RSS dependence Day - 19/01/2002
Reading RSS is really addictive: more and more news. The problem is not anymore how long it takes me to find interesting news bits, but rearranging these chunks of information so I can ultimately illustrate my PoV and draw the bigger picture. Analyze, summarize, publish.
Yes, Radio is a good RSS reader (although it tends to get slower at the end of the working day, just like
Peerkat. Except that I can hack Peerkat - which also happens to be natively unix-friendly). Alas Radio is quite useless to manage the flux. All you can do is read and delete or keep or route. If you can delete more than one item at once, you can't post four items in
one click. And there are no easy ways to merge, change the order of some previously post/published items or keep some items for later. Too bad,
JRobb was bragging so loudly about
K-logs, I was expecting more
KM on a desktop.
Furthermore, what really bothers me with Radio is that I can't really see what is so superior in the webapp compared to a homegrown php/perl/python solution. And with the homegrown solution, I don't have to learn yet another scripting language to do what I want.
I guess I'm not the average user: I
can code my own system and I can tweak my crontable. But then, Radio documention really stinks for a newbie, if he wants to do more than the average
blogthis. No easy way to
grok the
Zen of Radio (just like it is quite hard to grasp the power of
Zope). I just installed
CityDesk and there is an
offline tutorial that you can read at your pace. I am not sure it can be printed though.
Radio is good for RSS. Intuitive for upstreaming and easy publishing (but publishing was easy
before). Innovative with the .txt as data magically rendered and easy integration of macros. Strangely enough, the outliner - that could help to manage ideas and info - is hidden. And the great
use me anywhere feature of Blogger is not available. Plus it is not translated into french, so I can't even offer it to dad. Is it worth 50 € ? still 20 days and some wine hacking to decide.
