From the ‘I’m glad someone else said it’ Department:
Camworld says “As a web designer I was intrigued by the CMS capabilities of Manila but did not like how the default HTML templates limited the kinds of layouts I could do and did not let me easily use my own from-scratch templates. I realize now that this is why every Manila weblog looks almost exactly the same and all Radio weblogs are very similar: it’s a limitation of the software being used to create them.”
The sameness of Userland blogs was one of my beefs with Radio (and Manila), and why I’ve returned to using Blogger. Other reasons I’m sticking with Blogger include:
- Not interested in news aggregation. I’m sure some people prefer all their content stripped of the original visual rendering and pulled into a list of paragraphs, but not me. One thing I learned by playing with Radio, is that I visit sites like A Whole Lotta Nothing or Glassdog nearly as much for the presentation of the content as well as the content itself. Reading weblogs in the Radio news aggregator’s list of content just isn’t a great experience.
- Not interested in web services. Okay, actually, I am interested in web services, but not in building my own. If you’re a developer, it’s swell that Radio provides you with a scripting environment. But I’m only a dabbler in development, so it’s functionality generally wasted on me (unless someone else extends the app in a way useful to me). Of course, this is sort of related to the next reason…
- Desktop Website: big deal. Userland hypes “A web server! On your desktop machine!” like it’s a revolution. Big deal. I’ve been running Microsoft Internet Information Server (or it’s scaled-down cousin, Personal Web Server) on my local machine since, like, ‘96 or ‘97. Talk about a web services platform. And while Radio is cheap at $40, IIS is free. More robust, less expensive, and while it has it’s own security issues, at least they’re known. Does anybody really know how secure the Radio server is?
- Split personality. No, not Dave Winer. Radio itself. Matt Trump wrote more eloquently about this, but basically Radio ties the application in with the community (radio.weblogs.com). As Matt points out, “The weblogs.com community must become the adjunct, which you can sign up for if you want.When I came to Radio, this is what I expected, to have the option to sign up for this very web site, the way you can sign up for Blogspot on Blogger if you don’t want to use your own server.” I was never interested in a radio.weblogs.com site, but you basically can’t get out of it if you use Radio. You can choose not to post to it, but you can’t choose not to have a site at radio.weblogs.com. Odd business decision; Userland could probably save money by allowing users to opt out of a radio.weblogs.com site.
- Radio is crippling until I’m a “full peer.” This is the primary reason I’m not purchasing Radio. A “full peer” is Dave Winer’s term for a server. Actually, he says it’s “a computer that can be both a client and a server and is operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It can call other computers and can be called by other computers,” but the client part is really moot. Every server can also be a client…it’s just that most people don’t use their server for client-side purposes. Basically, the point here is that unless you have a machine with a 24/7 connection outside a firewall (which I don’t), Radio is not a web service, but just another desktop app. If it’s installed on my home machine, I can’t post to my blog from work. As someone who works off of at least two separate machines (and usually more), this really makes Radio useless to me. I need “post-from-anywhere” service, which Radio can’t give…since it’s really a desktop app.
I’m sure Radio is great for some people, and at some point in the future (e.g. when I have a 24/7 connected computer outside a firewall), it might be worth re-visiting. For now, though, Blogger is the better tool for me.
Addendum, ten minutes later: Good comments from another disaffected Radio trial user at Winterspeak.