Gadgetopia

Radio UserLand Fact Sheet: Here's a good look at the voodoo that is Radio Userland. It explains most of the features, and it's even written in the outliner tool that confused me so much when I tried to use it.

I installed Refer from Textism a few weeks ago, and it's awfully interesting to see where all your visitors are coming from. Something else I find interesting are entries like this: 127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/news This is the referrer of someone monitoring the site in Radio Userland. Userland runs locally on port 5335, ...

Radio UserLand : What is Radio UserLand?: I always feel like I'm missing out on a party when I read about Radio Userland. I flirted with it for a few weeks once, but I shied away because (1) it wasn't designed to have titles for entries (perhaps a stupid excuse), ...

Scripting News "On Tuesday, July 15, UserLand Software transferred its copyright in the RSS 2.0 spec to Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. This addresses one of the major concerns about RSS 2.0, that it was published by one of the competitors in the RSS application ...

Interesting things are happening at UserLand. John Robb has left, and Dave Winer is hinting that big changes are coming. Two theories abound: (1) they will open source some or all (Frontier, Manila, Radio) of their products, or (2) they will be acquired. With Google's purchase of Blogger some months ...

As good a time as any: Dave Winer announced today that the kernel of Manila and Radio the object database code will be open-sourced sometime in the next few months. To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure ...

Weblog Links: Part 1 The Impermanence of Permalinks: Some good thoughts about links in blogging, and how you get tied to both your domain name and your permalink structure. "This happened recently with a well-known weblogger, John Robb. When John left his old employer, Userland, his Userland-hosted weblog was ...

This is an excellent article at InformationWeek about the blogging trend and how blogs can be useful inside a company for things like project and knowledge management. Interestingly, UserLand popped up again: "John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software Inc., which develops blogging technology, envisions individual workers ...

The write stuff: Radio Userland wins another comparison. I swear I'm missing out here. (Other than that morsel, however, the article is pretty lightweight. Focuses only on hosted platforms.)

Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books: "Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved." ...

The time for my custom-built blogging app is over, I think. This site runs off a PHP/MySQL-based app that I wrote, but I'm tired of dealing with it. It's stable and everything, but to get to the functionality that, say, MoveableType offers would be more work than I'm interested in ...

The Blog Herald: Yahoo! to buy Blog hosting company "....Yahoo! is set to launch into blogging based on the blog service it appears to be running in Korea (but no one is sure as its in Korean except the logo: Yahoo Korea Blog) ignores the recent history of Yahoo! and ...

A couple of interesting things about Google's GMail in this article: FIrst, and not all that surprising, is that GMail is running on Apple Xserve hardware, which is something I'd heard before (reported here earlier.) I'd be interested to find out if they're actually using OS X on them. Another ...

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: Here's an awfully interesting attempt that succeeds in defining just what a "weblog" is. It's written by Dave Winer, who should know since he founded Userland. "At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying 'I ...

I just pulled a log file for the last week and cranked up Webalizer. It took me 30 minutes or so to screen out all the spiders I could find and all IP addresses that might be someone associated with this site, but after finally getting some clean stats, the ...

How about Microsoft Access as a client-side content management tool? After playing around with Radio UserLand and CityDesk, I'm finding more and more utility in a client-side apps. They're responsive, they don't need to be connected (great for laptops or dial-up), and you can do a lot more with a ...

WriteTheWeb - What is a k-log?: John Robb is one of the founders of UserLand (I still think I'm missing out). This is an article from last year where he discusses "K-logs" essentially the use of blogs for knowledge management: "...K-Log features like subscriptions let you as an employee ...

When I was deciding whether or not to move off my custom-built blogging system, I flirted briefly with Radio Userland. What I really liked about that software was that it was a desktop app. I know that that's verboten in our Web-based world, but it was really handy having ...

Neil at PDFMoto and I have been talking about software development, and the differences between the big, enterprise packages, and software from smaller companies. He made a great point, and gave me permission to reprint it: "Like so much software that seems very simple, under the hood PDFMoto is extraordinarily ...

Blogging systems have always confused "posts" and "pages." We've talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive "post" and an "eternal" page? At what point does a "post" get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost two ...

What's the difference between a blog post and an "article" or a "story"? By those terms, I mean content that isn't as ephemeral as posts that hit the site every 15 minutes. Blogs are, by definition, transient they're time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples ...