Radio 8

I’ve been playing with Radio 8 and so far I like it. The news aggregator part of it is better than it was in the past. With previous versions, I seemed to lose news on occasion, but with 8, things appear to be fine.

Radio is now more focused on weblogging than it was before. A Radio license includes hosting space for your blog, and the blogging tools are now more sophisticated. But here’s my problem with the Radio way of blogging. I have to blog from this machine. I want to blog to my own server from my laptop, my desktop, and my office and I can’t easily do that with Radio’s desktop-based system.

Scoble points out that he hates a centralized service for publishing. He wants to have everything local and publish to the server. Personally, I want a Web service for my blog. I want to have a Web interface that I can use from anywhere to edit and publish my stories. I also want a more feature-rich editor that I can use whether I’m online or offline. The editor should be something I install on the machines I use the most, and I should be able to seamlessly publish from any of them without worrying that the other machines will be out of sync. If the data is centrally stored then there’s no synchronization needed.

I use Blogger to manage this blog. The data is all stored on Blogger’s servers and then published by FTP to my servers. And I use blogBuddy as a desktop client for much of my editing.

What I would really like to do is use Radio as my desktop client and publish to my site through Blogger’s XML-RPC interface. There’s a simple example of how to connect Radio to Blogger, but it doesn’t use the Radio browser interface, which is the reason I want to use Radio in the first place.

Radio is based on Frontier’s powerful scripting language. You can write macros to make Radio do many things. So what I would like to do is wire the Radio blog editing interface to Blogger over XML-RPC. It shouldn’t be that hard except for one thing. Where’s the developer documentation? I could worm though all the code that builds the Radio interface and figure it out, but it would still be nice to have some docs so that I don’t have to. Dave, are you listening?

Update: It appears that Dave is listening. I’ve already seen those tutorials, but they don’t really get into managing the existing Radio content management system. I’ve been digging into the scripts taht power Radio and I have a few ideas, but I’d still like to see Userland document the thing. After all they are trying to encourage people to develop things for Radio.