Status-Q

OK. I’ve clicked. I’ve just started to realise quite how cool a piece of software Radio is.

I’ve been pretty impressed so far just using it for reading news and writing weblogs. It’s great for that. And I knew that under the hood there was a lot of power if you wanted to program in the macro language, and I hoped at some point I would have the time to do that.

But you don’t need to delve that deep into the internals to realise the power. It may be THE SIMPLEST way to create a web site. Once Radio is set up and running on your machine, you can just dump text files into a particular directory on your hard disk.

They are rendered into HTML using a default template (which you can customise or replace). Automatically.

They are uploaded onto your web site. Automatically.

Any images etc that you might also want to use or refer to in the pages you just drop into the same directory and they are also uploaded. Automatically.

If you want to change the text of your pages, you just open them in a text editor, edit the text, and hit ‘Save’. That’s it. Everything else happens. Automatically.

And despite all this, there’s a great deal of power and flexibility there if you want it. You can automatically upload different directories on your hard disk to different sites, for example. To start learning how to use some of these nice features, look at this page. (Oh, and another hint if you looking for something on the Radio site – almost everything beyond the absolute basics is contained within the Directory).

It’s not often that I find myself reaching for my wallet to pay so readily for a piece of software. But it just happened. Automatically.