Someone needs to write a book on this subject.

posted: 9:16:33 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

John Robb left UserLand almost two weeks ago now. As of this evening, his blog is off the air. The old address used to be http://jrobb.userland.com. Where it will turn up is anyone's guess.

posted: 9:10:06 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

What is going to happen to UserLand? Here is what I think will happen. Jake and Lawrence will continue to move forward until the paychecks stop coming, and perhaps a little further. Eventually it will be just Dave, yet again. This will have to be after he finishes his fellowship. If Jake and Lawrence go away before Dave completes his fellowship, the community will be on its own. Will the UserLand products go way? No. UserLand has a cult following.

Here's what I think should happen. This would be a perfect time for UserLand to open source its products -- including the binaries -- and set up a structure for code submissions, reviews, testing, and releases that the community can support. Jake and Lawrence could establish the foundation projects, manage the code base, and facilitate the release process. I believe that this would be like an adrenaline shot for UserLand. It might be time to truly put these products in the "User's Land."

I know I would feel a lot more comfortable investing more time and energy in Manila, RCS, and Radio if these products were being built and maintained by the community in structured projects or in the hands of a larger company.

posted: 8:00:50 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

For anyone considering switching from Radio to MoveableType, Bill Kearney has built a Radio exporter that exports all of your Radio posts to a format that MoveableType can import. I will have to give this a try and see how it works.

posted: 7:21:51 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

How do you decouple Radio from RCS so that you simply have a stand alone installation of Radio that run locally? I have been digging, but can't seem to find all of the connection points beyond my machine.

posted: 7:16:33 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I discovered tabbed browsing in Safari today. What a great feature!! It is what I love about Netscape 7 and now it is in Safari.

posted: 6:38:35 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

Moving my Radio weblog to my server using the FTP Upstream options has been anything but easy. I have run into a number of errors, not the least of which is a very strange message stating "Too Many Files Open." I am also suspicious of the FTP module in Radio. It appears to not be handling resets very well, but I need to see what's going on on the wire to confirm this. It also appears to be trying to do a complete upstream if it doesn't complete the first job. I have yet to complete a full upstream of my weblog since starting last night at 10pm. My weblog contains two years of posts, 2MB of images, and a number of outlines. Radio appears to be choking on the amount of content when upstreaming via FTP. This makes me question the viability of decoupling Radio from RCS. Complete decoupling of Radio from RCS is impossible due to ties to the xmlStorageSystem and updates, even when using the FTP upstream option.

posted: 6:33:44 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()