2004-1-5
Replacing Radio on Client Side
You might notice a distinct lack of content here.
That is because my Radio UserLand installation exploded one time too many. I'm going through the pain of moving to something new.
At the moment, I'm using bzero. However, there is a bug that prevents it from working when bzero itself is installed on a different volume than your home account. I had to drop in an ugly little hacque in place to redirect the location of bzero's per-user configuration
In looking for a replacement, one key feature is to continue to be PyCS compatible in that it must implement the xmlStorageSystem protocol.
I'm quite comfortable with continued hosting at PyCS. Phillip Pearson has been extremely generous and helpful-- I'll take this opportunity to publicly thank him for his efforts!
An old friend from our mutual NeXT days contacted me. He now works at Sleepycat and gave me a pointer to Syncato.
One of the reasons why I write a weblog is so that there is a google-indexed record of some thoughts/notes/tricks that I have had/taken/discovered over the years. It is more efficient and effective to find information via Google than it is to grep through a bunch of text files on my own system.
Through XSL and XQuery, Syncato offers a compelling set of features that might effectively address the need to find information and certainly offers a wide variety of interesting ways to cross cut the data.
With all that said, it is hard to beat the simplicity of bzero and bzero's use of Python source as templates is particularly interesting.
In the comments, PyDS has been mentioned as a possible candidate. PyDS is a really cool collection of technologies, but it does not fulfill the desire to have a simple weblogging client that is compatible with Python/Radio Community Servers.
PyDS and Radio share a particular trait that is at the heart of a pet peeve of mine. In particular, why do I need a desktop web server to publish a weblog? Both tools are extremely complex, though in different ways. Radio is a closed, proprietary, pile of antiquated complexity that no longer behaves well on the modern Macintosh desktop. PyDS is an open, well behaved, desktop server infrastructure with a boatload of dependencies on other open source projects. If it were a choice between the two, I would be posting from PyDS right now.
But both platforms are eliminated by the complexity factor. In their own right and for different reasons, each are fragile, hard to manage, and complete overkill for solving the relatively basic problem of publishing a WebLog.
The Syncato solution mentioned above is also relatively complex and hard to install (compared to something like bzero or your basic Blogger client [NetNewsWire again]), but it offers a lot of direct benefit for that complexity in the form of a powerful/flexible database containing your content. In other words, the complexity is focused on solving one problem and not solving a bunch of different problems in a loosely connected desktop server. I'm just not sure I care -- I'm not sure that Syncato offers enough value over the knowledge that Google is going to index what I publish sufficiently for my needs. Maybe if I wanted to have a personal log of private notes. For that,I use Note Taker and SBook.
That is because my Radio UserLand installation exploded one time too many. I'm going through the pain of moving to something new.
At the moment, I'm using bzero. However, there is a bug that prevents it from working when bzero itself is installed on a different volume than your home account. I had to drop in an ugly little hacque in place to redirect the location of bzero's per-user configuration
In looking for a replacement, one key feature is to continue to be PyCS compatible in that it must implement the xmlStorageSystem protocol.
I'm quite comfortable with continued hosting at PyCS. Phillip Pearson has been extremely generous and helpful-- I'll take this opportunity to publicly thank him for his efforts!
An old friend from our mutual NeXT days contacted me. He now works at Sleepycat and gave me a pointer to Syncato.
One of the reasons why I write a weblog is so that there is a google-indexed record of some thoughts/notes/tricks that I have had/taken/discovered over the years. It is more efficient and effective to find information via Google than it is to grep through a bunch of text files on my own system.
Through XSL and XQuery, Syncato offers a compelling set of features that might effectively address the need to find information and certainly offers a wide variety of interesting ways to cross cut the data.
With all that said, it is hard to beat the simplicity of bzero and bzero's use of Python source as templates is particularly interesting.
In the comments, PyDS has been mentioned as a possible candidate. PyDS is a really cool collection of technologies, but it does not fulfill the desire to have a simple weblogging client that is compatible with Python/Radio Community Servers.
PyDS and Radio share a particular trait that is at the heart of a pet peeve of mine. In particular, why do I need a desktop web server to publish a weblog? Both tools are extremely complex, though in different ways. Radio is a closed, proprietary, pile of antiquated complexity that no longer behaves well on the modern Macintosh desktop. PyDS is an open, well behaved, desktop server infrastructure with a boatload of dependencies on other open source projects. If it were a choice between the two, I would be posting from PyDS right now.
But both platforms are eliminated by the complexity factor. In their own right and for different reasons, each are fragile, hard to manage, and complete overkill for solving the relatively basic problem of publishing a WebLog.
The Syncato solution mentioned above is also relatively complex and hard to install (compared to something like bzero or your basic Blogger client [NetNewsWire again]), but it offers a lot of direct benefit for that complexity in the form of a powerful/flexible database containing your content. In other words, the complexity is focused on solving one problem and not solving a bunch of different problems in a loosely connected desktop server. I'm just not sure I care -- I'm not sure that Syncato offers enough value over the knowledge that Google is going to index what I publish sufficiently for my needs. Maybe if I wanted to have a personal log of private notes. For that,I use Note Taker and SBook.
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