|
Radio UserLand for Webloggers
Radio UserLand for K-Loggers
Greetings
John Robb of UserLand wrote this guide to help you get started in the world of K-Logging with Radio UserLand. Radio is the first K-Log tool to run on the desktop and costs only $39.95. You can download a 30-day free trial here.
This document is written for people who want to build a powerful personal Weblog with Radio 8.0. If you're interested in using Radio as a content management system for general site construction, please refer to the Radio UserLand for Developers, written by Dave Winer.
While Radio 8.0 is easy to use, it is also a powerful tool. This guide is intended to help you learn about all the powerful features you need to optimize your experience.
If you see a way to improve this guide, please email: jrobb@userland.com.
A K-Log is?
A K-Log is a tool that runs on your desktop. The interface for a K-Log is your browser. A K-Log combines a weblog publishing tool and news reader. K-Logs are used for knowledge sharing in corporations and nonprofits.
A K-Log is a personal Web site that contains annotated links to other Web sites, Intranet resources, pictures, multimedia, documents, and other useful material. They are organized by time in a daily format (with the most recent posts first). It is important to remember that K-Logs are living sites that are authored by individuals. They reflect what a person is thinking about and doing during the course of the day. They are archives of experiences, organized in a way that makes it easy for visitors to understand.
What isn't a K-Log? A static Website that doesn't change much. A personal home page with merely contact information or a portal page with generic news and info.
Do it in the browser
With Radio, everything you need to do to publish your K-Log is done conveniently in the browser. You can type-in new content, publish it to your K-Log, and view the results all in one program you already know how to use: your Web browser. You don't need three separate tools to build your site (one to design and edit it, one to FTP the results to your site, and one to view it).
When Radio is started, it'll automatically open your Web browser and take you to the home page of what we call the Desktop Website.
Install Radio
The installation process for Radio is simple. It will ask you to fill in a few basic things.
Your name Your email address A password that you want to use That's all there is to it. Most people are up and running and posting to their Weblog in five minutes or less.
Start up the browser interface (aka the Desktop Website)
To get started with your K-Log you'll need to get to your Desktop Website. The Desktop Website is available whenever Radio UserLand 8.0 is running on your machine. If you're running Windows or Mac OS X you can right-click on the Radio UserLand icon in the system tray, and choose "Home Page" to pull up the Desktop Website. The Desktop Website should also pop up automatically whenever you first start Radio UserLand. (If you're using the Mac Classic version, choose Home page from the Local Pages sub-menu of the application's Radio menu.)
The Desktop Website is where you'll build and write your weblog or website. Everything important is there right in your Web browser. You can also visit http://127.0.0.1:5335/ with Radio running to get to your Desktop Website. That address is located on your desktop. It'll only work on a computer that has Radio UserLand running on it. It tells your computer to open your Desktop Website.
So, let's get your weblog whipped into shape and have some fun with Radio UserLand 8.0.
Post content
The goal of every weblog is to share content. You know: words, pictures, files, and items like that. Most weblogs will be mostly words, though, so we'll start there.
WYSIWYG or HTML editing?
We provide you a choice when editing your K-Log between simple what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editing and HTML source editing (due to restriction on the Microsoft browser WYSIWYG only works on Windows). The default is WYSIWYG. You can either click on the small radio buttons below the editing box on your home page to enable HTML "source" editing, or set you preferences here.
Making your first post
You should be on the home page of the Desktop Website now. If you are, you'll see an editing box like this:
Go ahead and type something in there. Then click the "Post to Weblog" button. Now Radio's gears get working. It does several things behind the scenes for you:
It converts what you type into a Web page so your content can be viewed in any browser. It then publishes that Web page up to your publicly viewable K-Log on UserLand's servers (or to an Intranet server via FTP) so everyone can see it.
Publish your K-Log
Radio UserLand comes with hosting space on our servers at UserLand. We provide you space on our public servers so that your co-workers can view your K-Log even if you desktop isn't connected or on. Here is how to publish your K-Log to our servers:
If you are not behind a proxy server, firewall or NAT you don't need to do anything but hit the post button to publish to your Weblog. Regardless, try this first to see if it works. If not, continue to the following steps.
If you are behind a proxy server, go here to set this up.
If you don't want to publish your K-Log to our hosting servers, and have an FTP account at your ISP, go here to configure this.
What's the advantage of using your own FTP-based server at your ISP? Well, you can have your own custom URL like http://www.microsoft.com/johnrobb instead of http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/ . Also, if you're posting sensitive or confidential things to your K-Log, publishing it to a secure server on your Intranet is a must. That's where the FTP option comes in handy.
After you post, Radio will do a couple more things for you. Radio also renders an RSS version of your updated Weblog and publishes that up to your K-Log too (that's important so other other people can subscribe to your site). Finally, it reports to Weblogs.com that your K-Log has been updated so other people can see that you have new content to read. You can check that everything got done as advertised by checking with your Events Log on Radio (this link only works if you are running Radio). If you don't want to share this information with others, go to this page on Radio's preferences to turn off community participation.
Post via email
You have the option of publishing to your K-Log by sending an email. You do that by configuring Radio UserLand to check an email account, and post any messages whose subject matches your "secret subject." If you choose to enable this feature, use a separate email account for mailing to your K-Log, not your main mail account. Mail-to-Weblog consumes all messages, even ones that don't contain the secret subject. To set this visit the Mail-to-Weblog preference page.
Linking to other sites in your K-Log
One of the most common things to do with your K-Log is to link to another persons site. Adding a link to other sites is really simple. First start typing some text into your edit window on your home page. When you are ready to add a link follow the instructions below:
Use the WYSIWYG "add link" button. Highlight the text you want to become a link. Click on the "add link" button. And cut/paste the link you want into the form provided. Click OK. That's it. Or, you can write some HTML (a little harder). Just copy and paste this into your weblog editing window:
<a href="http://www.scripting.com">This is a link</a>
Just replace the URL with one of your own and replace "this is a link" with text that you'd like to show up in the browser.
Delete or edit content
After you post content to your weblog, you can edit it, or delete it. Just visit Radio's Desktop Website. At the bottom of the Home Page are the last 10 posts you've made. Each post has a checkbox. Check the boxes of the posts you wish to delete, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Delete.
Each previous post also shows when it was posted, and has an EDIT button that, when clicked, places the text of the item in the edit box, where you can make changes, and route it through categories (more on categories below). If a previous post has been routed (through categories) a small checkmark will appear to the right of the EDIT button. The number of posts displayed in this section is configurable in the Preferences system.
New pages (The ability to publish new pages or stories)
OK, so you should be able to see how you can publish to your main page, but how do you add an entirely new page to your site? This is very easy, use the "stories" page. Stories are entire pages with their own URL. Go ahead and try to make a story. You can delete it later if you'd like. You can take the link of this new "story" page and use it anywhere on your site (you can find the link to the new story by clicking on the globe to the right of the story name or using shortcuts -- see below for more information on shortcuts).
Shortcuts
Shortcuts are powerful way of managing your stories, pictures, multimedia, and preconfigured blocks of content. You can see you shortcuts page here. To create a shortcut, put the content you want into the editing box (cut and paste pictures, add links, etc.), assign a natural name to it like "John's Picture", and then click publish. Now, whenever you put the name you assigned in double quotes, the shortcut content will automatically show up. Note: all stories are automatically published as shortcuts. This is great timesaver for people that reuse content, links and pictures often in their K-Log.
How to participate in the weblog community
By starting a Weblog, you are joining a large community of fellow K-Loggers using Radio. Here is how you can find their sites and have them find you by using the links to the right on your desktop website homepage (Note: if you are running a private Radio community on your Intranet, these links will point to your community and not UserLand's):
Referer traffic: This is information on who is linking to you and lists the amount of people that have used that link to visit your site that day.
Sites Ranked by Pageview: This is a ranking of the K-Logs in your community by the number of pageviews that day and by all time.
Recently updated sites: This is a list of sites that have updated recently in the community. The most recent updates are at the top of the page.
Subscriptions: This is a list of the most popular subscriptions.
Readers are the life blood of K-logs. The more readers you have, the more influential you are in the community. These community tools help you connect to that audience.
Subscriptions and news reading
What if you could have one piece of software that would gather all the world's newspapers and other news from around the Internet and put it all in one page. That's exactly what Radio UserLand's news aggregator does. You enter in subscriptions to the news feeds that you want to track and then every hour Radio goes out and gathers the latest news. It's like having a newspaper on steroids. Just visit your News Page. We've subscribed to a small number of feeds, but there are a lot more out there. Anytime you see an orange "XML" icon, that's a feed. Just enter the URL of that XML page into Radio's subscription page and you'll make your "personal newspaper" even better.
Make multiple weblogs by using Categories
A really cool feature of Radio UserLand 8.0 is its ability to create multiple K-Logs with different URLs -- Radio calls them categories and they are a powerful tool you can use to route your weblog content to multiple locations, each with its own RSS feed (for subscriptions), and possibly its own website. The Categories Page is where you go to create new categories, delete old categories, or edit the settings for existing categories.
If you have the categories preference enabled, you will see a list of your categories on the Home Page, below the editing box, with a checkbox next to each category. When you add an item to your weblog, it will also be added to any of the categories you checked.
The first time you route an item to a category, the category's name on your Desktop Website home page will become a link to the category's upstreamed RSS file. The category's website is optional, you can choose to publish web pages for a category as well as an RSS feed, by turning on HTML rendering for the category. Each category's website may have its own templates to differentiate its appearance from the rest of your site.
At the top of the Categories page is a link that you can click to create a new category.
Below that is a list of all your existing categories, each with a checkbox that you can use to delete the category. Also listed is the category's name, its description, when the category was last published, the number of items that have been added to the category, and a link to the category's RSS feed.
You can click the name of any category in the list, to edit the category's name and description, or to tell Radio to render the category in HTML.
If you set categories up right, you'll have a home page like this:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/
And categories pages like these:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/categories/windowsxp/
What's cool about Radio and what makes it different from other weblogging or web design tools is you can post once to multiple weblogs. Just check which weblogs (er, categories) you want your post to be on. This feature will save you a lot of time when you need to put the same content on a large number of weblogs. For instance, let's say you had 10 different weblogs and you needed to tell everyone you'd be on vacation for a week. With a traditional tool you'd need to copy and paste the HTML nine times. With Radio, you just post once to all of the categories (er, weblogs) that you'd like your announcement to appear on.
Usernums (Your user number)
When you publish to UserLand's hosting location you are given an unique usernum/URL. Nobody has the same number. So its easy to find you. This usernum is located in your URL (don't worry, this number is set-up automatically so you don't need to configure it).
All you need to know is someone's Radio 8.0 usernum to figure out their URL. For instance, my usernum is 0001011 so my URL is http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/.
This comes in really handy when finding new K-Logs.
Templates and how they work
The old way of doing Web design was to add codes to each page separately that would tell your Web browser how to display your content. Very tedious. Things have gotten better since then with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but still most Web designers mix content and design elements together into their HTML. The new way of doing things is to keep your content and your design completely separated. How do you do that? With a content management system like Radio UserLand and templates. Templates are cool. Just change one line of code on your template and it'll change the look of all your pages, even if you have 1000 pages. You can get to your templates on your prefs page. They are HTML files that you can change by hand. As soon as you hit submit, your changes will be published.
|
