Here's how it looks like. If you want to give it a try, download the template, expand it, drop it into your Radio UserLand/www/slides/ folder (make a backup copy of the old template... you never know), enjoy.

Like... Why are you bloggin' at me like that?

It looks like the cool weblogs domain names season has opened.

Cool, even before my new Italian Weblog (thanks Paolo!) was up, I was already getting coverage in Italy from Gaspar and Simplicissimus.  Thanks!  I am now publishing to two continents, simultaneously, using Radio.  Set up was very easy.  All I needed to do was create a new password, create a new category (John Robb's Italian Weblog), and drop an upstream driver (a 3 k text file supplied by Paolo via e-mail) into the folder for my new category on my desktop.  Simple.  Now I can publish to Italy and the US by clicking a single check box below my editing screen.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I think that the ability to manage multiple weblogs with Radio is not very known and it does make the difference for many of us. I was discussing this feature today with Joe Friend (in Indonesia!). It shows the huge potential of Radio as a content management system.

Here's what I'm watching now:

Yes, I'm managing 13 weblogs from a single window. Cool uh?

in·tel·li·gence
n.
a. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.
...

Personal RSS Aggregators: By Jon Udell

Stratight to the point. I think that the interesting thing about RSS and Personal Aggregators is not that the system is based on distributed computing, but that it's based on the distributed intelligence of computer users.

Disinfotainment: "Now Dave's solution is to release a script that continuously polls Radio and restarts it if it's crashed. Wouldn't it be better to fix the bugs that make it crash in the first place? Instead, we have a workaround that is even more of a CPU burden."

First, Dave or UserLand did not release the script, I did, so I'm the one to blame.

Second, in yesterday's post I did say that this is not an elegant nor an efficient solution, but that it kept a server running for 34 days. Of course, this is not the best way to run a service and, btw, Radio is also not the right application to run such a service, while Frontier is. We have Frontier servers which have been running for months, serving millions of pages, without much problems, but it took a lot of time and hard work to properly tune them and get them to run smoothly, just like with any other server software.

I don't think that using Radio as a server is a clever idea, unless we are talking about very small communities of users (such as small intranets) where RCS can perfom decently. In this case a low cost computer, an incredibly low cost application and a simple hack, in our case, did the trick.

A blackout this night caused the restart of our RCS server (reminding me that I have to change the batteries of that UPS), and breaking a good record: yesterday it was the 34th uptime day for that server.

Not a big deal for a server, but this is just an old iMac, with 128Mb of RAM, where Radio UserLand has been silently running without a glitch next to Apache and FileMaker. 34 days ago we resarted it after the update to MacOS X 10.1.4.

To be honest, saying that Radio has been running for 34 days without a glitch is not completly correct, Radio did crash, but we have installed a little script that checks every minute if Radio is running and, if it is not, it launches the application. The result is that from time to time we do find a "The Application Radio UserLand unespectedly quit" alert, but the in the meanwhile the script has restarded Radio and everything is up and running.

On this copy of Radio we have also installed RssDistiller, that it's scraping news sites and sites of our competitors every hour and distributing the feeds to all 19 internal Radio users, plus it's where we are running the beta version of our new SharedOutlines server, so every user is polling several outlines a few times per minute.

Not bad for an old iMac, uh?

If you are interested, here's the script we use and instructions on how to install to keep Radio running.

Tomorrow I'll be meeting Marc Barrot in Venice. While on the phone agreeing to meet in the most beautiful place in the world, we realized that we've never seen each other. Well Marc, this is how I look like, see you tomorrow.

To turn on the feature, visit the Mozilla preferences and go to the Navigator > Tabbed Browsing panel. My favourite detail is that Control/Command clicking on a link open the site in a different tab without bringing it to the front, so while the link I just clicked on loads in the background, I can continue reading the site I was on.

"Apple has recently implemented bandwidth limitations on iTools HomePages. If an iTools user's website receives more than 500 hits in a six-hour period, the user is limited to roughly two times their iDisk capacity of data throughput in that six-hour period.
  iTools users who have upgraded their iDisk capacity will have additional bandwidth. If an upgraded user's website receives FEWER than 500 hits in a six-hour period, the user is limited to roughly 14 times their iDisk capacity in that six-hour period. If an upgraded user's website receives MORE than 500 hits in a six-hour period, the user is limited to 2.5 times their iDisk capacity in that 6 hour period.
  When these limitations are exceeded, that iTools user's websites will be disabled for a period of up to, but not greater than, 12 hours. The limits stated here are subject to change without notice." [Macintouch]

Now, besides comments on the fact that maybe they should have warned users, and that I think that this policy is harming small developers who using Apple's servers to distribute their software, I'm very interested in any kind of approach to this problem.

It looks like companies are realizing that bandwidth has a cost and there's the need to define rules to manage these costs. On our servers, we have customers that are paying very low prices and using *a lot* of bandwidth and processors, while others are paying more and using almost nothing. But it's hard to build a statistical model having almost no data to work on.

The other issue is quality: is people willing to pay for services such as backups, reduntant servers, more bandwidth? If anybody would offer such services, would webloggers be interested in paying more (or in some cases, to start paying) for their tools and services?

In the very unlikely case that for some reason I have your IP address, there could be a message for you in the yellow box on the right of this page.

It's just a silly experiment: I was watching the logfile of my weblog's server, and I saw a known IP address passing by. "It would be cool to be able to leave a message to this person" I thought. Well, now I can, simply dropping a .txt file with the message into my Radio/www folder.

Of course, it could be better implemented using cookies, a Radio tool could manage subscriptions, there could be other features... who knows, maybe this might a new tool (after we will finish the ones we are currently working on!).

Next Saturday, the 25th, I'll meet Marc Barrot, who is on vacation in Venice!

<teasing> an "Expand all" button at the top of the page would make it perfect, and keep conservative weblogs readers happy. </teasing>

Recently I have bumped a few times in this message on Apple's server:

It happened also for the Zoë site (the cool email management system), so now we are offering a new home for Zoë.

Now, back to Apple: they have decided that bandwidth is expensive, and the time of free stuff on-line is over. This is ok.

It's known that Apple is not automatically blocking sites according to bandwidth usage, but insted there's a sysadmin picking the most active ones.

It's also a known fact that many small Apple developers were using Apple iTools service as a way to distribute their software from powerful servers with lots of bandwidth.

Each time I saw the above message, I was trying to download legal software from a developer who has been working on Apple's new OS.

Now... this doesn't look like a good way to help developers, besides, I think that most people getting this message is just people like me trying to download software for their Macs.

It would be nice to be able have only today's posts open, with previous days collapsed.

Not easy... but I guess I won't have to wait for long

Adam Wendt's Agnostic Audiophile Smorgasborg: "I have already used google 25 times today, its only 12:40 and I didn't get up till nearly 10:30. At that rate by 10pm when I go to watch anime I would have used google over 100 times. Already up to 27 times just writing this post.

I guess that isn't directly related to the economy but still interesting. :) "

I think that this is related to the new economy.

Web sites first and weblogs later have given to everybody the power to express themselves, which is cool.

But google is the glue that's holding all this together. Over 90% of traffic coming from search engines on the sites we manage is now coming from google. This means that somehow they have now a monopoly as far as web searching is concerned. Luckly they cannot do evil things this this monopoly (at least... none that I can think of at the moment), and they could very easy loose this position if they did.

But let's not understimate the power of Google: for some reason I have been removed from Google once for a few days, and I felt like I had dropped of the face of the web.

I was discussing with my wife something related to all this while shopping at a super market this morning.

We were reading various products ingredients on their labels, trying to understand which are the best, or at least which ones don't pose some kind of threat to our health. While trying to figure out what was something written on a shampoo bottle, I said "I would like to have google available now".

The new economy brought this to us: freedom to access information, from anywhere, from anybody. To me this is a particularly important issue, especially at a time when here in Italy the three main private TV network are controlled by the Prime Mininster, and the three other main public networks are controlled... uh... by the Prima Mininster. I'm not saying that there's currently lack of freedom in Italy, but having access to the web and thus to ideas and opinion from people allover the world, makes me feel definitely more comfortable.

But access to information does not mean culture. What need to be done (and I'm afraid is not the top priority now among governments of most Western countries) is to create the cultural bases for the new generations. Having access to this world of information will do no good unless we'll provide the tools to decode and understand this huge amount of data that the new economy helping us to create.

Otherwise we, as individuals, will loose.

It's incredible how you notice the importance of a tool when it stops working. While it looks like public instant outliners after the first weeks slowed to almost no traffic at all (while still cosuming bandwith and servers' processor for the polling), at least here they have become a very valuable intranet tool.

It's getting real, the client side is almost done and server side the database is taking form. While working on it we are getting new ideas and trying to implement them while we go. The full story here.

Send comments, criticism and suggestions .

While I'm writing this, I'm watching Steve Jobs introducing Xserve and thinking.

Tomorrow we are going to deploy an IdeaTools standard set up, which is made by two servers, one running Windows + Frontier, the other running Linux + Apache. So far this kind of approach has give us all the advantages of a dynamic server (Frontier) plus the reliability of Linux and Apache, plus on the Linux server we can run database engines such as mySql or PostgreSQL and do all kind of tricks between the two environment. Thanks to our synamic rendering technology, we can also easily move the load between the two server mantaining the main dynamic features of web site pages.

Even if the two servers set up still provides some advantages (for example, the two servers can montor and backup each other), now it looks like we could merge the whole set up into one server.

Something I had not realized is that these servers come standard with two Ethernet interfaces, so also running the two web servers on separate IP addresses is going to be much more simpler than it is today. As far as we are concerned, this could truly be the ultimate server platform.

The question is: will our customers be willing to accept an Apple server? So far we've been using IBM servers (notoriously you'll never get fired for buying IBM) and also a Microsoft OS (disabling IIS makes it remarkably reliable). I just hope that the public will understand that we are talking about a Unix flavour and that these servers will actually be as reliable as they claim. I guess that I'll have to order one now...

This is what I had in mind done with good ol' tables. I'm absolutely not saying that it cannot be done with CSS, simply that I don't know how to do it.

It should scale gracefully, work at all resultions and be easy to edit. Anybody out there willing to give it a try?

Fonts and lists in this example are rendered with CSS. I wanted to make also the background a variable, using .png format to manage the transparent soft shadows, but as I have already found out, this soulution doesn't easily work with IE/Win (I'll do it for my presentations ).

s l a m: "From a security conscious sysadmin p.o.v., it is a mixed blessing though. The mechanism built into Frontier that makes Radio and any Frontier Tool autoupdate a snap (thanks so much UserLand :-) makes it also the ideal Trojan horse.

If UserLand (in Radio's case) or eVectors (in activeRenderer's case) get compromised by evil minded no-goodniks, they have unlimited access to your workstation, with an active connection to the Internet. Yumm."

Marc Barrot is right, security with Radio tools could become an issue, especially as the installed base will grow. As it is today, Radio could potentially host dangerous tools (yes Marc, I'm reading your mail now ;). Besides trying to make updating servers relatively secure (which is something that we are taking quite seriously), there could actually be the risk of having malicious tools distributed from any source.

Since I was blaming Microsoft only a few days ago about the sourge of the most recent worm, I think we should also make sure that the same should not happen with Radio.

A way to make things a little safer could be to make Radio's www folder its sandbox, and making sure that any access outside that folder is authorized by the user. Just an idea...

1. Create an rss feed to announce news, webservices and tools for Radio UserLand;
2. Develop APIs for the updates system to allow an easy interop with e-commerce applications (already digging...)

Notice to Radio users uploading their weblogs via ftp: if your home page on the server suddenly becomes an empty html file, and your events page reports Can't upstream because "Can't find a sub-table named "6008"." (where the number can be any number), most probably your server's hard disk is full

With many of them there have been very interesting discussions and at least three ideas for new tools that could be developed.

On the marketing side there's an interesting message by Ralph Hempel about the minimum size of a tool. There might be some tools doing just one little thing, but a little better than Radio itself. Is there a market for such tools?

I guess that since this is a completely new market we'll have to find answers ourselves.

The user base is the most important issue to consider: with a very large community, I think that there could be a market for let's say "micro-tools", tools that enhance some specific features of Radio for a very low cost.

With a smaller base (as we have today) it would probably make more sense to create "utility tools" that pack together a set of tools.

One of the main reasons we want to set up this centralized registration system is also to be able to gather and share at least some information on how this market is moving. UserLand could also help sharing their POV. John?.

I think that it is time for us Radio/Frontier developers to get moving. Here's our first step.

But this is nothing new.

What I would like to see is an alertbox about weblogs. Also if the whole weblogs world is based on a DIY-oriented philosophy, I think that having Jakob's opinion would be very interesting.

Thoughts?

Ok, ok, I give up.

When I first got on-line, at the end of the last century, my company was named StudioIdea, and I registered the studioidea.it domain name.

A couple of years ago we changed our name to evectors, so all my email addresses are now @evectors.it. I kept my old @studioidea.it addresses working both for "backward compatibility", and because it was kind of cool, made me feel a little like a pioneer having a domain registered "before 960129" (apparently the whois databases didn't keep track of registrations before)

Starting next week I'll disable all @studioidea.it addresses because I've been receiving an average of 100 spam messages per day there and almost nothing else.

This is because at the old times, posting your email address on a web page was not a big deal, to the contrary, everybody was doing it hoping to get some messages back.

We all did this in good faith, now we are paying the consequences. I hate this.

If anybody out there is still using my old address, from the next week I will not be reading it anymore.

Somehow I had totally missed the news. Available on May 14th. Hmmm, very interesting. We have just started experimenting running Frontier and Apache on the same OsX server, but what was missing was the machine to mount at the server farm (or in a closet...).

What's going on in these windows?   [Scripting News]

Yeah, what's going on? But most of all: will it work on MacOS? I'm afraid it will not...

I decided to start from what I have been avoiding for a while, the "Say who you are" page, even if I find hard writing about myself. Here's a first release of the about page.

At Evectors we are working on so many applications and tools at the same time, that we decided to create a tool help us manage our tasks

TeamTasks Tool is a simple to use tool to manage task workflows. It's not ready for prime time, but I wanted to share some screen shots to see if anybody might be interested.

After the meeting, after several restarts, after buying on-line a utilities upgrade, after re-installing the OS, after re-updating it to the most current version, after spending part of my digital life sometime at the beginning of the '70 (something have reset the internal clock, I wanted to try to post something on my weblog from the '70s, but decided that Radio might not have liked it) I'm back on-line reading the news.

Compared with what's happening in the rest of the world, mine has been a pretty good day...

Today, a simple little macro to add Post-it like notes to your stories. All instructions and downloads in this story. It's a very simple thing, I know, but it cannot be a breathtaking revolution every day, uh?

PS: Apparently the png transparent files are not rendered properly with IE on Windows. They look good with IE and Mozilla on my Mac. Still digging...

Who said that there's no spell checking for Radio weblogs? Just check the comments of the posts below and you will see that I have a perfectly working spell checking solution: my friend Marc Canter.

Do you remember Yoda in Star Wars Episode I saying "Always two there are, a master and an apprentice"? Well, this is Marc and me, obviously he's the master. I hope the story will end differently in our case .

So I'm still here, waiting for the call

Scripting News: "To the Macromedia guys, Paolo Valdemarin is a guy you should talk with. His company, evectors, based in Italy, makes software that turns Dreamweaver into a great tool for designing Radio templates."

GoodMorning MacroMedia!

If you want to get in touch send an email clicking on this icon . We also have an English version of our site at www.evectors.com which is far from perfect but you'll probably be able to understand a little bit more about us than translating the Italian site with babelfish.

PS: here's how the theme of the weblog looks like while edited with DreamWeaver.

The funny thing about Italian domain names is that they all sound like English verbs. How do we solve this? Let's xml-rpc.it!

Not sure what we'll do with it yet...

This is what we currently do:

• The standard IdeaTools deployement architecture is made of two identical machines, one running Windows+Frontier (this is what we call the IdeaTools Server), the other running Linux+Apache. Our main servers at the web farm are a couple of IBM Xseries 330, 2 PIII 1 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, HD 2 x 40G raid HW, 1 U.
• A Frontier script on the IdeaTools server every night makes a backup of all root files + copies from the Linux server all contents that are served statically via Apache
• A script on the linux server download an additional copy of the backup on the Linux server's disc
• At this point we have complete backups of both servers on both servers
• Yet another script compacts all root files and sends the compressed file to another server which is at our offices
• A last script saves a copy of one of two root files every night (this helps a lot to prevent database corruption and keep everything speedy)
• Both servers have a RAID system that should keep everything up and running also in the case one of the SCSI discs explodes
• We have a quite impressive network intrusion detection system called Demarc that keeps track of everything happening on our networks (since we installed it we realized just how many failed attacks are happening every day)
• Most important of all, we have a team of incredibly good people that keep everything running and constantly updated!

Overall we should be able to recover from almost any crash scenario... but of course I've worked for enough time in this business and have seen enough "asteroid-smashing-server-farms" movies not to feel totally safe