Recently in Radio Userland Category

Paul Beard will do doubt mutter the West Coast equivalent of "duh!" when he reads this, but since I moved this weblog to my own box and can look at the web server logs, I'm discovering a number of bad links in items I've published over the last year. Not dead links - links that were once valid, but no longer are - but links that were incorrectly constructed in the first place.

When I was using Radio and hosting with Userland, I never saw the logs, and I was blissfully ignorant.

Of course, it was my fault that these links were bad in the first place; I published the items but never bothered to check them after they were published. As my friend John Sampson says, "Your gun, your bullet, your foot."

I know there are things that aren't right yet on this site. Part of that is caused by the way I moved over from Userland: I used wget to fetch a copy of all my pages from Userland (attempting to fix local links along the way), and published a copy of those pages on my new site. I then told radio to add a Meta Refresh tag to all my pages at Userland, directing them to the same URL at my new site. The result is that people see who hit my my old Radio pages see the same pages on the new box. But as I've pointed out, there were problems with some of the links originally, and I've added to them with the move.

What I really want is for the old URLs to work if people change radio.weblogs.com to weblog.bluepenguin.com in the URL. Over time, the next step will be to put redirects in place, redirecting from the the Radio-formatted pages in the old paths to the same content published from Movable Type. If I'm willing to dig into mod_rewrite again, I can probably make it all work in a couple of lines in my httpd.conf.

Now that Mozilla 1.0 has been released, one of the things that's standing in the way of using it fulltime is the the fact that Radio's nice WYSIWYG HTML editor only works in Internet Explorer.

This is annoying not only the PC, but on the Mac as well, because even IE for the Mac doesn't support this technology.

Anyone have a nice solution that would work for the Mac and PC in Mozilla without paying more money? I know there's at least one commercial Java solution, but this feels like something that UserLand should step up to.

Found this great little tool while surfing over at Radio Userland's Discussion page. It's very similar to Blogger's "blog this!" bookmarklet (a bookmarklet is a javascript button that gets added to your IE toolbar). While browsing, if  you see an item you want to add to your blog, just highlight the text you want to post, click "RadioExpress" on your toolbar, and it pre-fills the title, link and text boxes with the right text.

Adding content to your blog couldn't be easier. Nice!

Here's a description of how to do a monthly archive page (all stories) in Radio.

CSS-Based Radio Theme

Currently Subscribed To, the Sequel

"We've done a bit more tweaking to Jon's currently subscribed to, and think that we've got it pretty much where we want it.

Find the tweaked-up script here .

Here's what we've changed:

• Just a little bit of the table formatting.  Obviously, you are free to tinker with that as much as you please.
  
• More important: we noticed that occasionally our subs() script would get hosed by the addition of a new channel.  All of a sudden, our macro would fail, and we'd get a bizarre error message:
  
  "Can't evaluate the expression because the name 'channeltitle' hasn't been defined."

Turns out that the error was a genuine one -- but in the RSS feed, not in the script.  We haven't kept careful track of RSS version numbers, and don't know the schema well enough to get haughty about it, but apparently some people are putting feeds out there that don't include the channeltitle element.  Solution: just wrap the code that addresses the channeltitle element in an if that makes sure channeltitle is defined." [The Boulder Inquisition]

If you've looked on the right at all, you've noticed that I've had this error message on my site for quite some time now. I'll have to give this one a shot to see if it fixes the problem.