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.

Executive Summary (the I don’t have time to read this whole damned thing, so give me the quick lowdown)

I’m free!!! I can now spill my guts and tell you all about radiating Radio eight-dot-oh (R8) since I’m no longer bound by NDA. It’s everything RAD (RADio, rad, radiating)! Because of its addicting features on the desktop, it’s making it difficult for me to get writing done. Here’s what grabs me:

Weblogs
You can look at the latest weblogs.com update right on your R8 desktop without entering weblogs.com in your browser. Not only that, you can even select your favorites and see them in a second column, so you’ll know when they were last updated. If they’re not on the list at all, it’s been awhile (Internet time) since they’ve been updated.

News Aggregator
No more schlepping from news site to news site or to places like DayPop40. Get it all on your R8.0 desktop by clicking on NEWS from the top navigation menu. When installing R8 for the first time, go to the hotlist on your Radio home and select the news sources you wish to receive (DayPop40, CNet, Salon, Wired, Slashdot, Register, and more). Then, these will update every hour in your News Aggregator page.

You can click POST next to a news item and it’ll already be linked. Just add any comments and PUBLISH! Another option for those ready to add a new tool: try out Doug Kaye’s News2mail tool. After you download it and unzip it, move the file into the TOOLS folder of your RadioUserland folder (in file manager). It sends the News Aggregator news to your mailbox every hour. Then, if you combine it with Jeremy Bowers’ customBlogPost tool, you can post it the news item right from the email. Load it the same way as News2Radio by putting in it in the TOOLS folder.

It’s a priceless tool for writers trying to keep up with IT news.

Referrers
Most Webmasters have Web site visitor stats emailed to us or go to the online stats screen to find out from where our visitors arrive. For example, if Dave posts a link to Meryland (I can dream, can I?) and people start clicking on it, the referrer list would show www.scripting.com along with the number of visitors who arrive from Dave’s link. In R8, you click on Referrers from the top left menu and bada-boom! You’ve got your referrer list!

Remote Posting
Posting to your Radio site when you’re remotely located from your computer loaded with Radio is not always possible. I connect to the Internet with a cable connection, but I installed a firewall. Radio can’t get through this firewall without disabling the settings (too much trouble and opens up the computer). There is a clever alternative. You can post to Radio by emailing yourself with a specific subject that you’ve identified in the Radio preferences.

For example, you can set up the preference to make the subject, “cool_radio” and enter an email account for Radio to watch for the email with the subject. Word of warning, don’t use your heavy-duty email account because Radio scans all incoming messages. There are so many free email accounts for the taking, so grab one and use it.

The hitch with this method is that Radio has to be running on the computer. When I’m slaving away at the office all day, I don’t have my computer and Radio on at home. Sure, I can be connected to the Internet 24-hours, but it’s not worth the security risk or a power outage.

Conclusion (to hell with all of that, what do *you* think of it???)
The crew of Radio 8.0 has truly separated the product from any others on the market. Is it revolutionary? I wouldn’t call it “the next best thing since sliced bread” because there are many people who aren’t even touched by applications like this. I know an IT hardware manager who still doesn’t know what weblogs are or the big deal about them. There are web designers who do know what are weblogs or online publishing, but aren’t interested. Radio, or any other similar app, isn’t going to pull them in.

Is Radio better than [fill in the blank with your favorite (or heard of) weblog or publishing system]? Yes… and no. It is superior in its unique ability to move files upstream (to the server) from your computer without your doing anything. Just push PUBLISH and it goes right to the site. Most places require FTP to get there, and many people (including students I’ve taught in a second level Web design course) have no idea what it is or how it works. Just work on your desktop like any word processor and save it. You’re done. It’s online.

Radio’s Cloud, Weblog, News Aggregator, and other technical behind the scenes stuff also stand out from the crowd. It’s very easy for a beginner to get set up and run with it. It took me five minutes (maybe less, but I didn’t have a stopwatch handy) to install it and post the first entry. This is without doing any tweaking, personalization, or fancy stuff.

If you do Web design and like to do fancy stuff like CSS, creating your own templates, and such, you can certainly do it in Radio. It’s not easy to do, but setting up templates is almost never easy even for the seasoned HTMLer.
It has some quirks that I can’t straighten out. Some of the links don’t go where they should despite checking, rechecking, and republishing. The articles are supposed to list three stories. Then, when you try to return Home from that page, you get a 404. There are testers who have not had this problem. I’m still trying to figure out why the links aren’t working. They work on some pages and not others.

Another quibble is putting images into an entry or story. I’ve tried it three ways:

• Copy and paste – This is based on the instructions from Userland. It works fine when on 127.0.0.1 (Radio cloud), but it doesn’t work in the public site because the img src refers to 127.0.0.1 instead of radio.weblogs.com/0001194.
• HTML (WYSIWYG) editor – I clicked on URL and entered /images/imagename.gif/ and it still puts 127.0.0.1 in front of it instead of the 0001194 address. I thought that when local URLs get upstreamed, it is adjusted.
• Source editor – this is the only way I can make sure it is accurate because I hand code the image source address.

The Comments feature is growing popular with weblogs and that doesn’t come built-in Radio. I’m sure someone will develop a macro for it soon enough. It’s impossible to have all the features that please everybody and keep costs down. The $39.95 is an excellent value just to have the weblogs, referrers, and the news aggregator features along with the server space. It’s good that it’s low because I need the money to go to a weblogs anonymous meeting to cure me of my Radio desktop addictions.