Wednesday, October 22, 2003

The Snail Moves Another Inch! Footage at Eleven! Wahoo! Major breakthrough! I've been able find a way to get my Radio weblog uploaded to my Linux box, despite the headaches with trying to get the filesystem upstream driver to work. Now I know that I'm not the only one. Bah! I'm realllly frustrated with Radio right now. But I can't just abandon it yet. My annual license billing is probably about to come due, and that's a pity, but I'll keep up with it at least another year. Radio's underpinnings are bittersweet. Radio is a great example of how a well-designed system (i.e., Frontier) can evolve to meet ongoing needs. And there's power in it too. The News aggregator, the web services, the upstreaming. Cool stuff. But there's a big cost. What Radio offers in power and robustness it takes away in usability and learning curve. I'm upset that I need to know so much about the internals of the product (UserTalk script, Radio's complex database layout) to customize it the way I would like (Yeah, I really bet they were thinking of me in particular when the built it). And it takes a good deal of digging to find out how to do quite a few not-so-unreasonable things. It was weeks before I figured out that pages that talked about "installing a tool file" were not referring to the web interface. I mean--come on--how hard would it be to PLACE A SHORTCUT TO THE Radio GUI IN THE STINKING PROGRAM MENU. I stumbled across it by accident when I was exploring the right-click menu on the taskbar icon. Later, I found that I was not the only one. That's lame. So far, I've only been able to get my Radio weblog files to my Linux box by copying the "rendering" folder's contents to my Linux Samba share. At the same time, it's not totally fair to bash it. I think Radio has the "cool, I can publish a post in 5 minutes out of the box" bit down pretty well. But then users start to want more. Try uploading pictures. It's clunky. Who are they helping by having a dedicated folder that you copy pictures into and they magically get spirited off to (maybe) the right location? Oh, and forget trying to control filename and location of the picture in the actual web content. Or the whole local vs. cloud links when rendering. Aargh! Ya know, I actually *do* have an ongoing, comprehensive list somewhere about my pet peeves with Radio. I think I will honor the irony (both the fact that I'm using Radio to post my peeves about it, *and* the fact THAT I STILL CONTINUE TO USE IT!) by posting a story on the topic. The thing that really gets me though, is how many others like Michael Boyink and Dale Lature at Theoblogical (I'll post more names and links later) have grown weary of the Radio hassles and abandoned it altogether for Movable Type or a custom solution. Maybe I have more of a tolerance for mental pain (and that's not bragging, it's actually sad). I have to say, I'm personally leaning toward Keith Devens' approach of creating his own CMS complete with bells and whistles. The problem right now is that with trying to have a life and cope with my ADD and all that stuff at once, I'm having trouble keeping up with a blog that requires little to no programming (at least just for posting alone). Ultimately, my work on objects and metadata is beginning to merge with my work on Content Mangagement topics. I believe that I will follow the example that Radio has so aptly demonstrated (hey, it's a great pioneer of the conceptual)--run a local web server type app that offers a local interface and allows things to be rendered and pushed (I can't say "upstreamed" right?) wherever you like. Right now it looks like my efforts will be a mix of ASP.NET website widgets and local publishing applications (rich and thin client). Nuf said. The cool thing is that xagronaut.com actually has content now. Sweet. Update: I'm still on the trail about the fileSystem upstream driver problem. It looks like Roland might have found something.

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