I should give up and go to sleep
But I ran into one more thing to talk about. Over on the radio-dev list, Dave posted a link to a newbie needing some help. Right here I found the best decription of some of my Radio frustrations to date.
Out of the box, Radio is a wonderful, easy to use, weblogging tool. You can be up and running in seconds. And if all you care about is working on your blog and doing regular posts to it, you'll never have any issues. But one of the cool things about Radio to me is that there is this whole scripting environment behind it. The only problem is, finding documentation on it. There are a few tutorials on the Radio home page, but there was nothing easily available that really explained the different parts of it. I kept feeling like I was seeing part of a big picture and it would never quite fully come into focus.
There is a lot written about what you can do with Radio and its language, UserTalk, but it is all reached through searching for things. Which, if you don't have enough background on how it all works can be a bit daunting. In a lot of ways it reminds me of my early days with various MUD servers, specificly the ones like MOO. MOO is a MUD server where the core program handles network connections and interpreting the MOO programming language (I'm not too sure of the internals and may be simplifying it, but that's the gist of it). So everything from the concept of what is a character to what is a location is programmed within the database for a world. Once again, there's a lot of stuff out there to work with, but the only way to figure it out is to sit down and really take the whole thing apart, or to have a really good guide.
Radio needs a better initial guide. Something that gives a more general view of how it all fits together. My guess is that it already exists, I've just missed the link someplace, or haven't come across it. I think the current tutorials are actually great, they have helped in my understanding of things, but there's still more background information I crave. I responded to the intial mail to the mailing list about this with these thoughts. One thing I like about the whole Userland crew is that they seem very receptive to peoples comments. They really are aware of what their users thing (at least as long as they voice their opinions).
