(s), folder(s), or everything.
Weblog integration with WYSIWYG editor.
Favorites folder for storing news items for later use.
Detects items that are only a headline and link, automatically loads linked content.
Hot-key to mark all items as read (Catch-up function).
Hot-key to delete all items (Clear function)

Cons:

Time-delay nag screen on launch that requires a button press to clear.
Nag screen on close that requires a button press to clear.
Constant reminders throughout the program that it is unregistered.
Favorites folder cannot contain sub-folders.
Supports Blogger API only -- no titles, no categories.
WYSIWYG editor has some odd issues with control focus.
Puts a tagline on weblog posts.
Using Clear function will cause all items to re-appear as new in the next scan. Manually removing all items from a feed does not cause this.
Sometimes double-clicking an item will cause an infinite number of IE windows to appear. This has happened to me three times. I'm not going to double-click anything in NewsCrawler ever again...

I need some more time to play with it, see how well it handles updated and duplicated items. Overall I like it, in spite of a few bugs... but I hate to pay for any program that nags.

No More Double-Decoding

Thu, 03 Oct 2002 20:03:41 GMT

Jake posted a bug fix for Radio's news aggregator that enables it to handle HTML code in news feeds (like my Google search box post last week). Update Radio to get the fix. [John Robb]

About friggin time!

Wanting to jump ship...

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 18:39:09 GMT

My request for help in the Radio DG has received the usual response from Userland: none whatsoever.

Al Macintyre has wrongfully attributed me as having migrated from Radio to Movable Type. What I actually did was migrate a (defunct) personal journal from a home-grown system derived from the CMS that I built for my former employer. But the temptation to leave Radio grows every day, and I will certainly not pay for any future upgrades. Why should I support Userland when they've never supported me?

The only thing holding me back is the aggregator. I like the reverse-chronological view, the grouping functionality that "myRadio" provides, the ability to retain items in the aggregator indefinitely, and of course, the weblog integration.

Sheisse Radio

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 16:46:29 GMT

Got nailed by one of Radio's stupid monthly roll-over bugs. First it complained that www\#prefs.txt didn't exist (it does). Then it published the calendar on my home page with the "September" link pointing to a day that I didn't post anything. The calendars on my category pages are fine...

Cruft

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 23:30:09 GMT

Late last night I decided to clear the cruft that has been accumulating in my aggregator since August. I spent many hours reading through nearly 1500 items, eventually posting two hundred of them to my follow-up category so that I might be able to find them again in the future...

This is where the Weblog / Aggregator model comes up short for personal KM. Aggregators aren't designed to persist data, Weblogs aren't designed to store and navigate unpublished items. That is why I want a Personal Knowledge Aggregator.

Radio Userland feeds still lacking (or not, my bad!)

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 03:20:02 GMT

Userland has rolled out RSS 2.0 to Radio users. RSS feeds have been silently updated to incude GUID elements that contain permalinks. The GUID goes not have the isPermaLink attribute set to True.

WTF?!

My bad, the spec says that isPermaLink=True is the default. Thank you, Justin. I can't remember if it always said that...

Building a better TrackBack...

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 01:37:31 GMT

Ian Hickson: Pingback 1.0. "The best thing about this idea is that unlike similar schemes like TrackBack, it is totally transparent to both users." [via dive into mark]

The concept is simple, the tech is easy (XML-RPC), and the spec is well-written. I like it, except for one thing: it assumes that the Pingback server will be integrated with the CMS. That's not going to be the case with static tools like Radio, they'll need stand-alone Pingback servers that can store pings until the CMS retrieves them. It's not a huge problem, but it would have been nice if they had spec'd an API for that.

Publishing Nightmare

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 00:29:29 GMT

I told Radio to re-publish all of my weblog and category pages. Oh, what a mistake that was! Radio's FTP upstreaming was being especially pathetic today, taking about 8 minutes per chunk of 25 files. It would have taken nearly 5 hours for Radio to re-publish my site at that rate. Can't have Radio hogging my CPU all night, my PC is supposed to be recording The Sopranos...

So I switched Radio to filesystem upstreaming. Thirty minutes to re-render everything, another thirty to rsync with my web host... Realized that I had messed up my nav links, repeat the process.

Thank you, Cygwin!

New Look

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 20:06:01 GMT

Back in March, when I first started using Radio, many in the Userland crowd were complaining that switching layouts from tables to CSS was too limiting and difficult. I set out to prove them wrong by converting the default Radio theme to CSS. It was nearly pixel-perfect on all CSS-capable browsers, at the expense of some "CSS purity."

These days everybody loves CSS, even Scoble is doing it!

I've got no attachment to the default Radio look. I started working on a fresh design months ago, and this slow Sunday afternoon seemed like an excellent time to finish it up and roll it out.

So now I've got a new look. It may be ugly, but it's my brand of ugly.

I've archived the old templates, just in case anyone wants them.

Wed, 28 Aug 2002 02:30:54 GMT

Better 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.

Wed, 28 Aug 2002 02:18:05 GMT

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)?

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 05:53:12 GMT

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...

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 20:52:54 GMT

Jon Udell on Blog migration, PageRank, and AuthorRank

Last week, when I moved this weblog to its new home, I left some loose ends. I'd meant to redirect my old homepage and RSS file to their new counterparts, but it wasn't immediately apparent how to get Radio to upload a page containing a client-side redirect.

My tool for migrating Radio sites was meant to solve exactly the sorts of problems that Jon talks about.

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 14:03:30 GMT

Fun with Referrers

Yesterday was the first time that I did not have any hits come from my old radio.weblogs.com site. I moved to my own server way back in May.

And yesterday I received several hits via my profile on Classmates.com. I wonder who those were?

If it weren't for the fact that my girlfriend found me on Classmates, I would have nothing good to say about them. They make you pay to create a full profile and to make contact with anyone, and when I moved back to America their system wouldn't let me change my country. Alumni.net is completely free, that's how my old high-school cronies usually track me down. Unfortunately, they are puny compared to Classmates and Gradfinder.

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 18:27:20 GMT

Winamp 3.0

I stumbled across Winamp 2.78's Unicode ID3v2 bug the other day, and when I went looking for an update I found that Winamp 3.0 is now available. "Talk about good timing", I thought. Download, install, boy is this thing different...

Marc Pasc (author of "Kit") has pointers to a couple of Winamp 3.0 weblog reviews. After a few days with 3.0, I have to say that I don't like it, and am going to downgrade myself to Winamp 2.8. Here's why:

Problem 1: Doesn't support Windows Media Keys

I own at at least five of Microsoft's Natural Keyboards Pro, plus I've purchased a few for friends and family, and every one of those sales is directly attributable to Winamp. These keyboards have a row of 19 buttons at the top, 8 of which are dedicated to multimedia functions (Play, Next/Previous Track, etc).

By not supporting the media keys, I actually have move my mouse to skip some ancient Mariah Carey song that I mistakenly purchased during puberty and still haven't gotten around to deleting from my computer (I have genetic predisposition to pack-rat behavior)... Which brings me to problem two.

Problem 2: Ignores Fitt's law

I've always taken advantage of Winamp's "Window Shade" feature, and leave the windows "docked" to the top of my screen. Under 2.7x, I could "throw" my mouse at the top of the screen and double-click to expand/collapse the window. This doesn't work under 3.0, the clicks are ignored, perhaps treated as clicks on the window's border.

There are minor UI mishaps in a program that is notorious for being a UI disaster, but these represent most of my interaction with Winamp. I'll downgrade to 2.8 with the Winamp XP skin until they are fixed.

If you're the sort to interpret WWJD as What Would Jakob Do, UseItAmp is the skin for you.

Update: One more reason that 3.0 sucks, the "Jump to file" (press the J key) window has been replaced by a search box that can only be used when the Playlist window is expanded. Bleh!

Sun, 11 Aug 2002 00:14:54 GMT

Wanted: Web Logfile Analyzer

Needs to be:

Free as in Gratis.
Available as a Windows binary.
Easy to get running (I'm smart, but short on time).
Able to decipher search queries.
Create pretty graphs and stuff... (the usual features)

Bonus points for something that can:

Perform unusual ad-hoc queries (like figuring out the peak number of times a file was downloaded within a 1-hour period).
Convert logfiles to a database format (simple imports into Access aren't good enough, I need deciphered user-agents, referrers, etc).

Sat, 10 Aug 2002 18:14:46 GMT

Some Radio Tweaks

Fixing Broken RSS 0.91 Feeds

According to the Userland RSS 0.91 spec, the LANGUAGE element is required (optional in RSS 0.92). Radio considers an RSS 0.91 file without a LANGUAGE element to be broken and will not allow you to subsribe to it. Ars Technica is one example.

To fix this, open system.verbs.builtins.xml.rss.compileService. Look for the "bundle //get language" line and hack away. (Any changes here may be over-written by a later Radio update)

Lower CPU Utilization

On my once top-of-the-line PIII 733, every 10 seconds Radio would jump to 100% CPU utilization for 2-3 seconds. It's not normally a problem, but sometimes I'm recording video and those peaks come frequently enough to cause frame drops. Icky.

Changing user.radio.prefs.thread.secsBetweenChecks from 10 to 30 seems to have improved things. Look in system.verbs.builtins.radio.thread to see what this change affects.

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 21:43:47 GMT

Why I keep blogging about aggregators and outliners

My Blogging the Enterprise post received a solid rebuttal from A Klog Apart, KM Systems are to Treacle as Weblogs are to Honey:

The best KM is the one people practice. For all I know, klogging may address only ten percent of your KM goals. But try it. It is a critical ten percent. This wedge gets people owning their expertise, sharing it willingly, getting credit, getting feedback, being social about knowledge. How does this compare to any other tools you've ever introduced?

I've been meaning to respond to this for a week now, but I'm fresh out of round tuits. I'm getting there tho, and my explorations into changing aggregation behavior and utilizing outlines are a major part of it.

AKA is preaching a sort of Guerrilla KM, using the path of least resistence. People will blog if you give them the chance. Initially I wanted to write that people will follow KM processes if you ensure that the emphasis is on Knowledge and not on Management processes. I may write about that too, when more round tuits are available.

But the first round tuit I find will be spent writing about how to address the biggest failure of blogging for KM: organizing knowledge. All of the blogging tools that I am familiar with are dismal failures when it comes to organization. The good news is that Radio has unique features can help create order from the chaos, but these features aren't necessarily: fully developed, well organized themselves, or integrated with other features.

There's nothing wrong with blogging for KM, it just needs to be made a little better.

Once I get that out of my system, I'll get back to more geeky Pocket PC and Wireless Data goodness.

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 20:40:57 GMT

Wanting to Outline

Today I was hoping to use the Outliner in "Kit" to organize a bunch of stuff that I have kicking around in my aggregator. Problems:

Pastes only plain-text.
- This means that I have to create several nodes in order to outline the text of a news item, any links within the item, and a link to the original source.
- I'm wondering how much effort it would take to write a system tray utility to convert HTML clipboard data to plain-text with the HTML retained.
Kit loses the links from link nodes when loading an outline. Kit will allow links to be created and saved, but they are destroyed if you load the outline back into Kit. Reported to Kit's author.
Kit encodes any HTML instead of rendering it. Mildly annoying.
When saving the outline, Kit encodes some things that Radio's outliner doesn't decode.
- An example is the apostrophe.
- Suspect that this is Userland's problem, not Kit's.

Using Radio's outliner presents it's own set of problems:

Pastes only plain-text.
- However, it does allow for some WYSIWYG-style editing of an item.
Creating an inline hyperlink is user-hostile.
- Ctrl-K transforms the whole node into a link (a dangerous function as the outliner will destroy any child nodes if the link node is ever collapsed).
- The UI for inline hyperlinks sucks.
  - If you use the HTML | Add link menu, no prompt is presented. Radio will either take the contents of the clipboard or create an empty link.
  - The only way to edit an inline link is to turn off the HTML rendering (HTML | Format Text or Ctrl-` toggles this).
The Outline and HTML menus do not have hotkeys.
Radio's outliner has other issues and annoyances, these are just specific issues that interfere with my task of outlining news items.

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 19:36:07 GMT

Controlling Aggregation

Turning off the Enable the Aggregator pref doesn't have any discernable side-effects. For on-demand scanning, I've long had the following bookmark:

system.verbs.builtins.xml.aggregator.readAllServices (adrlogcallback:@radio.log.add)

"Kit" has a feature to run arbitrary UserTalk scripts, so I should be able to build a button for this.