Peter's Blog 23.4.2004

Been playing with **Radio Userland**.

Been playing with Radio Userland. It is a mixed bag of things:

• a local web server, driving the main application through a web browser

• a blogging tool. Type a post in a box and publish. It gets uploaded to Userland's servers and there it is.

• a news aggregator, it aggregates RSS feeds for perusal through the browser

• Content Management System: put files in directorys and they get rendered and uploaded automatically.

• Scripting tool

• Outliner

Good points:

• Easy blogging for newbies

• Can email it to post blogs

• Easy to knock up a web site

• The outliner has neat features like linking to web pages or other outlines which can be opened in place.

• It is heavily scripte.

Bad points:

• I had to reinstall it because the upload got broke

• The scripting language is clean but it's no Python

• The outliner is not nice to use. It is a fairly crude app by modern windows standards. Bonsai is far nicer to write in.

• The outliner is used to edit the system scripts: no syntax highlighting and all nodes collapsed by default. I find this hard to read. I miss Vim.

• Their web servers can be very slow: uploads can time out.

• Uploading is all done automatically in the background so you have to keep looking at an events page to see if it has worked.

My head says dump it but something in my heart wants me to keep it. If it ran on linux I probably would.