A frustrating but pivotal blogging week

I always suspected that adversity would move me off of the Radio Userland software and onto a more modern blogging tool. This week that adversity reared its head.

One morning, Radio simply would not load from my old laptop. I'd click on the Radio icon, and Windows Task Manager would inform me that the Radio.exe process had begun running, but Radio the app never loaded. I reinstalled Radio on this PC a couple of times, to no effect.

My first plea for help at Userland's support discussion group went unanswered. I was already planning on checking out TypePad, so the first thing I did was install it and get up and running on my new PC. Next, I tried to reinstall Radio on this same new PC, and it seemed to work, to the point where I copied over critical files from the old PC. But as soon as I did that, Radio stopped working on the new PC.

I value being a regular blogger, so by this time I began posting new entries in TypePad. Still, my old blog was frozen forever at Sept. 17, and it rankled. So I reinstalled Radio and tried to post a new entry without bringing over my old critical files. That immediately blew away my old blog's home page and replaced it with something alarmingly spartan. It turns out that not all the old blog entries were lost. Since late spring, I've used Radio's categories to create a series of mini-blogs on topics I track. These pages were still okay (mostly). More on that in a second.

The other good news was I was able to get Radio to work long enough to have that one new post point to this blog. The bad news is, a subsequent post meant to help readers navigate through the old blog hasn't made it through yet.

Here's that post:

To repeat, I've moved my blog to a new site. Although it doesn't look like it, most of the old blog is still archived here. But the front page has been radically simplified through software failure and likely through my technical error. Like many other Radio users, my plan is to leave this content here until my annual subscription to Radio runs out, which for me is sometime in 2004. Please visit my new site for the latest and greatest!

Meanwhile, here's a handy link list for most of the 2003 content in this old blog, organized by category:

In my opinion
Open access
Fast fibers and wires
Public funding
ISP survival guide
Backhaul
802.16/Wi-Fi on steroids
ASPs
Spambusters
Wi-Fi
Location services
Home networking
Digital TV
Bandwidth spiffs
Blogging

See also Archive.org's snapshot of this blog, Feb. 12, 2003, with entries back to the blog's beginning on April 24, 2002.

Now, the good news. I'm rediscovering how and why I blog. I used to treat my blog as a research tool for a variety of projects. I still will, but you won't be seeing nearly so many posts. For one thing, I'm focusing more on the big picture, instead of trying to filter so much of the news. If you want filters, there are some excellent ones out there, for each of the above topics. I'll eventually rebuild a blogroll that is basically the "best of" what's in my RSS aggregator. The purpose of this blog is for me to comment and to contribute more original thoughts to the discussions at hand, not to be a filter. In fact, I'm convinced that combining RSS aggregators with filters -- something the PC, not the browser -- is uniquely capable of doing, will be one of the next killer apps.

Even better, I've migrated away from the Radio browser-based RSS aggregator toward one of the new generation of RSS aggregators, NewzCrawler. It's great - a far more productive way to read RSS feeds than the dumb-terminalish browser metaphor that Radio used. If you haven't tried NewzCrawler, or NetNewsWire, or one of the other RSS aggregators that leverage the power of the PC instead of sticking with the browser's limited power, please check it out.

I certainly did appreciate Userland's low, low prices, and I'm paying more for the total solution now that I'm paying for NewzCrawler and TypePad, and Radio still remains the champ as far as getting you up and going quickly while still allowing your blog to emit RSS (unlike Blogger, which has its problems right now in this regard). For me, the evolution feels right, perhaps inevitable.

Over the coming weeks, I'll try to bring over some of the cool "extras" I had baked into my Radio blog, like the recently-added ability to have new posts delivered to you as email messages, so watch for them. And thanks for reading!

Comments

[Al Bonnyman]

I have always liked the look of your Userland blog with all its' different categories.

I've been frustrated with Blogger's reliability problems and had been considering migrating to Userland or Movable Type. I'll be interested to follow your TypePad experience.

P.S. My actual e-mail address using ASCII codes is -- I hate posting a spambit-readable e-mail address on the web.

[Sabiene Joel]

Just be surfing around in net. I definitely fpund a very informal place with a lot of good stuff for everybody. I will
certainly visit your site again sometime. Really good work.