Dann Sheridan asks Jake Savin here if a hacking Radio/Manila blog would be appropriate. I'd love to see one myself.

I've been thinking about this, too:

I'm curious; perhaps someone out there knows…

Has anyone yet attempted to create “RSS email”, where the “feeds” served to a feedreader might be automatically synthesized from the emails themselves as things such as Person (from or to), Thread, Folder, etc?  (One could probably easily implement this as a straight layer on top of IMAP.)

[Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Here's the problem, though. What happens when the “news item” that came to me from email drops off my newsreader's list of recent articles? With email, I can flag it for a follow-up of import the information into a task item within my PIM. Since I'm using a Mac, Newsgator is not an option. Ideas? Comments?

I meant to post this a couple of days ago. Dann, I have felt this pain:

Oh, The Horror!!. The evil triad: Radio, my old firewall, and my ISP. The past 72 hours have been quite unintentionally Radio free.[Dann Sheridan's Weblog]

BloggerCon provides some relief. I'm now looking into attending through sponsorships. Anyone care to lend a hand? Email me.

After sending out the first round of invites to BloggerCon, we got quite a bit of feedback on the pricing. A lot of questions were raised, we answered them best we could, and now we want to respond, by:

1. Changing the program, in a significant way to offer scholarships, on a random basis, for people who can't afford the $500 or $250 fees.[bloggerCon News]

Original post

If you haven't ordered your copy yet, read this and follow the link to Amazon. It's great that we're going to get some help for Radio. I recently bought a copy of Frontier: A Definitive Guide from an Amazon vendor, mainly to have an easy reference.

John Palfrey says that they are working on a solution to the cost of BloggerCon. I wanted to go, but airfare from Springfield, MO to Cambridge, MA is at least that much, plus the cost of the forum (also hotel stay, food, etc.) puts it out my reach.

I'll watch this in case things change…

I've been looking for a new book series to read. I'm heading to Borders to look this up:

I've just finished reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first volume in a British kids' fantasy trilogy. I'm over the moon with delight. This is a brilliant novel: gripping, funny, dark, heartwarming and vivid. I haven't been so glad of a BritLit book since The Borribles Trilogy — up until now my absolute favorite kids' fantasy books, not least because of their unflinching grimness and refusal to be even slightly twee. Northern Lights rivals Borribles, outstrips the Hobbit, and leaves Harry Potter in the dust.

The book revolves around the quest of a little girl to uncover the nature of the universes parallel to her own — beginning in an alternate, steampunky Oxford University and ranging through London, the fens, and Lappland. The fantastic creatures and the magic that fuels them is utterly captivating and brilliantly executed. The book reveals its oddities and back-story in tiny sips, interspersed masterfully through the fast-paced action. I've just contacted my corner bookstore to see if they have volumes two and three in stock: I plan on devouring them.

I'm intrigued to see that there's an audio edition with Pullman reading: sounds wonderful.

LinkDiscuss

(Thanks, Cait!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Dewayne dug up this old Bryan Bell post about CSS and Radio:

If you would like to centralize your Radio CSS you can simple save your Style sheet as “#cascadingStyleSheet.txt” then place it in your “www” folder. Then simply add the macro to your template. Your CSS will be included where you included your macro.

This method will work even if you create a theme out of your design.

Spaces in the CSS macro tag added by me to prevent Radio from being confused…

I'm glad I found this. I'm working on my test install of Frontier/Manila and need this info to build the “surprise”.

From this “a klog apart” post:

Tim Bray measured the RSS traffic to his personal weblog. He came up with these numbers for a day with one change:

• 11,526 GET requests (about 8 per minute)
• 8,901 returned the no-change (code 304) 77%
• 2,625 returned the data (code 200). 23%
• 359 HEAD requests.
• 1,374 unique IP addresses.

Tim's work with Antarctica.net touches thousands of people. His professional network will be early adopters, so tracking Tim's blog would be natural.

Of note, Tim made a change. “The code that changes the picture-of-the-day every ten minutes or so was also as a side-effect re-writing the RSS. So I fixed it.” It's probably saving him 1.5 GB/month in downloads. Who's going to write the book on RSS optimization?

[a klog apart]

Sean Gallagher says:

After following the drama of personalities that is the debate over weblog syndication strategies old and new (RSS 2.0 vs. RSS 1.0 vs. Atom/Pie/Echo/Whatever the hell they've decided to call it this week), I've decided that it's time for someone to launch a truly open and unfettered syndication standard. I've decided to call my, oops, our new effort in openness and semantic web goodness RASH (Really Awful Syndication, with Hypertext).

The great part about RASH will be that you can get a RASH feed without even subscribing to it. All you have to do is visit a RASH-inducing weblog, and you'll instantly “catch” its RASH content. In fact, anyone visiting the weblog of anyone who's visited a RASH-enabled weblog–or is just in their FOAF file– will probably catch it too.

That's right–rather than being opt-in subscription-based syndication, RASH is opt-out syndication–you have to do something to get rid of it.

The result will be a boon to bloggers' log files–the hits to weblog.rash files will make any site's logfile look like Instapundit's. Inverviews with Chris Lydon, instant Internet fame, and power over the fate of nations will immediately follow launching syndication in the RASH format.

To opt out of a RASH feed, users will have to use a file similar to robots.txt, called “ointment.rash”, with explicit refusals for each feed they do not want to receive–much as they must currently do with unsolicited e-mails. While this may seem to put an inordinate burden on those on the receiving end of a RASH, it guarantees the RASH source a rapid growth in readership–even if readers are only trying to figure out how the hell they caught the RASH in the first place.

Soon, the whole Web will break out in RASH. [Sean Gallagher: the dot.communist]