John Robb: "Radio is a fully decentralized system. Even better, it provides you with a complete back-up of your weblog on your desktop and the ability to add to your weblog while disconnected. Given that it is decentralized, you can opt to self-host your weblog at your ISP or on your corporate Intranet in under a minute."...

It's not only about centralization vs. decentralization, is about freedom and Content Management Systems.

With a single copy of Radio I'm updating this weblog (which is hosted on a linux server), 3 company k-logs (hosted on another linux server), and weblog I use for a teaching program (hosted on an iMac with RCS). Sure, I could use three different programs to manage all these weblogs (btw: we also develop a CMS that is centralized!) an different servers but, in this case I would not have a Content Management System, but a Totally Messed Up Content System. Try to get this: this very post is appearing at the same time on three different weblogs. This can happen because the CMS is centralized, but it is centralized on my own PowerBook, not on some remote server.

The server on which pages are sitting is not the center of the system, it is just the front end, the center is where the core of the contents is.

Besides, with Radio I can manage my InstantOutline, can collect news and run several useful other tools.

In this wonderful brand new web services world, we have the freedom to run code and store contents just where it's better, and the content management system for my weblogs is better run from my desktop.

Now, it's late, let me take my iPod and go home... but this is another story.

A few days ago I wrote about the benefits of weblogging, here's today's example.

In these days are working on the second stage of beta testing of our new Shared Outlines Radio tool. What we are realizing is that while outlines are a great writing environment, they might not the the best reading environment, especially if several people are writing in the same outline at the same time.

A solution to this might be coloring the text in the outlines (blue text = new stuff, or each user one different color). So far text coloring is not supported in a Radio UserLand, so the alternative could be to make outlines readable in a browser, while using Radio only to edit them.

As you have probably heard by now, Marc Barrot has been doing an excellent job recently with ActiveRenderer, a tool to render cool dynamic outlines in any browser.

I had already got in touch with Marc since he created the espressoCup macro. Just a quick exchange of email messages and within minutes we got an agreement, now SharedOutlines is going to be a much better tool thanks to Marc's code.

Cool, uh?

• Become millionaire by 30 by 35

Hmmmm... Adding one of those 1 pixel transparent gif to all my posts, should let me track where my posts are syndicated with a simple logfile analysis...

It's true, Dave has been trying to convince me to write on my own weblog for a while. I particulary remember him telling me to do so while having a good dinner in Trieste, in Marc Canter's favourite restaurant there (this IS a small world!). To be honest I thought that it required too much time and would not bring much benefits. I was wrong: it does require some time, but there are a lot of benefits.

Now, about thinking in the open: I think that we developers of tools and applications based on UserLand's software should start talking a little bit more between ourselves. Playing a little bit more with the idea of Radio or Frontier as an OS, I'm sure that there are lots of opportunities in this community and probably we can help the whole process. How can UserLand help us more with our development or our marketing? How can we help UserLand to sell more and make even more cool software? Let's just not make UserLand another Microsoft or Apple

InstantOutliners are a great working tool (and SharedOutliners will be even better ;-), but the process needed to check updates of subscribed outlines can be pretty bandwidth intensive. André has probably found an at least partial solution to this problem, and I had a confirmation of this issue again this morning.

To check if an outline has been updated, Radio reads the http headers of the opml file you have subscribed to, checking the size of the file, if the file has changed in size Radio interprets this as a change and downloads the opml file.

Now, this polling process is done using a GET on the file, instead of using the HEAD method. Also if Radio is not reading the contents of a file if the http headers have not changed, it looks like using the GET method triggers the file transfer anyway.

Here's how my network statistics app was showing this morning:

See the spikes? No other app was running except for Radio, and they match the polling process.

After changing the polling code to use the HEAD method, this is what the same utility was showing:

This is totally empirical, but also quite evident. I'm not suggesting how to change your polling script here because most probably UserLand will update it soon and because you could break it :-).

Since we began the discussion about selling our tools for Radio UserLand, what I have been hearing both internally and externally is that "they should cost less than Radio".

At first it made sense to me too, why would anybody pay more for something that is something like a plug-in than the application itself.

Thinking about it, let's try to see this differently: let's say that Radio UserLand is not just an application, but it is something like an operating system. From many points of view, this is what it is, it has APIs to link to, it provides lots of basic features, but it can also be extended to do a lot of other interesting stuff. With Frontier, it's a platform upon many smart developers have started building on.

Now, if considered from this POV, application running on an OS do not necessarily need to cost less than the OS itself, to the contrary, they usually cost more.

This is not to say that we want to charge more on our tools, we have not decided yet, and if people thinks of a price as "appropriate", it's hard to change that feeling just using different metaphores. But still, I don't think that there necessaily need to be such a strict relation between the cost of the platform and the cost of the application.

Windows .Net Server now due in mid-2003 [IDG InfoWorld]

.Net in mid 2003? This what I've been hearing for a while now. Not sure of what this implies, but il looks like we have at least 12 months to lead the revolution before The BigCo will actually start deploying anything.

Now, this could also mean that fellow BigCos will wait until mid 2003 (or later than that, since the are not usually very fast adopting new technologies) before embracing the web services approach.

Apparently all this delay is due to security (or lack of) for the new Microsoft server software. It looks like companies have finally started to consider security an issue, and thus have stopped using IIS which has some quite serious security problems.

During the whole Microsoft trial, one of their main points have been about them leading the development to benefit users, from every POV that I can think of, they are now slowing the development.

• We are at a very early stage of beta testing, so we won't distribute this tool now. Most probably within the next few weeks we'll start a small open beta test starting with highest bidders:-).
• The tool does not let you edit outlines simultaneously: only one editor at the time can change the outline (while all partecipants can read them).
• While at the moment all users must be subscribed to the same RCS server to be able to share outlines, the very next feature on our list is supporting multi-cloud environments. You will still need an RCS server, but you won't have to publish your weblog on that server.
• Most of other features available with Radio outlines are still available, thanks to all the great work done by UserLand.

Testing the first beta of SharedOutlines, the next cool tool from evectors.

In our company we do a lot of web design, and this usually means showing around PhotoShop files. We've been using Radio since the beginning, each designer uploading jpg versions of the sites under construction in their personal weblogs. Today we found another interesting approach.

With the QuickTime plug-in, you can also open PhotoShop files, and you can do that in the browser (if you use MacOS X you need to fix this in the preferences because it's broken in the default install).

So, starting today, our designers are saving all their PhotoShop files inside Radio UserLand/www/layouts/. Since they save frequently, anybody is able to follow the development of a design simply reloading the file in the browser in real-time.

Of course, this is possible because we have our own rcs server on our LAN, otherwise moving 10Mb files around would be a problem.

DaveNet: How to be a revolution. "You can't undermine by trying to dictate the terms, you have to do it by invading at night, slipping in the back door unnoticed. Then when the old folks wake up, it's too damned late."

What do you mean with "old"? 42?

The message was sent from somebody I know, the two related addresses have been extracted from a message which contained both as recipients of a sent message, they belonged to the same domain name, and of course creating the postmaster address was simple. It look like this virus is targeted to corporate users... a very creative approach indeed. Beware of messages from your postmaster.

I have just received something that looks like an interesting evolution in the field of email viruses: the sender apparently is postmaster@evectors.it (in my case a non existant address, but it would make senso for most companies), the title is "Undeliverable mail--"N. 29.03". What is notable is that the body of the message says:

The following mail can't be sent to the real address of a corworker:

From: My email address
To: My coworker address
Subject: N. 29.03
The attachment is the original mail


Follows an attachment named "BENIAMM.bat", that I guess I'm supposed to double click. What is curious is that this thing has been sent to two related addresses, my coworker's and mine, so it cannot have been automatically extracted from somebody else address book.

Or, there is somebody out there who really loves me but not enought to know that I'm a Mac user

This new weblog I needed a testbed to expose bugs in our implementation of the MetaWeblog API, so I did an experiment I've wanted to try for some time. This new weblog tracks NY Times articles as they enter UserLand's content management system, on their way to people's desktops via the news aggregator in Radio. All these articles appear on the Times website, but they can be hard to find unless you know where to look. If the NY Times had a weblog, this is what it might look like. If it becomes popular, I might dress it up with a new template and a better address.  [Scripting News]

It's actually much more readable than the original home page, maybe bacause I'm so used to weblogs that I write also the shopping list from bottom to top. Btw: it looks like anybody can subscribe to the NY Times rss feed from this site now...

Mike's Radio Weblog: "But why RemoteEdit? I didn't realize until now what it was for. "

Mike is right.

We have been calling it RemoteEdit because it is the tool we use to edit remotely templates and directory structures for "IdeaTools" web site. It makes sense because IdeaTools is a server based application, and you use the tool on your computer. It does not make much sense for Radio, since you are actually editing templates locally. Anybody has an idea for a cool new name?

Every day I wake up trying to think something smart to write, because otherwise nobody will link to these pages and I'll slowly fade to oblivion.

But if there's an interesting post, it's instant gratification. In terms of just minutes the number of hits goes up, email messages from a lot of smart people start to get to my in box, and lots of new connections happen incredibly quickly.

Also if I've been reading lots of weblogs for quite some time now, I would have never imagined that writing in one could have been such an interesting and exciting, but addictive, activity.

In the case you are wondering... yes, no smart ideas today .

How appropriate!

While checking the referrals to this site, i noticed that the new espressoCup() macro by Marc Barrot is offering more options to European I/0 users, while jnutella.org is commenting on the google/dictionary/thesaurus post:

Andrew commenting the same post suggests that google is automatically compiling a thesaurus (in library science terms), which is probably the correct term.

What I was trying to notice is the incredible implications that having the power to process data (words) from almost the whole web can have.

Marc also says that he drinks espresso in a glass. You are right, here's the OPML Espresso Glass.

I've been using google as a spell checker for a while. If I'm not sure of the proper speling of a word I run a search with google and most of the time google will reply with "Did you mean: spelling.

So reading in the docs of the new Google's APIs that they are somehow supporting the feature got me somehow more interested.

While checking my referrals page (as any good weblogger constantly does ;), I found that Jake Savin had misspelled my name on his weblog. Click: idea.

Checking my name spelling on google I got the right suggestion.

What this mean is obviously that google is not checking words' spelling against a somehow fixed dictionary, but against words somehow frequently used on the whole web.

Probably somebody could elaborate this further, but while all dictionaries have always been lagging behind real-world usage of words, google is actually registering it in almost real time.

This means that if enough people decide to invent a new word, most probably the word will start going trough the google spell checker. It also means that this system is totally language independent, provided that there are enough web pages in that language.

I agree that if you start searching for your misspelled name on google most probably you should seriously consider some kind of medical help

When I first installed Radio, I did it on my PowerBook: when I'm on the go, I have my PowerBook and thus Radio with me and I can update my weblogs, I/Os and all the rest. BUT, I usually don't bring my PowerBook at home every night, since I have an iMac at home that is enough to check my email and do some light surfing.

This meant that I could not usually update my weblog from home... until now.

Today I moved Radio UserLand folder to my iPod. Since moving Radio is usually painful, I renamed my iPod disk with the same name of my PowerBook HD. Everything works as expected, I'm posting this message from my G4, running Radio from my iPod.

This also means that I can walk to any Mac, plug in my iPod and start blogging in seconds.

Cool, uh?

I've started to think about all this as "Reusable Info".

What is really happening in these days is that new ways to store, distribute and manage information are seeing the light on almost daily bases. All this will have a huge impact on how we work, live and communicate, but it's not yet very clear how.

At evectors we are experimenting every day all these new communication channels, and we try to put some sense in all this from a work environment POV.

Basically what is happening is that every piece of information, every idea, every concept, every document is getting its own url. You can access it and reuse it. All borders between you desktop and the rest of the universe are fading, you can borrow the search capabilities of Google's powerful servers from within your favourite application, or you can read news from the New York Times on the same page containing the news from your co-worker telling you what's up today.

Hmmm, it's going to be interesting... very interesting.

Ken Rawlings: " "Radio's News Aggregator is such a compelling way to read content that there are very very few sites left that I actually surf to daily. Now, with RssDistiller and 5 minutes of my time, I don't even have to go to those. :-)""

Of course this is why we developed the tool: to get rid of all those links to check in the browser toolbar favorities. Now everything is in the aggregator, and I gained 20 pixels worth of screen estate.

markpasc.blog: "Should I be bitter that RssDistiller gets more noise than Stapler? (I am, at times.) Should I have chosen a better name, one that more obviously screams "I TURN STUFF INTO RSS!"? Is it a design and documentation issue? Is it because Stapler isn't pretty like RssDistiller, with its tabbed interface and eVectors' bumblebee colors? Am I wrong that it's difficult to specify what one wants out of a page (ie, how hard is that in RssDistiller)? Was I wrong to have a feeds concept that aggregate sources? Should I reimplement feeds as a special source scraper? Obviously I should figure how to share sources, since RssDistiller does that. I should probably make Stapler not autonumber new feeds and sources. I haven't worked on the refined interface yet (and if I make a radical change to the feeds thing, I shouldn't, yet)."

I don't think that any of us should be bitter while doing a job we like and helping people to work or to express themselves better like we are all doing.

Stapler and RssDistiller are both fine tools, each with its own unique features and unique bugs. We could get together and try to build a better product. Or we could simply continue our development and get inspiration from each other software. Peace, uh?

the issue i found with remote edit was documentation. (i.e. there isn't much.) here's what i found out working with it: [dix: radio blogging] follows a short but very good list of tips, worth checking if you downloaded RemoteEdit

You are right, there is not much documentation for RemoteEdit or RssDistiller yet. This is because they are still in beta version, and not all features are set. The good news is that we are working also on documentation and that by the time we will release version 1.0 of these tools there will be plenty of examples, tips, tricks, FAQs, etc.

Meanwhile, we are offering support to whoever is contacting us via email.

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] From the perspective of the site you are scraping, they get a page view every hour.  In fact, they make more money if you scrape than if you don't (most people don't visit the home page of most news sites 24 times a day).  So, in the near term, they are making more money from the small percentage of the audience that scrapes vs. visits.  Longer term, it makes sense that they offer an RSS feed themselves.  It increases the chances of subscribers clicking on the link to the full story.

It probably also depends on the kind of site you are scraping and the use you do of the rss feed.

If, for example, you are scraping the index of a news site such a newspaper, since all links are pointing to their own stories you are probably creating more traffic for them from clicktroughs.

If you are scraping a weblog-style site (i.e. scripting.com or macintouch.com), since most of the link are pointing to other sites you are taking traffic away from the site.

Then, once you set up the feed you can easily share it with other users on your intranet or also with the rest of the world (I could subscribe to the Boston.com feed that you are generating), thus taking more traffic away from these sites.

If there are still sites out there generating revenues with impressions and click trough, they might not like users scraping their sites.

What they could do to solve the problem from their POV would be generate the feeds themselves, and include banners in the feeds.

I've had several people come up to me or contact me after recent presentations to ask about the concept of news aggregators and their future impact. I still need to write up something about all of this, but when they ask what to look for, I tell them to start looking for the little orange box that says XML on the sites that they visit. In libraryland, that amounts to a few blogs, but that will slowly change. I'd really like to see American Libraries, Library Journal, LII What's New, Library Juice, and other big-time library sites RSS-ify themselves so that they'll appear in my news aggregator, but I know that's a ways off.

It will happen eventually, though. It's exciting to find a new site that interests you and see that little orange box. So imagine how wonderful it is to see a regional newspaper, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina, syndicate their headlines! Yes, check out their Latest Top Headlines and scroll down a bit, looking on the left-hand side. Right now, it's something that is incredibly rare for a professional newspaper's site, but what you're starting at is the future.

"Our headlines, your Weblog." That's the tagline, and what a succinct one it is, too. Congratulations to the Herald-Journal for shifting themselves into their readers' worlds!

[The Shifted Librarian]

Well, you don't necessarily need to wait for them to RSS-ify themselves, you can RSS-ify them on your own if you want. We have developed a Radio Tool that you can install on your copy of Radio that lets you do just this. Check this out

[Radio X Neophyte] I would like to add that RemoteEdit is a great tool for making quick work of enhancing or creating Radio templates. I have been using it for sometime now and I am very pleased with the results! I am running RemoteEdit on Mac OS X with Adobe's GoLive 6.0. I am VERY pleased with my Radio design environment! These tools work well together. Transitioning between Radio and GoLive is seamless. The evectors Team has created a great RadioTool that will greatly enhance the Radio Theme designer's toolkit. If you are looking for a RadioTool that will bridge the gap between you html editor and the Radio environment, check it out today! Thanks to Paolo, Simone and the rest of the team for a great resource!

Whew... this is why I like my job . Thanks Robert

Thanks also to all the people who downloaded the tool and have sent feedback. We have found and fixed a nasty bug that prevented templates from opening in some occasions using Windows. Update the tool to get the bug fix.

Very good question!

Remote Edit is a Radio tool that we developed at evectors that can be used to edit Radio themes using a standard html editor such as Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Foront Page(continues...)

Bill Seitz had different expectations about what an Instant Outliner would be.

My personal opinion -- the reason he hasn't seen the type of system he describes is that it isn't implementable.[Scripting News]

Uh... not that I'm claiming that we can do something impossible, but as we started using I/Os at evectors we felt the need for something similar to what Bill Seitz describes. We are calling this Project Outlines, to distinguish them from current Personal Outlines.

We have started investigating a few ways to get a shared Outline, that is, an outline that can be changed by more than one person, and have started working on a tool.

If we can get this tool to work properly, you'll get the news here first .

Sir Winston Churchill

The Quotations Page: Quotations by Author - Sir Winston Churchill

Quite appropriate in these days...

It took about one hour to do, going from PhotoShop to Radio via GoLive and RemoteEdit.

Remote Edit is a tool that we developed to create Radio templates. It's still in beta (actually I found a small bug while using it), but it works.

Once you have clicked the "Edit home page template" in the Remote Edit panel, it's just a matter of cutting and pasting between PhotoShop and GoLive.

Here's how this page looks in GoLive.

The Shifted Librarian: "I'm going to have to give Paolo's setup some serious consideration to see if it (or something similar) could work at SLS. I don't know that it would work for the extranet, but perhaps it could be one piece of the puzzle for the intranet. Question: what languages would I have to learn to truly understand Paolo's diagram and to be able to tweak it to do what I want at SLS? SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, UserTalk...?"

It depends on how much you need to tweak it. Once you have set up the server doing all the Intranet and RCS stuff, you have almost everything that I described up and running.

You already know that working with Radio and RCS does not require much programming skills.

If you need to edit the intranet style and layout, there's a tool (part of the IdeaTools license) that lets you edit all templates in any wysiwyg editor.

For further tweaking, all input/output in ideaTools is made via xsl scripts, that are pretty simple to handle if you have some programming skills.

Of course, if you need to really go under the hood, UserTalk is the language behind the scenes.

Blow Out a Candle for OS X. Last weekend was the first anniversary of Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X. No one noticed, except one Mac fan in rural Ohio, who held a birthday party for his beloved operating system. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

So this means that I've been using MacOS X for about one year. You might have heard this elsewere, but this OS is totally cool! I just opened my terminal window and typed uptime, I got

3:37PM up 8 days, 19:05, 3 users, load averages: 1.63, 1.22, 1.11

Now, can you imagine not having to reboot for some crash for 8 days in a row with Os9? 8 days is not a record, I don't remember why I rebooted. That I recall I've had only 3 kernel panic crashes in the last year.