So, today is the last day of my Radio demo. Do I purchase or do I let it go by?

Published on by Andy Affleck

So, today is the last day of my Radio demo. Do I purchase or do I let it go by?

Pros


  • News aggregates automatically in my chosen RSS feeds. One stop shopping (of course, I can do this via other sources, notably NewsIsFree.com, which also lets me post directly to my blog)
  • Through services and Radio Express, I can post directly to my blog from almost any app under OS X and from any website. (of course, I can do this using AppleScript and Blogger’s own javascript popup box)
  • I can easily theme my site using a variety of looks and feels (then again, Radio’s templates make it somewhat difficult to design my own site the way I want it through a somewhat convoluted interface and with blogger I have much more full control which has worked well for me).
  • An RSS file for my site is automatically created and weblogs.com is updated when I update my blog. (So what? What, exactly, does that get me? My readership hasn’t changed as far as I know and I never really did this for a wide audience but friends, family, and interested parties. I am not interested in becomming a popular blog so what do these features really gain me? And I can still achieve both of these goals using blogger pro.)
  • Neat little calendar on my site to go to past days (and I can do the same thing, less attractively, with blogger.)
  • Posts are mirrored to my blogger-based blog. (So what? Why do I need two blogs at all? In fact, it would be much easier if I *only* had the blogger blog and not the radio-hosted one.)
  • Ability to build my own services (so what? I can’t think of a single one I need or want. This is a neat idea which I have no need for.)
  • Extremely handy method of adding images to my blog. (I know HTML, I did fine doing this manually before).

Cons


  • Yet one more application I have to leave running and one which spikes the CPU ever 5-10 seconds. Just watching in top and with a load monitor running, I see a 20%-40% hogging of the CPU ever 5-10 seconds. (So what? It’s UNIX. I haven’t noticed any slow-downs on the front-end and UNIX is designed to handle these situations gracefully and does. And leaving another app running means little. Again, UNIX handles this just fine and I have a boat-load of RAM.)
  • I cannot make the aggregator run when I want it to. Sometimes I get a free minute and want to see what’s new but it’s been less than an hour since the last run and I have to wait. I have found no way to make it go manually. (I’m sure there is a way or there is a way to hack this functionality in. And there’s nothing stopping me from still using newsisfree.com and so forth.)
  • It costs money while other things which do what I need are free. (Well, true, but $40 isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things and to achieve the same functionality I have to cobble together a number of other resources into a loose confederation of software packages which is a pain. And Radio is being actively developed. New features are coming out all the time.)
  • Very hard to find certain items in the documentation. For example, I remember an announcement for a spam-free email link but I cannot find it at all at Userland’s site. I’ve done searches for “spam-free” and “spam” and “email” in radio userland’s site, I’ve wandered the discussion boards (I did find a message about someone having trouble with it but nothing about it itself). For the life of me, I can’t find it at all. OK, I finally found it by searching scripting.com’s archives. Why is there nothing about this on Radio’s site?

The Bottom Line
Honestly, I don’t know. I do know that I have been blogging more and reading more since using Radio so it is clearly making my blogging-life easier but it’s not clear to me if that is Radio’s doing or the fact that I never bothered to get the other tools doing what I need them to do.

If I can find a way to NOT have the radio blogger and only have this publish to my blogger blog (or if a reverse bridge allowing posts made to my blogger site to come over to the radio site existed) then I’d be truly content.

Any thoughts out there? I’d love to hear from you. <%radio.macros.mailTo ()%>