Rodent Regatta

Newbie Questions *
After wrestling with HTML fundamentals all weekend and trying to understand the connection between weblogs and web sites, I find that I’ve still got a bunch of questions. There must be something that I haven’t found yet that answers questions such as these; or, maybe Radio is much more intuitive and I just don’t ”get it.” What prerequistes have I missed that are required courses for Radio 8?

1. What’s really happening when I ”update radio root”? Is this what I see when I go to the news aggregator and find some listings of bug fixes? In other words, does ”3 parts downloaded” mean 3 bugs fixed?


2. Who uses the desktop application that came with Radio 8.0? I come to this posting page in IE6 to post and to review what is going on. What am I missing by not using the desktop app?


3. Can I ”subscribe” to any web site using the news aggregator or do only sites that have the orange XML feature work?


4. What do themes actually change? In the folders, templates, etc., which ones should I copy in order to be able to return to the default setting of a fresh download/install of Radio?


5. What is meant by dropping things into the wwwfolder? What is really happening if I do that? What are some examples of this?


6. How is a permalink actually established? Why do some people have titles over each post with a permalink next to them? You can see this here.


7. Where can I get a better understanding of what categories really do for me?


8. What are events?


9. What value do referer rankings have?


10. What are the rules and methods associated with making a weblog a person’s web site? Can I use Radio to create pages of other content? Can I make the Radio weblog a part of another web site without losing any of Radio’s capabilities? Does userland host a Radio web site if it goes by a completely separate domain name? (e.g. Would I have to arrange for a host for somesite.com?)


11. What templates (I hope this is the correct term) are used to change the ”Look” of my weblog? Clearly, a theme changes a lot. But what if I find the right theme, then want to tweak certain things about it – like where the date/time/permalink symbol appear after a post? Or, how the links down the right hand side of the default theme are grouped and displayed?

(* How long after the initial download of Radio can someone remain a newbie? How much thrashing must they do and for how long before they are labeled ”moron?”)