Dave Winer: Radio UserLand

Stapler is a "tool for Radio UserLand that creates RSS feeds from sources you select, scraped hourly (or every N hours, variable for each source) from HTML web sites."

Craig Burton tutorial: Radio Remote Access.

Joshua Allen verifies that Radio works on Windows XP. [Scripting News]

Today's Craig Burton tutorial is on channels in Radio. It's by far the best docs on our software. I hope everyone runs his latest tutorial, it's a Java window, he presses all the buttons and narrates. Craig talks very slowly and explains everything. His tutorials are eye-openers. [Scripting News]

The editor of soapbox, which I admire, posted a newbie intro to Radio as a weblog tool. Gotta love it. [Scripting News]

Here's the most interesting Radio Blog I've seen so far, but understand that I've been looking for something like this ever since we released the beta of the decentralized blogging tool in Radio. It's the zig to Blogger's centralized zag. (Or the blig to its blog?) As Blogger has grown, it's climbing a scaling wall, and the performance has suffered, much as the performance of Weblogs.Com has suffered as it has grown. [Scripting News]

Marty Heyman warns: "Radio is an Insidious Plot for global domination by Userland Software!" [Scripting News]

Oliver Wrede: Golden Rules for Newbies to Frontier and Radio UserLand.

For tomorrow's press release. "Radio UserLand is at the sweet spot of the next generation of the Internet, bringing together XML-based web services, a decentralized approach to computing and the power of software," said Charles Fitzgerald, director of business strategy in the platform strategy group at Microsoft. "This next generation of the Internet promises more control for end users and renewed opportunity for developers."

It's not hard to find programmers to work on Radio, though. This evening I added a feature for our friends the bloggers, making sure that it's easy for people to credit their sources. This should emit a loud sigh of relief in Radio UserLand and perhaps elsewhere. The Supremes are singing You can't hurry love, no you'll just have to wait. We're figuring this stuff out in real-time, as always. [Scripting News]

Interview: Dave Winer on Radio Userland. We interview Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Software, about his newest creation, Radio Userland. Thirteen years in the making, Radio Userland puts an industrial strength Web server on your desktop. Designed to be extended by developers, Radio will also appeal to the masses with its news aggregator and weblog features. By Andy King. 0312

Well, it looks like everything got published. Cool. I'm going to release it. Wish me luck! ";->"

OK, it sure came back a lot faster. Now let's see if everything got published. For that I have to look on the Events page to see what got uploaded. Back in a minute or so.

This is a test. I am going to publish this to my blog and route it to my Radio UserLand channel. The difference is that all the uploading will happen in a thread running in the background, so the page will reload a lot faster than it would if I had to wait for the FTPing to finish. Let's see if it works.

BTW, did you notice the product shot near the top of the page? We had some fun. Radio doesn't actually come in a box. But we wanted to imagine what it would look like if it did.

Tip for Radio newbies. If you want your channel choices to be reflected in the Top 100, you must turn on upstreaming.

Yesterday I did a feature for Radio called Magic Folders. A router for folders. Now if you plop a file into the images folder it goes into the images folder (via FTP) on My Blog. I think stories are going to work the same way. Just a little bit of glue to create a workgroup. They're magic because there's almost nothing there, like any good router it's just a glue-bit. "When you see one of these, do this."

Sean Elfstrom has Radio glue for Apple's new iTunes music player app. He says "I 'borrowed' a lot of it from the original driver for Sound Jam (since they are built on the same codebase), but the scripting support is pretty broken."

Sometimes things work just like you wanted them to.

Pfieffer Report: "In a funny way, we are back to where publishing was before DTP came around: content creation and management is once again the playground of larger players, and requires heavy investment, just as publishing technology did before XPress arrived." Amen.

Two-Way-Web: SOAP meets RSS.

inessential.com: Radio UserLand 7.0b34 is out. Among the bug fixes is one that has annoyed me for a long time -- on Windows 2000, when you click the Edit With Radio button, Radio actually comes to the front now rather than just flashing in the taskbar. AFT.

DaveNet: Desktop Websites.

DW: mySubscriptions.opml contains the RSS channels I'm tuned into.

Radio is the first Web server to do upstreaming, a necessary feature for servers running on users' desktops.

Sometimes a picture makes the difference. When I started the MUOTD project I also made a resolution to organize my document work using Radio's Bookmarks menu. Now before I close a window I think "Will I want to edit this again?" or "Is this part of some project?" If the answer to either question is yes, I bookmark it, and then drag-drop it into the category it belongs in, or create a category for it. It's made a major difference in my writing work. Note that some of the documents haven't been released yet, that's good -- less shooting from the hip, and hopefully the projects will make more sense when they're rolled out.

Radio: "When accessing a server on the local machine, MSIE/Mac doesn't yield enough processor time to allow the server to do its processing. The net result is a glacial pace, when it should be lightning fast. The addition of a single system call to the loop that's waiting for a response from the server would probably cure the problem."

Radio bug report. Open an outline stored locally. Bring it to the front. Choose Add Bookmark from the Bookmarks menu. Close the window. Choose the file in the menu. Error. The filename in the generated script is incorrect. On Windows the path delimiter is backslash, which must be escaped in string constants. (It was probably only tested on the Mac.)

Susan Kitchens provides the kind of first-time user feedback that we need. "Radio displays the links as underscores. But I haven't yet figured out how to access the URLs." Yes, that's something we need to call out on the outliner page. To see the HTML behind the links choose the Format Text command in the HTML menu. It toggles.

Teaser screen shot. It'll probably be under the Christmas Tree shortly after Christmas Day. (It's a Web app that runs on your desktop. You get the source code, of course.)