manila or radio?
Al Mac
Manila-Newbies@userland.com
Tue, 25 Jun 2002 22:30:57 -0500
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You may need to consider a combination of both.
One Manila site shared by participants in each group.
Some of the participants also have Radio.
Think of Manila as being a shared location that can be visited by MANY
individuals from MANY PCs.
Think of Radio as being Manila on YOUR PC desk top with YOUR PC web site
copied to some public like-Manila site that other people can access. It
does not seem to be the right tool for a group of people on different
PCs. Rather EACH PC should have its OWN site, and everyone link their PCs
Radio sites to everyone else in the group.
Radio supports multi-authoring where more than one person contributes to
the site.
You might want to review what that does for you.
As an alternative to organizing topics of discussion on Manila, take a look
at Categories in Radio.
Look at Outlining for your to do lists.
For long articles (which I sometimes also do) consider connection standards
of your users ... if some are on broadband and others on dial up, you have
to consider how annoying you want to be to the people with slow access.
Both Radio and Manila support uploaded files, like spread sheets and word
processed documents, but your readers need to have Excel or Word or Access
or whatever on THEIR PCs to be able to process these uploaded files, so you
may prefer to move towards PDF or some other software that you expect to be
standard across all your users.
Radio does the news feeds but Manila does not.
Explaining that topic might be inappropriate to Manila-Newbies.
For people who know Manila but not Radio, basically you can 'subscribe' to
various other web sites & every time they change, your site is told the
last date it changed was whatever & on that day there were however many
changes. Well obviously various news media outlets are changing
non-stop. I like to go to Homeland Security and CDC to see the latest on
solving the challenges of Anthrax and Dirty Bombs, but sometimes they go a
week or two with no new info. With news feed subscription I not waste time
going & seeing that it not changed since my last visit. I would like the
news feeds to include date last time I was there, and how many changes
since my last visit, so I would then sort on which ones changed the most
since my last visit.
You do not want a master list of newsfeeds because there are tens of
thousands available. Instead, you want a Google plug in to your site so
that you can search for newsfeeds by topic then push some button to
subscribe to this or that.
Mark might want to cross-post some questions to the Radio discussion group
http://radio.userland.com/discuss/
Browser compatibility is important.
You can update a Manila site using Microsoft IE, AOL, and a great variety
of other browser alternatives, but Radio is more restrictive. Try doing
WYSIWhatever that is Radio without Microsoft IE.
There are some licensing topics.
With Manila you pay $40.00 per site that will each be shared by a group of
individuals. There might be 5 groups, each with 10 people = $200.00
With Radio you pay $40.00 for each and every unique PC that is doing this
stuff. If these people dial in from home, work, mobile PC, each and every
PC needs a separate license.
Two or more PCs in the same building, each one needs a Radio license.
Do you have any shared PCs where 2 or more people in an office or household
who use same PC?
Will they need different sign ons to this?
It gets real complicated if PC-A runs the Radio, and you want to get at the
site from PC-B.
The READ ME on Radio says NOT FOR EXPORT OUTSIDE THE USA but I see people
from Europe, Asia, South America apparently using it.
You need to check the fine print to see what is Legal.
If you have corporate offices in more than one country, is it legal for
them to be sharing the same site? It is doable, but what kind of trouble
might that open you up to?
Consider what you can do with Manila.
-------------------------------------------------------
Make everyone in each group as an Editor, so they can do the Editors Only
Menu bar.
In Preferences arrange to have all the Editors get e-mail copies of posts
and changes to posts.
If you have vigorous activity this can clutter people's e-mail. They may
prefer to subscribe to a weekly Bulletin (digest) that has links to which
discussions changed. This cannot exactly be automated. You'd have to have
a moderator subscribing to changes and new posts, then cut pasting from
them into the weekly Bulletin.
Designate one person for each site as your official Editor person who knows
how to setup new users.
Notice that you can log on from multiple different machines using an e-mail
address that is not valid from the machine you logging on from. For
example I have to be at my home PC to access certain e-mail address, but I
can use that e-mail address as my identity when browsing in from a
different PC.
One thing you have to be careful about is when you change your identity.
Suppose I am Al Mac with e-mail ABC and I want to change my identity to
Al.M with e-mail ADE ... the act of deleting my old identity also deletes
all posts that I made.
You might not want that to happen.
Teach your people how to do the links ... perhaps have a HOW TO site or
thread connected from the discussion area (left side = start a new
discussion, cool links, etc.) that has stuff like HOW TO change my
password, how to work the different kinds of links: local; double quoted
stories; shortcuts etc.
If you select by Topics rather than Chronological, they are not
Alphabetical but Chronological by when they started, so you need your own
Table of Contents, made easier if all your posts are automatically stories.
>Hi --
>
>I am thinking of a project and don't know if Manila or Radio would be
>better suited for it (hopefully it won't need both). I am a little bit
>familiar with both but not enough to know what-all the capabilities are. I
>used Frontier quite a bit in the Aretha days but have not looked at it
>much since it went commercial. I downloaded the Radio 8 demo and tried it
>for a couple of hours but then let it lapse since I did not have a need
>for it at the time.
>
>We are setting up a handful of working groups (maybe five groups of four)
>within the company and I'd like each one to have a weblog to foster
>discussion and information-sharing. Here's what I think we need:
>
>* Private. The weblogs should be private, preferably running on our own
>server. They should be Internet-accessible but password-protected.
>
>* Shared. Several people will need to be able to post to each weblog, from
>a variety of machines (i.e. one person should be able to post from work,
>home, whatever... preferably they would not need a local application to do
>this).
>
>* Super-easy. Most people posting are not technical.
>
>* Archive-by-topic. Although archiving by date might be ok, I am thinking
>that a memepool-style topical archive will be more valuable in the long
>run. The ability to assign multiple topics to one item would probably be
>necessary.
>
>* Access to newsfeeds. It would be nice to be able to instantly grab news
>items and add them to the weblogs. I started to play with this in Radio
>but got a little bit lost -- iirc it seemed to only be able to show news
>items that had been posted in the last hour, but instead I would need to
>select from everything since the last check (probably once every day or
>two). I also had trouble finding a master list of all available news feeds.
>
>* Discussions. Each item should be discussable.
>
>* E-mail updates. Group members should be updated whenever the weblog page
>is updated.
>
>* Long articles. At some point people will want to be able to write longer
>articles that have their own page (and automatically link to these from
>the home page of course).
>
>* Task management? I can imagine that if folks really like using this tool
>they will want some kind of integrated to-do list related to the
>weblog/website. What I have in mind is a list of tasks for each person,
>which would show up on the page if that person is logged in. Maybe some
>unassigned tasks that everyone in the working group would see.
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>--
>Mark
-
Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)
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You may need to consider a combination of both.<br>
One Manila site shared by participants in each group.<br>
Some of the participants also have Radio.<br><br>
Think of Manila as being a shared location that can be visited by MANY
individuals from MANY PCs.<br><br>
Think of Radio as being Manila on YOUR PC desk top with YOUR PC web site
copied to some public like-Manila site that other people can
access. It does not seem to be the right tool for a group of people
on different PCs. Rather EACH PC should have its OWN site, and
everyone link their PCs Radio sites to everyone else in the
group.<br><br>
Radio supports multi-authoring where more than one person contributes to
the site.<br>
You might want to review what that does for you.<br><br>
As an alternative to organizing topics of discussion on Manila, take a
look at Categories in Radio.<br><br>
Look at Outlining for your to do lists.<br><br>
For long articles (which I sometimes also do) consider connection
standards of your users ... if some are on broadband and others on dial
up, you have to consider how annoying you want to be to the people with
slow access.<br><br>
Both Radio and Manila support uploaded files, like spread sheets and word
processed documents, but your readers need to have Excel or Word or
Access or whatever on THEIR PCs to be able to process these uploaded
files, so you may prefer to move towards PDF or some other software that
you expect to be standard across all your users.<br><br>
Radio does the news feeds but Manila does not.<br>
Explaining that topic might be inappropriate to Manila-Newbies.<br><br>
For people who know Manila but not Radio, basically you can 'subscribe'
to various other web sites & every time they change, your site is
told the last date it changed was whatever & on that day there were
however many changes. Well obviously various news media outlets are
changing non-stop. I like to go to Homeland Security and CDC to see
the latest on solving the challenges of Anthrax and Dirty Bombs, but
sometimes they go a week or two with no new info. With news feed
subscription I not waste time going & seeing that it not changed
since my last visit. I would like the news feeds to include date
last time I was there, and how many changes since my last visit, so I
would then sort on which ones changed the most since my last
visit.<br><br>
You do not want a master list of newsfeeds because there are tens of
thousands available. Instead, you want a Google plug in to your
site so that you can search for newsfeeds by topic then push some button
to subscribe to this or that.<br><br>
Mark might want to cross-post some questions to the Radio discussion
group<br>
<font color="#0000FF"><u><a href="http://radio.userland.com/discuss/" eudora="autourl">http://radio.userland.com/discuss/</a></u></font>
<br><br>
Browser compatibility is important.<br>
You can update a Manila site using Microsoft IE, AOL, and a great variety of other browser alternatives, but Radio is more restrictive. Try doing WYSIWhatever that is Radio without Microsoft IE.<br><br>
There are some licensing topics.<br>
With Manila you pay $40.00 per site that will each be shared by a group of individuals. There might be 5 groups, each with 10 people = $200.00<br>
With Radio you pay $40.00 for each and every unique PC that is doing this stuff. If these people dial in from home, work, mobile PC, each and every PC needs a separate license.<br>
Two or more PCs in the same building, each one needs a Radio license.<br>
Do you have any shared PCs where 2 or more people in an office or household who use same PC?<br>
Will they need different sign ons to this?<br>
It gets real complicated if PC-A runs the Radio, and you want to get at the site from PC-B.<br>
The READ ME on Radio says NOT FOR EXPORT OUTSIDE THE USA but I see people from Europe, Asia, South America apparently using it.<br>
You need to check the fine print to see what is Legal.<br>
If you have corporate offices in more than one country, is it legal for them to be sharing the same site? It is doable, but what kind of trouble might that open you up to?<br><br>
Consider what you can do with Manila.<br>
-------------------------------------------------------<br>
Make everyone in each group as an Editor, so they can do the Editors Only Menu bar.<br>
In Preferences arrange to have all the Editors get e-mail copies of posts and changes to posts.<br>
If you have vigorous activity this can clutter people's e-mail. They may prefer to subscribe to a weekly Bulletin (digest) that has links to which discussions changed. This cannot exactly be automated. You'd have to have a moderator subscribing to changes and new posts, then cut pasting from them into the weekly Bulletin.<br>
Designate one person for each site as your official Editor person who knows how to setup new users.<br>
Notice that you can log on from multiple different machines using an e-mail address that is not valid from the machine you logging on from. For example I have to be at my home PC to access certain e-mail address, but I can use that e-mail address as my identity when browsing in from a different PC.<br>
One thing you have to be careful about is when you change your identity.<br>
Suppose I am Al Mac with e-mail ABC and I want to change my identity to Al.M with e-mail ADE ... the act of deleting my old identity also deletes all posts that I made.<br>
You might not want that to happen.<br><br>
Teach your people how to do the links ... perhaps have a HOW TO site or thread connected from the discussion area (left side = start a new discussion, cool links, etc.) that has stuff like HOW TO change my password, how to work the different kinds of links: local; double quoted stories; shortcuts etc.<br><br>
If you select by Topics rather than Chronological, they are not Alphabetical but Chronological by when they started, so you need your own Table of Contents, made easier if all your posts are automatically stories.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Hi --<br><br>
I am thinking of a project and don't know if Manila or Radio would be better suited for it (hopefully it won't need both). I am a little bit familiar with both but not enough to know what-all the capabilities are. I used Frontier quite a bit in the Aretha days but have not looked at it much since it went commercial. I downloaded the Radio 8 demo and tried it for a couple of hours but then let it lapse since I did not have a need for it at the time.<br><br>
We are setting up a handful of working groups (maybe five groups of four) within the company and I'd like each one to have a weblog to foster discussion and information-sharing. Here's what I think we need:<br><br>
* Private. The weblogs should be private, preferably running on our own server. They should be Internet-accessible but password-protected.<br><br>
* Shared. Several people will need to be able to post to each weblog, from a variety of machines (i.e. one person should be able to post from work, home, whatever... preferably they would not need a local application to do this).<br><br>
* Super-easy. Most people posting are not technical.<br><br>
* Archive-by-topic. Although archiving by date might be ok, I am thinking that a memepool-style topical archive will be more valuable in the long run. The ability to assign multiple topics to one item would probably be necessary.<br><br>
* Access to newsfeeds. It would be nice to be able to instantly grab news items and add them to the weblogs. I started to play with this in Radio but got a little bit lost -- iirc it seemed to only be able to show news items that had been posted in the last hour, but instead I would need to select from everything since the last check (probably once every day or two). I also had trouble finding a master list of all available news feeds.<br><br>
* Discussions. Each item should be discussable.<br><br>
* E-mail updates. Group members should be updated whenever the weblog page is updated.<br><br>
* Long articles. At some point people will want to be able to write longer articles that have their own page (and automatically link to these from the home page of course).<br><br>
* Task management? I can imagine that if folks really like using this tool they will want some kind of integrated to-do list related to the weblog/website. What I have in mind is a list of tasks for each person, which would show up on the page if that person is logged in. Maybe some unassigned tasks that everyone in the working group would see.<br><br>
<br>
Thanks,<br><br>
-- <br>
Mark</blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
-<br>
Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)</html>
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