Surfacing a Few More Comments
Christian Crumlish
A lot of lively discussion is going on in the comments. Here are some more that deserve front-page status:
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hello. i've been using radio since february, and i think i can answer some of your questions. i'm sure if i get some of it wrong, somebody will step in, 'eh?
on the radio scripts, that all really happens on your desktop. you set up radio to do what you want locally, and it upstreams the site files generated by the local setup. the ru macros in conjunction with your templates create the site pages. if you wanted php pages, you'd either have to set your sever to parse all the html pages, or set radio to use a php extension (which i haven't investigated.) the local radio www directory is a mirror of your site directory, except that your html isn't there, text files with the content before being placed into your templates is there. radio puts them together and sends it to the server. the diy factor is, i think, one of the most interesting parts of radio. it's commercial software with an "open-source" attitidue. i fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. people that want to just type and click can use radio straight out of the box (so to speak) and be up and running in a matter of minutes. people that want a custom look can create their own templates. people that want to add cool widgets can install tools other people have written in the radio macro languge. (this is where i sit.) and people who are so inclinded can make their own tools and customizations. developers are met with enthusiasm, which is nice. overall, i am happy with Radio and i like the software, even though i was intially wanting something free. i would like to see the comments system improve (i use yaccs because it's more flexible and for the rss feeds), and i'd like to see radio generate standards compliant code of the shelf, and include a spell checker and a few other basic features. but all in all, i am happy with it. dix [dix@dixiblog.com] • 7/27/02; 12:44:34 PM |
I just wanted to add something to what I wrote before. While I think Radio is great, I think that up until recently it's biggest weakness has been lack of documentation. There are a lot of questions I had when I first started that I really had to dig to find the answers for. Luckily, more has been written since then. Gregory [gblake@ezoons.com] • 7/27/02; 2:54:34 PM |
The other big weakness of Radio is bugs. I have suffered a number of crash and data loss bugs. RU is feature laden, but buggy. If you want to know what I went through, check out http://radio.weblogs.com/0108719/categories/blogOnBlogging/. Thanks, Geodog [Geodog@cyberdude.com] • 7/27/02; 11:50:49 PM |
and:
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Radio does have an FTP option in the prefs section. You can send your weblog to any server (Intranet etc.). Of course, when you do that, you miss out on the community features. Also: you can create categories to publish to multiple sites in different sites. Right now I publish to my blog on UserLand's servers and also to my blog on eVector's servers in Italy (I can publish to both at the same time by clicking both categories when I publish). There are instructions how to do this on the UserLand site.
John Robb [jrobb@userland.com] • 7/27/02; 2:08:54 PM
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all my posts show 0 comments right now, so I didn't even know I had any comments to read. That's probably a browser cache issue. Let me guess -- you're using IE on a Mac? It likes to cache the JavaScript that shows the comment counts. If you quit and re-launch IE, and then view your page then the counts will be up-to-date. Jake Savin [jake@userland.com] • 7/26/02; 5:10:33 PM |
One other feature you missed in Radio: Tools. Radio is a whole development environment, and with a little programming, you can create your own Tools to do whatever you might dream up. Tools are integrated with the desktop website via the Tools page and links in the Status Center on the desktop website home page. As far as I know, no other blogging tool has this kind of functionality. Jake Savin [jake@userland.com] • 7/26/02; 5:12:48 PM |
The advantage of centralised storage is that I can post to my LJ from any internet connection. It's impossible for me to do that with RU due to dial-up and NAT issues. Andrew Ducker [Andrew@Ducker.org.uk] • 7/27/02; 4:38:42 AM |
Speaking of tools, I wrote one to post to LiveJournal. Using a custom RSS output style (since LJ's own RSS doesn't put post bodies in the description), the multi-author weblog tool should do the opposite. Though, of course, using both at once would be unfortunate. Mark Paschal [markpasc@markpasc.org] • 7/27/02; 12:46:28 PM |
I've try Radio and Movable Type. Radio is cool, but subject to little bugs. But since I travel, and I don't wan't to be chained to my laptop, I prefer being able to access through a form on a server... "à la Movable Type". MT is a GREAT piece of software, but very difficult to install and maintain for a newbie (nobody's perfect) ;-). That's why I choose PMachine Pro (www.pmachine.com), another great piece of software, but easily manageable. And all the features are there. My two cents. EmDee [le_scribe@no_spam_hotmail.com] • 7/27/02; 2:45:59 PM |