Status-Q

Sometimes I put things in here just so I know where I can find them later. I'm having to create a lot of presentations at the moment, and I was thinking of Tom Stewart's Fortune article Friends Don't Let Friends Use PowerPoint. It's an oldish article and it took me a little while to find it, but it's here now! Worth a read if you missed it when it came out, as is the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address which it mentions.

(Often weblogs are really just shared, commented, bookmark lists.)

The biggest problem with the otherwise wonderful Radio software is finding coherent tutorial documentation for it. But Emmanuel Décarie's Frontier Newbie Toolbox is the nearest thing I've found. Even though it was written some time ago and is about the related product Frontier, much of it is applicable to Radio too.

I've recently been trying to help a couple of different people get on to the web who have never used it in any form until now. It's amazing just how easy it is to take certain bits of knowledge for granted in this situation.

So I wrote down my one page guide to The Web - the Absolute Basics in the hope that it might be of use to somebody else and their grandmother.

BBC News: Don Norman likes the new iMac. So do I, having played with it a little bit this week. A lovely bit of design.

Because of this, before the year is out, a very large number of people will have full Unix machines in their living rooms. I would never have believed it 18 months ago.

To her horror, she realised that the powerful vacuum action had got her in its grip.

[from Adam Curry's weblog]

Want a different view of the movies? Try Mr. Cranky's Reviews.

OK. I've clicked. I've just started to realise quite how cool a piece of software Radio is.

I've been pretty impressed so far just using it for reading news and writing weblogs. It's great for that. And I knew that under the hood there was a lot of power if you wanted to program in the macro language, and I hoped at some point I would have the time to do that.

But you don't need to delve that deep into the internals to realise the power. It may be THE SIMPLEST way to create a web site. Once Radio is set up and running on your machine, you can just dump text files into a particular directory on your hard disk.

They are rendered into HTML using a default template (which you can customise or replace). Automatically.

They are uploaded onto your web site. Automatically.

Any images etc that you might also want to use or refer to in the pages you just drop into the same directory and they are also uploaded. Automatically.

If you want to change the text of your pages, you just open them in a text editor, edit the text, and hit 'Save'. That's it. Everything else happens. Automatically.

And despite all this, there's a great deal of power and flexibility there if you want it. You can automatically upload different directories on your hard disk to different sites, for example. To start learning how to use some of these nice features, look at this page. (Oh, and another hint if you looking for something on the Radio site - almost everything beyond the absolute basics is contained within the Directory).

It's not often that I find myself reaching for my wallet to pay so readily for a piece of software. But it just happened. Automatically.

So we now have copy-protected CDs. They don't play on certain players, and on Windows machines. Interestingly, they may still be copyable on a Mac.

OK, I've updated this system to use the new Radio Userland 8.0, which should allow me to maintain it from my Mac OS X machine. Yippee!

It took me a while to get everything moved over from Windows, my FTP connection set up, and my page templates in place, but it's now basically sorted. The new Radio looks like a very interesting piece of software, and I hope I'll have some time to play with it more seriously.

Now, I can probably switch my home Windows machine off. It was only really there for two reasons. The first was as a Radio server until this version came along. The second was so that when members of my family call up about problems with their Microsoft software I could follow along at this end and describe the dialog boxes to them. I guess I'll still need to turn it on for that.