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Permanent link to archive for Monday, January 14, 2002. Monday, January 14, 2002

Well ladies and gentlemen, it was another day sipping from the firehose. I got a lot of work done, between phone calls and reviewing buglists. I got the Radio-Manila and Radio-Blogger connection working on my machine. Murphy-willing it will be released tomorrow. I decided to do it the clean way and added a callback that hooks into the publishing event, this is more efficient and more immediate and opens up opportunities for developers to hook other neat gadgets into the content flow. We also added a callback so developers can hook into Post events as well. I've never been so exhausted from work, but still am very excited about what's happening in our little corner of the galaxy. Thanks to everyone for the good vibes. Still diggin! 

We also started the endgame today for Frontier 8. We've got a nice little easter egg in there. No comment.  

Hey it works with Blogger now too. Heh that was fast. The power of open interfaces. 

OK, I've got the user interface done for the Manila-Blogger bridge tool for Radio 8. It works with Manila, now I have to test it with Blogger.  

Steven Vore transcribed Al Pacino's Inch By Inch speech. 

Microsoft: "The Microsoft Office XP Web Services Toolkit brings the power of XML Web services to Office XP by enabling developers to use the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) Business Registry or the URL to a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file to reference XML Web services in Office XP solutions directly from within the Visual Basic Editor." 

Cause for hope that Radio runs on Unix under WINE. 

NY Times: "Signs of a rebound appear in the high-tech heartland." 

Steve Zellers: "The thing I've always liked about Dave's software is that it has good defaults." 

JY to the rescue! He found the stuff about XML-RPC from this year in 1998 on archive.org. Nice. Nice. Nice. I like the part where I say "We don't have a DTD yet, we will soon." Heh heh. It's even worse than it appears. 

Google has already scanned radio.weblogs.com. 

OK, what's the number one glaring hole in Radio 8 (aside from the bugs and glitches, which we're working on after spending much of the weekend overloading on excitement and sleeping)? It doesn't connect to Manila. It will. I'm working on a Tool that mirrors your posts to Manila sites. I have it working here. Now here's a heads-up to developers of other centralized blogging tools like Manila. We're using the Blogger API. That means it will also work with Blogger, naturally, and any other centralized blogging tool that supports the API.  

I wish my scanner worked so I could draw a picture. On left would be Radio in a circle. In the middle would be a circle for the Blogger API. On the right side would be a series of circles for Blogger, Manila, Greymatter, MovableType, Drupal, Slash, whatever -- centralized blogging tools that support the Blogger API. There would be an arrow connecting the Blogger API circle to each of centralized tools. The arrow would be in gray for each tool that doesn't currently support the Blogger API. They all will eventually, of course.  

Rob Fahrni -- used Visio to render my diagram. Thanks! 

venndiagram.com runs on a Mac, with Filemaker, Clip2Gif and Frontier 4.2.3. 

On this day in 1998 we broke through on XML-RPC. Unfortunately most of the pages got redirected to this page, and I haven't been able to find the source for the original site. I wrote a DaveNet piece on the event, but it doesn't say a lot. What I think happened is that we got Frontier on Windows and Mac to communicate using XML as the encoding and HTTP as the transport. As this matured it caught Bob Atkinson's eye at Microsoft, we worked together, added two things that turned out to be very important (structs and arrays), and later in 1998, on April 4, XML-RPC was hatched, and two years later SOAP. 

9:07AM: Outage appears to have cleared. Maybe not. 

I'm experiencing some kind of outage. Can't get through to MSBC, NY Times, can get through to Google, but it's very slow. Can't get through to my own sites. Mail is working perfectly. Conclusion, some router somewhere is fried, not on our LAN. The outage appears to be clearing now, slowly. I am able to get through to some sites but they're very slow. And as you can see I can update SN, but it's hit or miss, usually miss. 

I've read some complaints that SN is focused on Radio 8 right now. What can I do? This is what's going on in my life. It could be that our world changed permanently on Friday night. It could be that yours did too. I've been working since 1976 (no typo) to create a product like Radio 8. And it's not just the product that I'm covering, it's the times too. A few years ago if we had shipped this product hardly anyone one would have noticed. Too much other stuff going on. Now a product like Radio 8 can stand out, lots of people are looking for the next thing to do. For some, this is it. 

VersionTracker picks up Radio 8. Thanks! 

ICANN Weblog: "I'm not ready to put 'find me on Google' on my business card in place of my e-mail address and domain name." 

Ray Ozzie: "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system." 

Reminder to users of MSIE/Mac, there's a shareware INIT that works around the performance problem that MSIE has when accessing a server on the same machine (ie Radio 8). 

About those XML buttons 

You'll see white-on-orange XML buttons on almost all Radio weblogs, and on other sites around the Internet that support a really simple syndication format called RSS. This is the main format that Radio understands and produces. Another Mobius Strip thing. We invented this format in collaboration with Netscape. Our work started in 1997. Anyway they're there for a reason. When you see a white-on-orange XML button it means "this site can be a feed for Radio's news aggregator." Here's how you access it.

1. Click on the button to open the XML file in your browser.

2. In the browser's address bar, select the URL, copy it to the clipboard.

3. In Radio 8, go to this page. (Radio 8 must be running for that URL to work.)

4. Click in the text box near the top of the page. Paste the URL you copied in step 2.

5. Click on the Add button.

If all goes well you'll see the source appear in the list of channels that you're subscribed to, and now every hour when it does its scan it will show you the new items in that feed on your News Aggregator page. (Another link that only works if Radio 8 is running.)

Here's a page that's updated every hour with 100 white-on-orange XML buttons.

Here's another app that does wonderful things with RSS.

Here's a mail list that focuses on curating and evangelizing RSS.

NewsIsFree, which I wrote about yesterday, produces lots of feeds, in RSS.

Note to Lawrence: Please make this a Howto on the Radio site.

Philosophy 

Kimro Staken: "I'm also thinking about writing a more full featured app called BlogFront that would replace most of the Radio web interface. I know it kind of violates the philosophy behind Radio but I really prefer a native interface and the Cocoa environment is a great way to build one."

Comment: It does not violate the philosophy behind Radio. Emphatically. Radio supports XML-RPC and SOAP precisely so that you can use other apps to interface to it (and vice versa). That's why it was such a boon for us and our users when Apple baked-in support for SOAP and XML-RPC into Mac OS X. Choice is the result of open interfaces, and also the reason for open interfaces.

No locked trunks. Use Radio 8 because it's the best choice. Your choice.

     

Last update: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 at 6:20 AM Eastern.

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