Ten Reasons Why

>Radio and PyDS need to publish to their
>symbiotic partner, the community server, but
>they can mirror the content to another site
>managed by, for example, Blogger or Movable Type

Perhaps a minor point, but Radio does not require you to use the community server. I publish a radip blog soley through ftp to a web server run by my ISP that simply provides an FTPable folder and a corresponding URL, and nothing else.

Cheers, Scott Leslie.

Thanks for pointing that out. So you're saying it is possible to "turn off" Radio's upstreaming to the Radio Community Server, so that Radio ONLY publishes via FTP to a location other than http://radio.weblogs.com (the Radio Community Server)?

Yes, you can turn off the
posting to Radio's Community server. You can also post to both at the
same time and ftp to several different location/servers. In fact you
can configure the final destination for each category. Finally, using
add-on (called tools in Radio) you can even post to Movable Type
weblogs or any weblog puplishing system that uses the meta-weblog API.
I personnaly use Footbridge to do just that, post to a MT blog from
Radio.

Good information. Still doesn't sway me to Radio, though. :-)

In that event (using Radio to post to an MT blog), Radio is just acting as a pretty bloated weblog client. Why wouldn't I just use W.Bloggar or another client? See another post from today re: why Radio's news aggregator doesn't float my boat. Or look for the couple of posts over the last week re: the problems I have with the whole "desktop server" approach of both Radio and PyDS.

If it's not obvious by now, I like a hosted tool that I can access from any computer with an Internet connection.

Cheers,
greg

Hi Greg,

I share your feelings about this issue. Last year in July I wrote this on Seblogging:

I am playing around with a new format for a Weblog on using dynamic Webpublishing in education. While I was testing out a Radio Userland log I discovered that for a number of reasons I am still happier with relying on a centrally hosted Manila set up.

A centrally hosted application that is accessible from any connected computer with a browser is still a much better solution for my purposes and life-style than the desktop server of Radio which is sitting on my laptop. My problem is that I use different computers during the week and though I often carry around my laptop I cannot get online wherever I am. But connected computers with a browser are almost anywhere available.

... and I haven't changed my opinion.

Just wanted to add... you can also switch to a different community server. I am currently testing a PyCServer hosted in Germany.

What I still find kind of interesting is Radio Userlands capability to interface with centrally hosted Manila sites. You can use Radio's outliner to publish directly to a Manila site... which is kind of handy sometimes.

greetings

Sebastian

BTW: could you point me to a photo of yourself? your "voice" is sitll missing a "face" on Seblogging ;-)

> In that event (using Radio to post to an MT blog),
> Radio is just acting as a pretty bloated weblog client.
> Why wouldn't I just use W.Bloggar or another client

I did not know radio could publish to other servers (like MT servers for example). But if this is the case, I think this is a good thing and in this case, Radio is more than just a weblog client: Radio also manages your posts locally, on your desktop. Weblog clients, like W.Bloggar, do not manage content. They only offer a good GUI that connects to weblog servers.

And there are many advantages to using a radio-like tool as a client. Take the situation where you have many weblogs to which you want to publish: One weblog for the family created on Blogger, a Radio weblog published on the Radio community server about your hobby, and a MT weblog hosted at work for technical content. Publishing to each of them requires that I either go to each weblog gui, that I use a weblog client (aka W.Bloggar), or that I use a radio-like tool.

The advantage of using the radio-like approach: Your posts are stored locally. These posts are the master copies. You can backup all your posts from the same place. Then when comes the time to publish your post, you decide where it should go: blogger and/or MT, and/or radio community server.

In this scenario, the webblog servers (blogger, MT, and the radio publishing feature) act as publishing tool only (managing templates, permalinks, archive lists, trackbacks, comments, RSS, ...).

Claude: "Radio is more than just a weblog client: Radio also manages your posts locally, on your desktop."

That's precisely the reason I will not use Radio (or PyDS). There's little value to managing your weblog content on your desktop unless you have a single desktop.

At any given time in my adult life, I've had at minimum two workstations (a home desktop and my personal laptop). Depending on my job, I may also have had office workstations, company laptops, plus spending days on end at client sites working on some random machine.

I can't count on a single desktop. I can count on getting an Internet connection almost anywhere there's a phone line though.

Given my computing situation, tying content to the desktop is a hindrance, not an advantage. I want the content located "in the cloud" so I can get to it and work with it from any machine with an Internet connection.

> There's little value to managing your weblog content on your desktop unless
> you have a single desktop

Greg, as you know, many applications running on a desktop can be accessed from the outside (HTTP, P2P, ...) Radio is a web app (http) that runs on your desktop. You can make its port accessible from the outside.

In this context, "the cloud" is still there, but it is used to access your data, from wherever you are. Of course, this model breaks if your desktop app is not connected. But you can always use the server tools in this case, and hopefully, the desktop app (Radio) will be able to synchronize at some point. Anyway, what I say here is not new: Some big P2P systems are based on this model (Groove for example).

Note that I am not a Radio fan or user. I use blogger and for what I do, I am happy with it for now.

Claude--

You wrote: "Radio is a web app (http) that runs on your desktop. You can make its port accessible from the outside."

I know. See Desktop Servers, Take...uh...Three? where I say: "[A]s with Radio, most of his solutions for Python Desktop Serverall require an always-on machine, always-on Internet connection, and remote access. If you're someone (like me) who blogs from multiple computers, none of which can effectively be set up as a server (which is what an always-on, always-connected machine is), that doesn't help."

Just face it, people: you're not going to convince me that the Radio/PyDS approach to personal publishing architecture is anything but a big ol' bloated hack!

It's only workable in a very specific computing situations (either "blog from one machine and one machine only" or "turn my desktop into an Internet-connected server"). I mean, cripes, if you're turning your desktop into a personal server over your DSL line, you might as well get a hosting account and do it on a real server!

:-)

Ok, we will not agree on this and that is fine ;-).

> I mean, cripes, if you're turning your desktop
> into a personal server over your DSL line, you
> might as well get a hosting account and do it
> on a real server!

Of course, if you can manage the real server, this is the best option. But I insist on saying that "turning your desktop into a personal server" is not such a bad thing. There are millions of users turning their desktop into file servers (heard of Kazaa?) Whether the server is HTTP based or any native P2P protocol is irrelevant: the personal desktop computer still serves files.

New Entry... A Drupal-based content management system, with some pretty cool stand-alone modules that integrate subscriptions and...browser-based instant messenger with update alerts (posts AND comments), member-to-member chats, web-based digest cool stuff like that, in a hosted, community-style setting... disclaimer: i work for motime.com, but seeing as though I am very much on topic, I hope that this is comment is taken as a contribution to the discourse in progress as intended.