Rodent Regatta

A Radio Lesson

I’ve grown pretty fond of Userland Software’s Radio product. I’d estimate that I understand 5-10% of what it can do! The simplest things bog me down, so I’m very slow in learning how to make the product do the things I want to do with it.
However, during the long weekend, I accomplished something with about 6 to 8 hours of work that might have taken a lot longer. Other users of Radio might benefit.
I wanted to add a list of links to my public home page that would allow my posts to be viewed by category. I use 20 categories right now. However, after adding the links to my home page, two things were wrong. First, those links weren’t showing up on the pages that showed posts by category. Second, none of the other changes to my #hometemplate & #itemtemplate were available on a ’category view page.’ For example, my comments weren’t available and the search feature for my weblog wasn’t available.
Using the Radio Discussion board, Matthew Ernest solved my problem. (I think Matthew works for Userland, but I’m not certain.) He pointed out that each category folder under the www folder has its own set of templates. I don’t know whether Radio defaults to this condition or whether something I did in all my trial-and-error work caused there to be templates in the category folders.
In any case, he suggested I remove all of the # files from each category folder – except for the #prefs.txt file. That file determines what gets posted in that category. Once those folders no longer had #hometemplate.txt and #itemtemplate.txt files in them, Radio began to look back up to the primary #hometemplate & #itemtemplate files. Now I have category links, comments and a search feature in all the views of my posts. Thanks Matthew!