Mail-to-Weblog and New Aggregator for Radio

I'm trying to do a little posting today using the mail-to-weblog feature in
Radio. The web interface I setup doesn't appear to be working–probably
router settings or dynamic DNS. Worst of all, I use the Radio web interface
to read news remotely, especially at work. Ugh. Troubleshooting never
ends.

Since I'm now without a portable (the Powerbook leaves tomorrow for
California and it's new home), I'm working on a new version of the
aggregator for Radio. I've copied the aggregator's code into a new table in
the workspace table and have started to document it. My next stop is to
email Roge
rs Cadenhead and see how much of this is covered in his new book.

Anyway…

I've been reading Matt Neuburg's nearly six year old book on Frontier and
still find it useful. That's how I was able to learn enough to correctly
copy the aggregator code and create the new table. I want to rebuild the
aggregator so it has more prefs for the display. Here's my list:

–Headline only display without the content
–Headline only display of only a single weblog at a time.
–subscription grouping

Now you might ask: why do this, just run a desktop aggregator? Well, I do.
I use NetNewsWire from Brent
Simmons' Ranchero Software. I love it, but it runs on a Mac and I have a PC
at work. I don't want to buy a second copy of Radio–I don't need the
second weblog hosting, etc.–and none of the Windows products have the
simplicity, elegance or speed of NNW. This brings me to a point of
self-analysis, where I determined that since I'm learning Frontier (since I
want to customize Manila a bunch), why not apply the knowledge in a simple
fashion first? Plus, immediate gratification never hurt anyone. :>

If anyone has seen some previous Radio work with modifying the aggregator,
specificially the layout, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Jake says in this post:

Enter Firebird — Mozilla's slimmed-down browser offering. It's got
tabs. It's got auto-complete. It's standards-compliant. It's fast. And it's
got Midas. I didn't even have to change my software to get the rich text
editor to work.

I just downloaded it and did the install. He's right–I'm running it on
Windows 2000 on my computer at work. It's faster than IE, responds better
to bad HTML and works great with my install of Sun's Java. It also exposes
the programming holes in some of our intranet apps. Why not program with
standards when you have the opportunity, eh?

Posting with the WYSIWYG text editor to my Radio weblog.  MacOS 10.2.6, Mozilla 1.5a. 
Probably the last post from my Powerbook.  I'm wiping it out
tomorrow and writing zeros to the drive for a couple of days.

Mitch says in this post:

IMAP with its multiple Inboxes and multiple sets of mailboxes adds cognitively complexity to the user model. Maybe it can be hidden. Maybe well-designed clients only expose more complexity incrementally. Maybe there are ways to bring people, self included, gently up the learning curve. But none of that has been my experience yet.

Apple's Mail.app has hidden some of the multiple mailbox issues you mention. I have two IMAP-enabled mail accounts that appear to be one. When I click on the “IN” box, the aggregated content of box actual in-boxes appear. I can choose to view either mailbox separately or both at the same time.

I have noticed that not all IMAP servers work quite the same way. Also, Apple's Mail.app does carry a frustration: try using the contextual menu to move a message. You are presented with a scrolling contextual *submenu* that has a list of *every* mail folder on every server. I have somewhere north of fifty. Ouch.

Pictures of the Corn Roast 2003, Day One:

This is dynamite.  Can you hear the fuse sizzling?  It makes me want to by the dev licenses and skip my Manila crash course.  I think that Radio can be modified to do this.  Needless to say, I'm jumping on this first thing next week.

Private Life III.

With Microsoft taking the Longhorn view, Chandler betting on RDF, and Sun postponing OS/X OpenOffice to '06, what can we do in this lifetime? After video conversations with Gary Burd, Dave Sifry, and players to be named later, here's the plan:

1. Get Panther. This will cost $500 for an entry level developer license today.

2. Investigate the new Mail APIs and the new TextEdit developer kit (if it exists).

3. Develop Gary Burd's idea of a brute force private Google built on top of a local IMAP store hosted in Mail.app.

4. Produce NetNewsWire plug-in from #3's work and contribute it to Brent Simmons with all possible speed.

5. Use NNW plug-in framework to develop additional extensions for converting iChat AV/AIM/Rendeyvous presence and message attempts into RSS feed.

6. Investigate wiring #5's feed to iSync for persistent calendaring and scheduling.

7. Work with Mozilla-based cross-platform aggregators to migrate to Windows/Linux base.

8. Watch Microsoft and Google scramble to catch up.

[Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]

To those sending me gifts from BlogShares:

I'll be contributing, but this weekend is my family reunion, so I'll hit the list on Monday. I'm buying up some 'blogs tonight and will continue tomorrow, so I'll have some to give. I'm using the shares I'm given to sell to make cash so I can buy blogs and give them away. So philanthropic!

Brent, this is my single most favorite (grammar?) feature in NNW now:

HTML differences
I’m going to be writing about new NetNewsWire features for the next few days… Here’s another one: HTML differences.

I read this later in the same post:

That leads to a little advice for app developers—your users are smart. The list of features I didn’t think I’d like, but that I did anyway because people asked for, is pretty much the list of cool features in NetNewsWire. (Groups, for one thing. The Combined View is another big one. And so on.) [inessential.com]

Thanks for including this comment, Brent. It's one of the reasons I was thrilled to send you the money for the “pro” license for NNW. You write for and listen to your users. NNW is the only app that I want to use to read aggreagated RSS feeds.