UserLand Software's Shrinking Role in Blogging
Dave Winer wrote this weekend that UserLand Software's still in business: On this day in 1999, MacWEEK (now defunct) covered the introduction of Manila. Believe it or not, Manila is still a product, and UserLand is still operating. ... Sometimes I think Radio, which was initially a success, was another example of breaking users. A year after its release I wished instead we had produced a Manila that runs on the desktop. Creating a whole new codebase and design for a blogging CMS wasn't such a great idea, in the ... read more
Cyndi Greening blogs about a programming job I did for her this month -- moving her filmmaking weblog from Radio UserLand to Movable Type: I have been complaining, whining and kvetching for over two years about how much I dislike using Radio UserLand as a blogging tool. When I started blogging in 2003, Radio was inexpensive and seemed easy to use. It had an automatic picture uploading tool. It had RSS features I liked. But then ... I started traveling more and wanted to blog from film festivals like Sundance ... read more
Turning Off a Radio UserLand Scripter
Last June, I published a 23-minute podcast of Juan Cole being interviewed on the Alan Colmes radio show. A Radio UserLand user on Comcast in Monterey, Calif., is apparently a big fan of Cole. His copy of Radio keeps requesting that 5.5-megabyte podcast over and over, as frequently as every 10 seconds. In the last week alone, he's consumed 12.13 gigabytes of my server's bandwidth by downloading the file 2,365 times. I don't know why this is happening -- it could be a bug in Radio UserLand or a UserTalk script run ... read more
Choosing a Programmer's Editor
A reader laments the difficulty of writing programs in a plain-vanilla text editor: I have a question that I can't seem to frame correctly. It relates to my inability to format nested punctuation (in any language, on any day). I would dearly love to see a quasi-visual editor which replaces the {{ ... }} with nested shading, and bold type used to identify classes, italics for variables, etc. etc. It clearly calls for a different approach to the text-bound, linear approach to coding. What would such a beast be ... read more
25 Will Enter, 5 Will Leave (with Books)
From around 25 entries received in the book giveaway, four copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start were mailed today to Rod Kratochwill, Ole Olson, Gary Secondino and Nick Starr. Steve Kirks is working with UserLand Software on Radio 9, a major upgrade to the software. Though I suspect that the upcoming release will affect weblog publishing features covered in early chapters of my book, Kick Start emphasizes two aspects of Radio that are important to learn and unlikely to change much in the future: the object database ... read more
Giveaway: Radio UserLand Kick Start
We adopted a kitten from the humane society nine months ago who thinks he's a dog, and there's nothing he likes more than the taste of a computer book. A stack of them make an excellent scratching post, as I learned when he shredded a dozen copies of How to Use the Internet Eighth Edition. This situation adds urgency to my need to give away more of my books, before they become either out-of-date or drenched with saliva. I'm giving away four author's copies of Radio UserLand Kick Start, each in new condition and ... read more
David Raynes has released Workflow, a plug-in for Movable Type that adds fine-grained editing capabilities to weblog authors. As Anil Dash explains: Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer ownership of a post to other authors and they'll be ... read more
