 Radio Userland has appointed Steve Kirks as its Product Manager to jump-start enhancements to the Radio Userland blogging tool. First up are some new themes, layout cleanup, improving upstreaming, comments moderation, improvements to usage stats, and upgraded documentation.
Improvements that Sloggers think are most needed per my survey last year include:
- Streamlining blogroll (‘navigation links’) maintenance, flagging of links recently updated, and auto-verification of links
- Archives that display more than one day at a time
- Easier ability to put HTML in comments, and to preview comments
- Ability to display comments below the main post (for those that want to print out both)
- Ability to change the appearance and content of individual Categories without having to fiddle with code in the ‘www’ folder
- Simplification and improved documentation of Outlining
- Google search bar addition (to search the blog’s archives)
- Ability to post just the headline and/or selected extract from a long post on the main blog page, with a link to the rest of the article
- A Table of Contents for your archive
- A Directory of all Radio Userland blogs (in which users could update their own profile), and other community-building tools
- Making the product more ‘foolproof’ and easier recovery after a hard disk crash
- Group blogging
- Ability to maintain a blog on more than one computer, with synchronization
- Improved features for remote posting over the Web
To their credit, Radio has introduced some of the additions and improvements requested in my survey already, including Trackback and a WYSIWYG editor for Mozilla users.
This is a great development. What else is needed? (Yeah, I know, better service, though I confess I’ve found the service good). I’ll bundle up all the comments and send them to Steve, or you can e-mail him directly from his blog’s Radio category. |
Dave:Thanks for the mention and the posting of the feature request list. I’ll be adding some of these to the internal hit list because some will be easy to do in the process.Steve
This is a very good list. I would note that someone already made a macro to list titles of recent posts on the home page, which works pretty well. I especially support streamlining blogroll functions, better archive displays, better management of comments. Would add the following:– a function within Radio itself that notifies the blogger when a comment is posted, rather than just e-mailing it;– better documentation not only of outliner but of most other aspects of Radio, including an integrated listing and description of macros and the most important UserTalk scripts;– more effort to help Radio users make their sites accessible (for instance, the current templates seem to be pretty limited in this regard, and there is no documentation that I can find);– reconsideration of the Themes function: I wonder whether must of this function could be handled better by creating a set of options and guidelines for users to manage their own CSS stylesheets associated with the home page, categories and stories on their site(s).
Ah, the Subdued Citizen… :>”a function…” — Can’t do this easily since Radio is sometimes offline and might not receive messages. I like the idea of an XML-RPC call back to your Radio install to tell you the commenter info. I’ll think about this one…”better documentation…” — some of the docs have been redone, but it’s ready for a wholesale flush and rebuild. Right now, everything else is a priority, but the new user stuff got a dusting off. Hit the docserver at docserver.userland.com for the top 50 used macros. It’s a little Manila/Frontier oriented. Like a side, we’ll have to fix this a bit later.”…their sites accessible…” — I’m assuming you mean 503-style accessible. We’re cleaning up the HTML first on our way to this goal.”…Themes function…” — I’m working on a replacement for themes and it should be ready be the end of the year. It’s a wizard: asks questions, builds the pages for you. Advanced users will still be able to modify the templates, but the wizard will nail it for most people.This help?