Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on radio-userland http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic radio-userland Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb You've got ping Thu, 10 Jul 2003 09:24:01 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://markpasc.org/weblog/2003/07/09_thirdparty_trackback_in_radio.html">Third-party TrackBack in Radio</A>. markpasc.org Matt Mower's Python TrackBack server for Radio (and ACLs in PyCS!!). [<A href="http://matt.blogs.it/">Trackback pings for matt_blogs_it</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Heh.  Nice to see it worked.  This is my first 3rd party, unsolicited, trackback ping to appear in the RSS feed :-) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001509.html Calling all kernel heroes! Sun, 13 Jul 2003 00:39:48 +0100 If there are any Radio hackers or kernel experts out there listening, i'd be grateful for your ear.  We're trying to nail down the last few problems with our Radio Trackback client and have come across something that appears pretty wierd.  Details <A href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radio-dev/message/7835">here</A>. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001511.html Radio downgrade Mon, 25 Aug 2003 08:19:30 +0100 Okay this is pretty grotty.  It looks like Userland have updated some part of the Radio aggregator, overwriting all the changes I made to the templates. It used to be that all links opened in a new window in my aggregator.  That is, wherever I clicked, new window.  It's what I want.  Don't tell me to shift+click or use the context menu.  It used to be that, if I clicked the magnifier icon, I got a view of all posts in a feed with a select all button.  My select all button is gone. Now i'm all for getting updates but I really wish they would find a way to allow you to customise this part of the environment without getting trampled on. Of course now my reading experience is diabolical; Expecting everything in a new window I keep closing the window I am reading and find that I have also lost the state of all the checkboxes I had set to that point. How did I do those customisations again? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001585.html Mozilla tolerances Sun, 12 Oct 2003 07:46:54 +0100 Has anyone else noticed that Win Mozilla (1.5) is much pickier about selecting checkboxes than Win IE?  I really notice this using Radio's news page where I find myself clicking down a long (sometimes several hundred) list of items.  With IE I found that I rarely missed, with Moz I seem to do it all the time and it's really irritating. Has anyone else noticed this? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001671.html Testing Windows Upstreamer Sat, 17 Jan 2004 00:35:57 +0000 Upstreaming in Radio Userland is a great idea. It's very nice to be able to drop a file in the www folder and have Radio automatically upload it to your weblog. The problem is that Radio has to check every file & folder in your www directory whenever it upstreams. If you have it set to do this often enough that upstreaming is responsive (30s is the slowest I can bear) then Radio ends up flaying your CPU alive. You can see this happen in the Task Manager with regular spikes showing Radio doing it's stuff. To combat this I have written a companion app WindowsUpstreaming.exe which detects changes to the file system and tells Radio to upstream. It's started when Radio starts and lives in the system tray. Now I can turn off Radio's regular upstreaming and say goodbye to CPU spikes. Better yet I get instantaneous upstreaming because it's using the built in OS mechanism. If anyone would like to help test the app, please leave a comment with contact details. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001821.html Better upstreaming all round? Sun, 18 Jan 2004 07:27:52 +0000 Some users are already testing the Windows Upstreaming app. The feedback I've had so far has been positive, all the glitches are UI related - the upstreaming works. Andy Fragen points out that we should be able to do this stuff really easily on Mac OS X too using Folder Actions to talk to Radio Userland. Being a complete OS X newbie I am struggling but it would be neat to complete the set. Here is Andy's comment: <blockquote> For those asking about OS X, consider this. A Folder Action attached to the www folder that would, in turn, use the "Do Script" command from the Radio UserLand AppleScript dictionary to run. Do Script: Execute a script Do Script string -- The text of the Frontier script to be executed Result: anything Where string is say the text of builtins.radio.upstream.xmlStorageSystem.upstreamMultipleFiles ?? Jake, if you find this adding to the AppleScript dictionary the ability to Do Script Object Database location would be much better.</blockquote> So far I haven't figured out how to add the Apple Script menu to Finder. I found the menu itself, but clicking & dragging it doesn't seem to do the right thing. BTW: Apple should be really proud of the job they did on the Help for this: <blockquote> Installing Script Menu After you install Script Menu, you can use the included scripts or add your own scripts to the menu. </blockquote> Thanks a bundle! So, for now, i'm playing with this in the Apple script editor. However, here too, I'm getting stuck. I've written a test script: <pre> tell application "Radio Userland(TM)" Do Script "Frontier.bringToFront()" end tell </pre> This asks me to identify the Radio application, which I do, and passes the syntax check. However when I run the script the Editor freezes and, eventually, times out. Radio is definitely running. Maybe there is some other step to allow apps to be scriptable? Anyway if this can be made to work then it should be possible to do using the following Radio verbs: <ul> <li>radio.upstream.uploadChangedFiles()</li> <li>radio.upstream.checkForDeletions()</li> </ul> I have a wrapper function around these two calls in the tool that accompanies Windows upstreaming. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001824.html DIY blogging stats Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:46:31 +0000 In case any other Radio users would like to do what I've just done I've uploaded the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/workspace.getPostingHistory.ftsc">script</a> necessary. Import this into Radio and run it. It will create two files in your gems folder called posting-history.csv, and, summary-posting-history.csv, respectively. These can be imported into Excel, sorted and used however you fancy. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001892.html Toggling checkboxes in the Radio news aggregator Tue, 17 Feb 2004 20:51:29 +0000 A while back I wrote a modification to the Radio news aggregator page which added a button for toggling all the checkboxes on or off. This was pretty handy but trashed by a Userland update. I could never muster the willpower to figure out how I did it again, and watch it disappear again at some unspecified point in the future so i've done without. Today I slapped myself for being a fool and wrote a JavaScript <a href="javascript:(function(){var inputs=document.getElementsByTagName('input');for(var i=0;i<inputs.length;i++){if(inputs[i].type=='checkbox'){inputs[i].checked=!inputs[i].checked;}}})()">bookmarket</a> which does the same thing. It just toggles every checkbox it finds on the page. I've learned some more <a href="http://subsimple.com/bookmarklets/tips.asp#Encapsulation">tricks</a> for writing Bookmarklets, since last time, so this one should work the same on IE and Mozilla (although I won't be testing it on IE). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001903.html More checkbox toggling Wed, 25 Feb 2004 14:26:25 +0000 A <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/02/17.html#a1334">few days ago</a> I wrote a bookmarklet for toggling checkboxes on the page. It's intended to make it a bit easier to use the Radio News Aggregator page. This often has hundreds of checkboxes which you may need to toggle on and off. After a while it gets to be a pain. The bookmarklet went through the page toggling every checkbox. Unfortunately I found it didn't really do what I needed as, quite often, I want to keep about half the posts in the page for later. I just wrote a variation which can be used alongside it. What this <a href="javascript:(function(){var inputs=document.getElementsByTagName('input');var toggling=false;for(var i=0;i<inputs.length;i++){if(inputs[i].type=='checkbox'){if(!toggling&&inputs[i].checked){toggling=true;continue;}else if(toggling&&inputs[i].checked){toggling=false;continue;}if(toggling){inputs[i].checked=!inputs[i].checked;}}}})()">bookmarklet</a> does is to selectively toggle checkboxes on the page. Like the previous one it looks at each checkbox in turn. When it finds a checkbox which is checked it begins to toggle each subsequent checkbox until it reaches another one that is already on. What this means is that you can toggle on the first and last checkboxes of a group (or several groups) that you want selected. Then use this bookmarklet to check every checkbox in between. Easy! It can then be combined with the toggle-all bookmarklet to invert the selection. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001909.html Enhancing Radio's aggregator Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:49:25 +0000 <blockquote><a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/outlines/radio/enhancedAggregator.html">Introducing the enhancedAggregator</a>. <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/images/my/aggregator.png" target="_blank" title="view hires"><img src="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/images/my/aggregatorLR.gif" alt="aggregator topics" align="right" border="0"></a>I've recently spent some time investigating Radio's aggregator code, looking for an easy way to support additional RSS modules in general, and ENT 1.0 topics in particular. The <a href="http://updates.prec-it.com/download/enhancedAggregator.root" title="click to download">enhancedAggregator tool</a> is the -provisional- result of this investigation. It comes with full <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/" target="_blank">ENT 1.0 topics</a> support for Radio's aggregator, and skeletons for aggregating <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage" target="_blank">Atom 0.3 feeds</a> and <a href="http://www.esfstandard.org/" target="_blank">ESF 1.0 events</a> for RSS 2.0. I'd like the enhancedAggregator to become a community driven project, allowing Frontier/Radio developers to easily test aggregation of new syndication formats and extensions, without mobilizing Userland scarse resources. So I've added some intal/uninstal/update/prefs ancillary functions to the tool, and provided <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/outlines/radio/enhancedAggregator.html" target="_blank">guidelines</a> for updating the current drivers and adding new ones, with pointers to the available online documentation. I hope <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/" target="_blank">Matt</a> will copy the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/" target="_blank">ENT</a> module driver and paste it into the <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/k-collector-support/" target="_blank">k-collector</a> client for Radio, and <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/2004/02/24.html#a2062" target="_blank">Paolo</a>'s eVector crew will build upon the <a href="http://www.esfstandard.org/" target="_blank">ESF</a> module driver skeleton, copying the result to their new tool when it's stable enough. [<a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">s l a m</a>]</blockquote> Marc's doing sterling work. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001920.html Radio Userland comment spam begins? Sun, 07 Mar 2004 11:54:50 +0000 Is this: <blockquote>GOOD website for ours!Thank you very much! human growth hormone 3/6/04; 7:31:54 PM</blockquote> the start of automated spamming of <a href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio Userland</a> comments? This morning I notice two of them on very old posts of mine from nearly 2 years ago. This would be very bad news as Userland offer no tools for managing comments. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001968.html Time to switch? Wed, 21 Apr 2004 17:00:51 +0100 I hate having to use a non-WYSIWYG editor to write blog posts and yet I really hate the WYSIWYG editor in <a href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio</a> For one thing in Mozilla I don't get an editing caret which is annoying enough.  But it also has no button for doing <blockquote> (it's not the same as indenting which is done via a styled section) and forces me to use the HTML view which is bad enough but there the cursor often ends up out of sequence with the editing position so you have no idea what's going to happen next.  Finally it cannot handle Radio's <% %> macro delimeters (would that there was another choice of delimiter avaiable but alas that will never happen...) Having been exposed to other blogging tools recently, most notably <a href="http://blog.blogware.com/blog">Blogware</a>, I find myself more and more wanting to trade in Radio for something a bit more modern, more stable, better featured.  I've been using Radio for 2 years and it has basically stood still in that time.  Enough is enough. Not wishing to throw out the baby with the bathwater I'd like an application that builds on what I see as Radio's strengths.  It's not essential but I'd prefer a desktop application. I like the built in newsreader (Radio's reader is still my choice).  I like the upstreaming (if not <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/01/17.html#a1292">Radio's implementation</a> of it)  I like the ability to hack scripts locally but I want a more regular, popular and powerful language than <a href="http://docserver.userland.com/">Usertalk</a> to do it (I no longer willingly grok <a href="http://www.perl.com/">Perl</a> though).  Also, and this is critical, I want a tool which is being developed and where bugs either are, or can be, fixed. Is all this too much too ask?  Any recommendations? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002097.html There has to be a last nail Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:57:44 +0100 After 3+ years of near-regular service <a href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio</a> has now started issuing me warnings about damaged free lists in it's database. So far as I can see I've not lost anything but this kind of thing is just one more reason to get my act together and find a new blogging tool. The main things which make me not want to think about this are:<ol><li>Migrating nearly 2000 posts</li><li>No it's not that simple because I need to edit several hundred of them to fix my crappy HTML</li><li>Breaking a shit load of permalinks</li><li>Or duplicating Radio's all posts in a day with anchors funky permalinks</li><li>Choosing what tool to use anyway damnit!</li></ol> I need a de-inertia ray... http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002914.html Normal service will be resumed (maybe) Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:38:53 +0100 Posting is a little infrequent right now because I'm having some issues with <a href="http://radio.userland.com/">Radio Userland</a>. I've reached the crunch point: finally deciding whether to migrate to Mac and stick with Radio or replace it. I've favoured the last option for a while but not found another package I wanted to migrate to. Yesterday I made a few baby steps on building a replacement by importing my database of about 2000 posts into MySQL and building a small Rails app around them. Although I am somewhat loathe to build my own tool it would allow me to get what I want:<ul><li>desktop solution</li><li>renders a static weblog site that can be uploaded to the site where <a href="http://paolo.evectors.it/">Paolo</a> kindly continues to host it for me</li><li>supports radio's permalink style</li><li>have things my way in terms of tags, rss feeds, and so on</li></ul> I'm not persuaded but while experimenting with a new solution seems less unpleasant than doing the migration I'll probably hack at it until I am certain one way or another. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003042.html Life after Radio Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:23:53 +0100 After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I not only have my entire weblog archive in MySQL with all the entities playing nice (although much of the older HTML needs tidying up somewhat) but also have Rails rendering archive pages to disk which will honour the Radio permalinks. This is actually a fair chunk of the work required for a no-frills weblog. I guess I may be looking at life after Radio after all... http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003045.html Another little mile-stone Sat, 22 Oct 2005 01:25:25 +0100 This evening I figured out how to do <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/gems/test.txt">upstreaming to a Radio RCS server from Ruby</a>. The tricky bits were all the implicit details not covered by the spec. In the end I just threw Ethereal at the problem and watched Radio do it's thing. At this point I can fully render my weblog archives by day, month, year, or everything and I can now upstream to my blog space. Remaining tasks include:<ul><li>a theme</li><li>an editing interface</li><li>implement tagging (<a href="http://dema.ruby.com.br/articles/2005/08/27/easy-tagging-with-rails">acts_as_taggable</a> to the rescue I expect)</li><li>implement a calendar</li></ul>At that point I'll probably call it 1.0 and switch. At the moment it's designated codename: <tt>noradio</tt>. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003052.html Not so ancient history Sat, 22 Oct 2005 10:36:07 +0100 Todd Higgins asks me: <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0101495/2005/10/21.html#a4">Is liveTopics still available?</a> The answer is: yes and no. Back in August I had dinner with <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/">Marc Barrot</a> and he asked me the same question. At that time I gave him an email putting the liveTopics code under the <a href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php">MIT License</a> and gave him my blessing to do what he liked with it. My single caveat was that I didn't want to have to support it. The complication to this is that, along the way, I have lost the last distribution file. It may be on a backup CD somewhere but I'm not hopeful. I have a few root files of uncertain provenance (works in progress) but nothing else. Maybe Marc himself as a copy, or perhaps <a href="http://blog.mathemagenic.com/">Lilia</a> does? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003056.html Curiouser and Curiouser on Rails! Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:45:47 +0000 Okay the weblog is back in action, no longer being published using Radio but now using <a href=\"http://rubyforge.org/projects/squib/\">Squib</a> which is my new open source weblog tool. It's heavily influenced by my 3 years of using Radio: like Radio, Squib is an application that runs on your computer and publishes a weblog to a remote server as a static set of pages (it talks to the Radio Community Server using the RCS upstreaming protocol). Unlike Radio, Squib is written in pure Ruby using the Rails framework and currently clocks in at around 1,000 lines total.Right now it's in pretty rough shape and probably only usable by someone desparate to escape Radio (let's say maybe your copy of Radio kept upstreaming 0-length files) but wanting to keep compatibility with an existing Radio weblog (same permalinks, etc...)Over the next couple of weeks I aim to fix the gaping holes. Source should be available from RubyForge any day now. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00003080.html