Meryl's Notes Blog

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Home is the desktop where you’re seeing the top navbar and right navbar. News takes you to the News Aggregator. Stories is where you enter long entries, essays, stories, and whatnot. You can see the three files I have in stories. Folder is where all your Radio files are located and it looks just like a file manager. Events lists all the activities including upstreaming and posting. The orange question mark is sprinkled through the Radio app for when you need help.

There are three parts to the right navbar: Cloud Links, Status Center, and Support Center.

The Cloud is a new concept to many, me included. It’s a perfect name because it’s the “area between home and heaven” and on the Internet the cloud is the space between your hard drive and the Internet server. It’s the space where you can see interaction with other Radio users.

Home is this page, the front door of the Web site. Referrers is a list of other sites that bring people to your site. These other sites have links to the home page. It’s a way to find out who is linking to your site and make sure they’re not saying anything bad about you. Also, you get to find out where you get your traffic. Ranking by Page-Reads is a list of all the Radio users and how many hits they’ve received for today and for overall. Woe is me! I’m not in the top 10. I guess I better suck up to the hotshots to get some attention my way.

The Status Center provides time and temperature, errr.. date and time. Actually, it gives you the latest snapshot of the site. It shows when the News Aggregator completed its last check for new news and the number of subscribed resources. The Hotlist is self-explanatory. Weblogs, oh my gosh, this is truly original and all Userland’s own creation. I have spent way too much time in this area. Frequent visitors to weblogs.com will somewhat recognize this page. The left has the latest updates to weblogs.com, instead of seeing it at the weblogs.com site, it’s on your own desktop when Radio is open. On the right is your favorites in the order they have been updated. So, if you don’t see your name on here, don’t get mad at me. You are on my list, you just haven’t updated as recent as this list you see. Anytime you see a weblog you like on the left, click in the checkbox and it’ll join your favorites list. Enough on that or I’ll end up stuck there and not finishing this report.

Web server tells you number of requests that have been processed by the server, not the number of people coming to your server. That’s the referrer‘s job. Events shows the type of event, what happened, when, and how long. Such events are hourly scans of news, upstreams (uploads from your computer where only you can see it to the server so everyone can view your work of art), archives, and weblog pings. Frequencies is not in a typical Radio installation. In fact, it’s one of the “extras” I installed later. It’s a tool from Jeff Cheney that shows you how many times you’ve posted, how many categories you’ve created, how many news items you’ve posted from the News Aggregator, and how many different sources you cite. These tools are cool! I’m user number 1194, hence the url: radio.userland.com/0001194. Also, occasionally, the Radio Userland folks sneak in subliminal messages. OK, they would give interesting newsbytes from time to time.

The Support Center provides quick links of where to go for help. Radio has discussion groups and mailing lists with many knowledgeable users ready to help. The email features sends your radio configuration to an email address that you enter. It tells the receiver how your Radio is set up to be able to provide you with better and more accurate support. We rarely think about such a feature, but it can be incredibly handy. How often do you call tech support and they ask you a ton of questions such as operating system, computer specs, software version, on and on? The email has all of this information.

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