Customer Reviews

Radio UserLand Kick Start

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I recently had the chance to review the book Radio Userland Kick Start by Rogers Cadenhead. So what's a blogger who doesn't use that software doing reviewing a book like that? It's always good to know what else is out there, and Rogers has done a really good job creating a guide to get you going.

The book is divided into four parts with the following chapters: Tuning in to Radio Userland; Publishing a Weblog; Enhancing a Weblog; Reading RSS Newsfeeds with the News Aggregator; Upstreaming Files to a Web Server; Designing a Weblog Theme; Calling Scripts to Create Weblog Content; Creating Outlines; Backing Up Data; Exploring the Object Database; Creating New Tables and Other Data; Editing a New Script; Writing Statements and Calling Verbs; Reading and Writing to the Database; Using Variables and Arrays; Working with Loops and Conditionals; Developing Web Services with XML-RPC; Sending and Receiving Email; Handling Errors and Debugging Scripts; Creating and Distributing Tools; RSS; OPML; XML; XML-RPC; Index

The book opened my eyes to the fact that Radio Userland isn't just "blogging software", but is in reality a development environment for content management. It edits your content, aggregates news feeds from other sources, and publishes the content to your hosting service. It also does scripting for building specialized tools to work with your content. Rogers' examples are easy to follow, and help you to understand exactly what types of tasks you can build on your own. Regardless of whether you're a blogger who can't program or a techno-guru who wants to start sharing thoughts, you should be able to benefit from this book.

The statement is made that Radio Userland has no official documentation manual and that the author hopes that you'll consider this book the next best thing. Based on what I see here, I would agree with him.

Radio Userland is a wonderful program for creating and maintaining individual blogs. It is accessible to beginners with little computer knowledge, but also offers amazing flexibility and control to those users willing to learn more about its features. This book is a great introduction both to Radio's basic features and the more advanced capabilities. I was at a sort of advanced beginner stage when I found this book, and it helped me move to the point where I could write simple scripts to automate various features of my weblog, and, I hope, to do even more yet.