Yesterday when everyone was oohing and aahing about Dave Sifry’s Moveable Type hack to show related stories using the Google API, I thought “that’s nice … hmmm … it shouldn’t be hard to do that in Radio. I’ll try to knock that up at the weekend.”
Jake’s beaten me to it.
Now to retitle all the posts that don’t bring back good results! And read all the interesting relating articles that I haven’t seen before!
I’ve spent most of today trying to get Radio to output XHTML. This is decidedly non-trivial, and I still haven’t managed it. Most of it was quite straight-forward editing of the default templates, but there are a variety of things that I can’t manage to control.
Most of the images that get inserted (the coffee mug, XML button etc) don’t have the empty element closing slash. I could theoretically replace these calls with explicit links, but that doesn’t seem to be the correct approach.
More seriously, each post listed has 3 spurious <P> tags after it. Trying to work out how to fix this led to an interesting voyage through the Radio macro system. To play with it, I decided firstly to rewrite the recentPosts macro (mainly because I didn’t like the US-centric date format!)
I’m sure there’s a sensible way to find the source code of the built-in macros, but I couldn’t find one, so I ended up creating a page with a call to the macro omitting the brackets – which dumps the source of the macro in your page, rather than executing it. This doesn’t always render well, but in this case it was fairly straightforward.
Editing it, however, was a highly frustrating experience. If I made the smallest mistake in the code (e.g. not realising that you often need a space before an opening bracket) the whole thing would stop working and give me a decidedly non-helpful error. [Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "myRecentPosts" hasn't been defined.]
It may have been easier if I could bring myself to code in Radio’s inbuilt script editor, but I was having a hard enough time adjusting to the language syntax without having to try to work out how to write it in an outliner as well! I eventually discovered that if you used the Quick Script editor it would at least show you where your errors were…
But I eventually got it working, and went in search of the macro which inserts the blog entries one by one. This seems to be radio.weblog.render (), but that doesn’t contain the offending tags.
So now I’m lost.
Ick.
When I write a weblog entry, Radio “knows” what id it’s going to store that post as in its internal database.
If you already have an entry with that ID, it clobbers it.
Well, it sort of merges the two. Any field that is filled in in your ‘new’ post, will overwrite any in the ‘old’ post. But if, for example, you don’t add a link for your new post, but your old one had one, then your new post will keep that link.
I think I’ve repaired it all now…
Now supported: If we can persuade existing weblog authors to insert this one line of code, and then get it into the default templates of Radio, Manila, and Movable Type, and we could make news aggregation an order of magnitude easier.
Radio doesn’t seem to mind too much if you change the date of posts. It gets very confused though if they end up being out of order (a post with an earlier ID has a later date). In that case the calendar doesn’t update properly, and entries of individual days go weird. Thankfully you can edit the IDs as well – and they don’t have to be consecutive. I can now gradually go about adding historic posts…
Update: Yick. It seems to keep an internal counter though, so Radio wanted to make this #63, even though I go up to #2320 now (I tried numbering based on date so I could follow what I was doing). I think I’ll have to hack every post I make until I catch up, and can reinstate them all back to a normal consecutive flow.
Scott Johnson is not a moron. I must be. I had exactly the same problem as him, but never solved it. As I said to Dave Winer at the time: “I’m obviously missing something really obvious here…”
But, I’ve changed my mind. It’s not at all obvious. “Choose the Open command from the File menu in the Radio application”. I never dreamt that “the Radio application” has to be launched through right-clicking in your status tray. I had noticed the Radio icon, but double clicking it merely brought a webbrowser to the fore. Like Scott I assumed that the Radio application was browser based. And I just could not find that menu. Unlike Scott I gave up.
I tried subscribing to the help list first, but it’s terrible. Every mail comes from the same address, and the first 30 character of the subject are taken up by “[radio-userland] New Message: “. In my mail client that means I only get about 5-10 characters of real subject line context. And each message is really just to let me know that “a new message was posted” to the help board, so there’s no “In-Reply-To” headers, or anything that will let my mail reader thread the messages.
Basically the list is unreadable.
So, then I gave up.
I suspect most users won’t even get as far as I did. There is indeed a fundamental conceptual disconnect with how Radio portrays itself.
I like outliners, and wanted to find the one in Radio – but not enough to work through this.
After watching from afar for quite some time, Dave Winer has persuaded me to start one of these up, by asking, in response to an email, that I post my comments somewhere he can point to and get a discussion going.
As I’d already downloaded a copy of Radio a while back, but just never gotten around to installing it, I decided this would be the easiest way. So, here I am.
Now all I have to do is find the outliner…
