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I am setting up a new site for a weblog - Jambalaya. When Radio from Userland first came out I had a private 'desktop' weblog of the same name, but I was disinclined to let it upstream to Userland's private 'cloud', preferring as usual to do my own thing.
Now I feel the urge to 'go public' with some of my musings (Spring must be in the air), but the question is how. There is of course BayswaterFarm News, which has been running a long time and gets plenty of hits - mainly I suspect because my 'how to' article on SquirrelMail for OSX comes up readily on Google. But BFN runs on Frontier/Manila, requiring people who wish to comment to sign up to the site before they can say anything. The comment feature in Radio seems much more accessible.
So Radio would be the logical choice, but for two problems. First, although I have used Radio (and Pike before it) since their inception, this has been almost exclusively to maintain Frontier/Manila sites via WebEdit, and all of the upstreaming, Radio Community Server stuff has passed over my head. Second, Userland has a serious problem with its documentation and support. Sure, at a basic level, their products work 'ot of the box' and within minutes one can be up and running -- a very great strength-- but beyond that it gets progressively more difficult.
I do not write programs or maintain systems for a living but have been doing both 'for fun' for a number of years. I have used Frontier since its earliest web-framework days and will no doubt continue to do so. My knowledge of how it works is quite good (for an amateur) and I with a bit of effort I can and usually do solve my own problems. In the past this has been facilitated by a combination of excellent 'foundation' texts by Matt Neuburg and a willing and responsive Userland team and community. Sadly, both are now much less accessible.
Matt's Frontier book (O'Reilly) is now out of print and out of date, but I have a copy and use it. It is an excellent primer on UserTalk, Userland's scripting language. When Manila was released, Matt provided an essential on-line tutorial -- Dr Matt -- which explained beautifully some of the arcanities of Frontiers mainResponder and how the Manila framework worked. This is no longer available: why? All the signs are that for some reason or another it has been actively suppressed. Strange.
Although there is quite extensive documentation on Frontier/Manila/Radio/RCS, it is scattered, hard to find, and incomplete. Front-end users are relatively well catered for, but system managers and maintainers are not. UserLand would do well to bring what is available together in a coherent form. Simply having a 'directory' mechanism does not ensure it will be adequately populated.
A useful technique in the past has been search.userland.com, but this seems now to have been deprecated in favour of Google searches from the Frontier and Radio sites that return multiple hits for the same articles. For an example, try searching for 'RCS setup' or just plain 'RCS' in search.userland.com, and see if you can find anything that actually tells you how to set up a Radio Community Server. Its OK to have your documentation scattered all over the place if there is a powerful-enough search mechanism to aid retrieval.
UserLand itself has changed over the years. When I first started using Frontier and for some time after, it was free and had built up a strong community of supporters with on line/email discussion groups where one could almost guarantee helpful responses to posted quries within a few hours. Then, and for entirely understandable reasons, UserLand started to licence its software for a fee. Naturally this changes one's perception somewhat: when you are paying for something directly you expect a higher level of service. (This is certainly true in healthcare: just compare litigation rates in US and UK!). The irony is, imho, that UserLand (and its community) are now less responsive than in the past. (Just look at the volume of traffic on their discussion groups/email lists over the years).
So, for Jambalaya, I'm going to try something different: Moveable Type. It looks nice and is widely used, and talked about. Thus far I have downloaded the softeware and am working through the installation. One thing's for sure, UserLand wins hands down in ease of installation and getting off the starting blocks. The documentation for MT looks good (so far), but setting it up is a more exacting process. Who knows, I may yet return to Radio ;-)
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