Nerve-wracking, inflexible, and unintuitive.
via Scott Rosenberg: David Pollard did an interesting <a href= "http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/04/11.html#a168">survey on Radio UserLand usage among the bloggers at Salon.com. Reading the responses for the question "what do you like/dislike about the existing Salon/Radio features?", one gets the impression that using Radio is not a very pleasant experience. The words cumbersome, nerve-wracking, inflexible, and unintuitive are used to describe the software and the words pathetic, sporatic, and impersonal are used to describe the support. One respondent: "ask other bloggers, not Userland, when you need technical help." Hmmm... didn't Dave Winer say open source software makers were the ones who did not care about users? Sounds like us open source guys are not alone ;-)
But seriously folks, I bet that many of those complaints also apply to Blogger, Movable Type, and, of course, Roller (OK, I have no idea about Movable Type). Blogging software makes web publishing a lot easier for non-geeks than it was with tools like FrontPage, but we've still got a ways to go.
The responses for "what additional functionality is needed in Salon/Radio?" are interesting as well. Better get on it UserLand, Dave Pollard just did your market research for you. Good ideas for Roller too.RSS fixins'
<a href= "http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/22/RSS-Problems">Tim Bray, RSS Needs Fixing: Because, boys and girls, RSS is no longer a science experiment, it's becoming an important part of the infrastructure, which means that a lot of programmmers are going to get the assignment of generating and parsing it, and they need better instructions.
XML co-inventor Tim Bray comments on the problems with RSS and uses language so foul that not even <a href= "http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/static/crimson1/fuckbrained.gif">Dave Winer can handle it (Dave deleted his post about it, but forgot to delete his illustration). Tim has a lot to say and you should <a href= "http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/22/RSS-Problems">read it yourself if you care about RSS, but the two problems he complains about are that entity-encoded HTML is allowed and that relative URI references are not allowed. Tim also mentions the informality of the RSS spec. I agree with all of his points and especially the one about the spec. We need a real, formal spec, managed by a standards body, something like the one that Mark Nottingham recently wrote up. I'm not sure why Mark's spec got such a luke-warm reception.
Tim's article, in part, was responsible for sending Sam Ruby's fingers into furious blogging mode. Basically, Sam agrees with Tim on both of his points, suggests adding a namespace to RSS, and mentions bringing IETF in as an RSS standardization body. Sam wrote up a bunch of excellent posts on RSS, much better than the post you are reading right now. Check them out:
Back to work.
Today I go back to work after week of furlough (happy happy, joy joy).
Here are some photos from my week off: