Your 30 day trial subscription has ended
So my trial version of Radio expired today, meaning I've been blogging with it for 30 days. I thought this would be a good time to discuss what I like and don't like about it. Prior to Radio I had about the world's most pathetic blog over at blogger.com. I rarely posted to it, and now I suspect it was for two reasons. First, it was kind of a pain. Blogger.com does a nice job actually, but posting wasn't something integrated with my daily life. Second, Blogger was a pretty isolated enviroment - no referer logs for example, so it felt like posting into the void. Within a few days of starting my Radio Blog I felt like I was joining a community - I get automatic updates of what other people say, can check the ego^H^H^Hreferer logs to see how people get to my site (like the guy who was looking for naked Janie Porche pictures :), and can check the top 100 to see how popular other blogs are. In some ways it's like browsing the web in 1994 - you can go from blog to blog to blog and discover all kinds of interesting things.
Radio brings together a set of elements that has made it more or less indispensable for me now. I spend dramatically less time cruising sites like Slate or Salon these days. The elements of Radio I like best are.
- Posting is easy - The posting interface really is very easy to use (though editing in "Source" mode could be better). My only gripe is that the little editing window I'm currently typing into is too small for many posts, works erratically with the midlle mouse wheel (which argualby is IE's fault and not Radio's) and it has a few bugs (See below)behaves somewhat erratically with the middle mouse wheel.
- Referer logs - Maybe I've just been living in the dark ages, but I've found referer logs to be tremendously interesting and useful. Not to mention fun. Sometimes its obvious in the logs that someone linked to my page from an email they got at Yahoo! or Hotmail - I can't help but wonder what the email said :).
- Navigation - I find Radio to be pleasant to use for most things. I never really find myself fighting the UI. It would be pretty nice if "Referers" were a top-level menu option - maybe I should just link there directly off my page.
- Ease of RSS subscription - I love being able to just click on the coffee mug and subscribe to an interesting blog in one step. It's telling that I feel annoyed now when I see a blog that doesn't have that button :)
- Ease of customizing templates - I will probably never learn much more about the Radio Scripting language but my home page was easy to set up. I have noticed that my blog looks like lots of other people's blogs, but right now I fin it hard to care too much. Given that I am a closet photoshop wonk I may someday have a shot at redesigning it, who knows...
Overall Radio has been great. It does everything I want it to and some things I didn't know I wanted but am now addicted to. It's not perfect however - there are some annoyances,including:
- *No way to manually update News! This one drives me nuts. I use Radio on a laptop. It's not all the time and often I have to use dial-up internet. When I open it up in the morning or dial in from the airport or something I want to be able to tell Radio to please go fetch news now. As it is I set up Radio to fetch news on startup and just restart Radio when I want to refresh. This (combined with criticism 2 below) means I'm unsure on a dialup just when Radio is finished upating.
- Asynchronous Operations are a little too invisible - I love that Radio does so much in the background, but wish there was a page to go to that would show what Radio is up to right now. Just a little blip on the status bar or something would be great. It's disconcerting to just never know until I look on the Events page.
- Radio does not start in a new browser window - Double-clicking the Radio taskbar icon lauches radio in some random IE window. More than once I've found a site, double-clicked radio so I could link to it, then got confused when the site's not up anymore.
- Post & Publish? I enabled "three buttons" under prefs so I can let a post brew before publishing it, but if I "post" without "publishing" there doesn't seem to be a UI element to alert me to that fact. If I Post without publishing it would be nice to have a "publish" button by the entry.
- Buggy html editor. If I enter a link for some text and then try to edit the link later the editor gets confused. And Ctrl-Z (undo) is just broken - for instance if I accidentally paste in some text with Ctrl-V then press Ctrl-Z the editor doesn't delete the text back out.
- Browsing RSS updates - I love having the RSS upates come in but the presentation of them feels very 1.0 to me. It would be pretty cool to browse them NNTP style like say Forte Agent. (in fact it should be pretty easy to literally convert RSS feeds in NNTP and feed them to Agent). I've thought about looking at other RSS browser tools, but I really like just being able to click-and-post, and using an external tool wouldn't let me do that. At the very least I really would like a button like Hotmail has that selects all the checkboxes on the page with one click. I sometimes dread subscribing to a new blog, knowing that I'm gonna have to go click all those checkboxes.
- Multiple blogs? - It might be nice to maintain several independent blogs in different places. Radio seems geared toward only maintaining a single blog. Categories help but what if I want a music blog on a different server than my professional blog? Seems easy enough to fix [though it might increase pressure on the poor userland server that provides server space].
- Subscription bug? - Maybe this is a well-known UI bug. If I type the name of an rss feed into the subscription page and press the "Enter" key...nothing happens. I have to click the button with the mouse.
- Flakey Comments - Hey what do I want for free? The comment server at http://radiocomments.userland.com/ seems to be down as much as it is up.
Overall I'm having a great time with Radio, so I sent Dave his 40 bucks and expect to be using it for some time to come...
8:59:39 AM 
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