Category: Tools

Blogging to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon

Blogging to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon.

Chris Brody shared the following tip in our newsgroups about posting to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon:

RadioExpress allows you to post content from any web page to your blog:
http://www.newsisfree.com/blog/archives/000430.html

Once installed and configured as you want, add the following command line to
FeedDemon’s blog publishing tools:

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/radioExpress?t=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$&u=$ITE
M_LINK$&n=$ITEM_TITLE$

Note that I don’t use Radio UserLand, so I haven’t tried this myself.

[Nick Bradbury]

I have tried this and it does work. I do want to go in and tweak the RadioExpress bookmarklet a bit, but this does make it possible to use FeedDemon with Radio.

feedexplorer from Diego Doval

feedexplorer.

Over the weekend I released clevercactus feedexplorer, a simple free app to browse the data from the Share Your OPML commons (thanks Dave for making this resource available!) and choose feeds that you find interesting, then allowing you to save them into OPML files that can be imported into a news aggregator. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and other OSes.

Here is the page with installation instructions and a short user guide.

If you can, take a moment to read the user guide as it explains how to change the sorting, perform searches, etc (Btw, I think the UI is pretty self-explanatory, but reading the doc should leave little doubt as to how to do something :)).

Note: if you have any problems with the installation, please take a moment to read the installation page, as it answers common questions and problems.

[d2r]

More interesting bootstrapping going on around Dave’s most recent experiment

Let’s get p2p about RSS share your feeds.

Let’s get p2p about RSS — share your feeds.

Blog pioneer and gadfly Dave Winer has created “A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, taxonomy”. Sign up and share your RSS feeds with the world — and find out who subscribes to yours. For example: find out who subscribes to Smart Mobs

Thanks, Dave!

(Via boingboing)

[Smart Mobs]

“Dave” is innovating again and that always makes things interesting. If you’re curious, here’s some of the folks who subscribe to McGee’s Musings.

Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks.

Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks. It used to be that I shlepped a power-strip (sometimes two!) with me when I went on the road, because they haven't built the hotel-room yet that has enough plugs to charge my entire device array, not least because everything that fits in my pocket comes with a charger whose transformer brick eats two or three outlets.

Then I discovered USB and FireWire charging — and more specifically, Zip-Linq retractable cables. Instead of plugging everything into the wall, you attach your device to a little bon-bon-sized retractable wire that goes into one of your computer's ports and plug your computer into the wall. This is especially handy if you're travelling overseas, since it's just not practical to buy enough Euro-220 adapters to get your devices to talk to the local alternating current. Your laptop probably has an international power-supply requiring only a plug adapter, and once that's attached to the wall, you've got know-quantity/know-interface power for all your gizmos.

Before I leave on my next trip overseas tomorrow, I will slip into my pocket a Firewire cable (for my little backup harddrive, which I yanked out of an old PowerBook and put into a tiny enclosure, so that I can back up every day on the road), a cellphone charger (one for my US Motorola iDen phone, one for my European Nokia phone — and cables are available for most manufacturers: Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Kyocera, Sanyo) and a PDA charger (Palm, iPaq).

Rael crashed on my sofa this weekend and pointed out that Zip-Linq is now shipping a wall-adapter, so that if your laptop is unavailable, you can plug this into the socket and still charge up.

The best part is that at $10-20 these wires are actually cheaper than the manufacturers' chargers for the most part. Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Interesting to see what kinds of things are possible when you start to think in terms of what you can expect to find in the environment that you can take advantage of.

ActiveRenderer 2.0 beta in progress

Marc Barrot is testing a beta of version 2 of his activeRenderer tool for “Radio” weblogs. I've been using version 1.4 for quite a while here and I'm now testing version 2. Expect to see some minor glitches in formatting here as I figure out how to take advantage of version 2's more extensive use of stylesheets.

Lots of nice new features.

Personal Wiki PIM – Update I

Personal Wiki PIM – Update I.

I’ve been using MoinMoin as my personal information management platform for the last several weeks. This had several goals. First, I needed to get my growing collection of documents under control. Secondly, I really wanted to dive into wikis a lot deeper and this gives me a great chance to do just that.

So here is a brief update about what I have found so far.

  1. I am amazed at how useful the auto linking and document templating is for PIM type functions. It is really a snap to put some rudimentary organization on the material and then let it develop from there.

    I was initially worried that what I needed was more structured database style storage for contact information and such, but doing it freeform doesn’t seem to have anty real disadvantages that I have found yet.

  1. MoinMoin has a pretty cool regex based query tool that lets you collect links to other pages. I have made good use of this to create a very low maintenance set of navigation pages so my info is only one to two clicks away. Very Handy.

  1. Wikis really help me write … all the fuss about how it really is designed for writers not readers is apparently true, at least in my case. I find it easier to write in my wiki than in MS Word. Perhaps less clutter? More focus on the words?

I have also made use of editmoin which allows me to use vim to edit my documents which may contribute to the ease of writing somewhat. Here is an Infoworld article noting that writers tend to work in minimal writing tools. Maybe that is partly what I’ve experienced.

  1. I have had to spend sometime on buffing up the css stylesheets. This is mainly because a lot of my formal documents need to get emailed out to customers and I have been converting them to PDF and sending them that way. This required some adjustment to the styles.

[Note to MoinMoin developers: It would be cool if the print preview used a different stylesheet… Then I could highlight uncreated WikiWords in the regular view but not the print view …]

  1. Finally, I am using JPluck to sync the content of my Wiki to my Palm Pilot. That way all the info I need is always at my fingertips. It took some adjustments to the spidering controls to get it to focus only on what I wanted, but it has worked out very well.

So far this has been extremely successful. More reports as events warrent 😉

[Ed Taekema – Road Warrior Collaboration]

Here’s a perfect example of why Ed’s blog is in my subscription list. This is excellent perspective on similar experiments I’ve been trying to get some traction on.

Google gaffe on blogging tools – old style marketing collides with web reality?

Seth Dillingham posted. When I first posted that I thought it was just a repurposing-DMOZ-problem, so it was a question of how Google looked, not anything they had actually done. But then Seth Dillingham posted a pointer showing that Radio UserLand is actually on the DMOZ list for weblog tools, so Google modified the list to take Radio out. This is surprising, and imho, requires an explanation. Did they modify it? If so why? And do they modify search results to favor their products and services? This is scary stuff. [Scripting News]

I’m inclined here to view this as a case in point of “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” (Hanlon’s Razor). Now the stupidity in question may likely be that of some techno-challenged marketing type who still insists on viewing the universe through a lens of “customer as couch potato,” where this sort of tweak could and would work because anybody who might catch the “error” would have no effective way to communicate to the masses of other couch potatos out there. Ironic that the error is about the very tools that are continuing the shift in power from organizations to people.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this mistake gets corrected and whether the explanation will be rooted in a classic couch potato marketing mindset or something else.