The RSS feeds that Radio3 generates, starting in v0.75, have <cloud> elements. This means that people who subscribe to your feed in compatible aggregators will be notified immediately when you post a new item, and can show the news to readers immediately.

This functionality is called rssCloud, it has been part of RSS since version 0.92.

Here's my linkblog feed with rssCloud support, as an example.

River4 supports rssCloud, as well as WordPress.

Andrew Shell has released an rssCloud server for Node.js. We use his server for Radio3 feeds.

New in Radio3 v0.74, you can now push links to a Slack channel in addition to Facebook, Twitter and RSS.

Getting your WebHook address

The only tricky part of the setup is to get a magic URL from Slack that enables Radio3 to send messages to your channel.

If you click on this link, it will redirect to your Incoming Web Hooks page.

1. Choose a channel from the popup menu.

2. Click the big green button, which takes you to a page with a long URL on it.

3. Copy the URL to the clipboard.

In Radio3

1. Choose Settings from the menu at the right edge of the menu bar.

2. Click on the Slack panel. You should see a bunch of settings like this.

3. Paste your WebHook address in the first field.

4. Click on the first panel in the Settings dialog, and check the box for Slack.

5. Click OK.

Now your Radio3 posts will go to Slack.

Customizing

We've set up defaults so your links will look like this when they arrive in Slack.

If you erase the default values in the Settings dialog, you'll get the Slack default values. Or you can supply your own icon, change the name from radio3.io to whatever you like, or use an Emoji to define your icon.

I display my linkblog on Scripting News, in the Links tab.

To do this, I wrote a bit of JavaScript code. It's really very simple, and since this question comes up from time to time, I thought it would be good to share the code.

Here's a gist on GitHub with the code. You can see this running here.

You can use this as example code for your own projects.

The main feature in this release is the new blog post editor.

How to create a new post

1. Choose Clear all fields from the Feed menu.

2. Choose Blog post from the popup menu above the text box.

3. Enter the title of the post in the dialog that appears.

4. Enter the text of your post in the edit box. You can use Markdown here.

5. When you're ready to publish, click the Submit button.

Video demo

Here's a video that demos the new feature, showing how to create a new post.

Example

This is what a blog post looks like.

How to edit a post

1. Click the edit icon in the same line as the post in the history table.

2. When you're ready to publish your changes, click the Update button.

Other changes

1. Radio3 no longer puts up a modal dialog for errors in tweets. Instead it puts up a status message above the text entry box. The message stays there for 10 seconds, and is then removed.

2. Improved the layout of the history table.

3. Each of the icons in the history table shows a tool tip as you roll the mouse over them.

Apology

First, I am sorry users have to even deal with this issue. It's not good and I want to fix the problem asap. But first let's talk about how to get your posts back.

I'm using a new technique for storing user data, and it's a good one, but I'm still learning how it works, and fixing mistakes.

What to do

1. Choose Restore from Backup from the Feed menu.

2. A confirmation dialog appear telling how many posts it was able to recover. If the number sounds right, click OK, and your posts will reappear in the History table.

3. Please post a comment here, saying it happened. I want to know.

25 is the max

If you have more than 25 posts, and it reports it was able to restore 25, don't worry, that's all you need to restore, because it's using those posts to build your feed. We are maintaining an archive that goes back before the feed start point.

History

Early in the life of Radio3 if there was an error getting your "prefs" from the server, you'd start over with a fresh setup. The next time you made a change, which usually was right away, the new empty data would overwrite the data on the server, and poof all your posts would be gone. This was terrible. It happened to me a couple of times, and the feeling was awful. I resolved to get to the bottom of it, and I think I have, and now I believe Radio3 works as it's supposed to.

And even if it were to happen again, there's a pretty good chance we can get them back, because we're backing up the data independent of the "prefs" file. Eventually I want to switch to the backup method because even though it's a little slower, it's more reliable.

There are no user interface changes in this version of Radio3.

I'm beginning a transition to a new way of storing posts, separate from prefs.

Each post now is stored in a separate object on the server. The object is updated when you edit the post. So it should be possible to reconstruct the history table if there's a glitch.

Eventually I want to transition to this method of storing posts. But for right now it's just a backup.

There's a new kind of "ping" implemented in this version of Radio3.

Instead of sending the address of the user's RSS feed to the receiver, we send the full contents of the post, encoded in JSON.

This makes a richer kind of connection possible, we expect.

Important caveat

Consider this an experimental feature. It's not frozen, it can change. Breakage could very easily happen. And it's conceivable the feature could be withdrawn.

Who this is for

Right now this is just for developers who can operate server applications.

When the messages are sent

When the user saves a new post, or edits an existing post, we send the update message.

How to set up

1. Choose Settings in the system menu (at the right edge of the menu bar).

2. Go to the Advanced panel.

3. Enter the URL of your receiver app in the second spot.

Here's a screen shot.

I've put up a simple handler at the address in the screen shot. It echoes the JSON struct it receives. No guarantees this will remain up for any period of time.

If you want to watch it operate, open the debugging console in the browser. Radio3 shows you the struct it's sending before the send, and the struct it received back. At this time it does nothing with the returned value, but maybe we should use it.

Also: Getting started with Radio3.

Example

Here's an example of the JSON that's sent when a post is updated.

How to tell an update from a new post

A new post will have a ctSends value of 0. It's a serial number, so it increments with each post.

Other fields

You can use the twitterScreenName field to identify the user.

The when field is when the post was created.

text is the contents of the big edit box. It's used in the description element of the RSS item that represents the post.

idTweet is only present if the item has been posted to Twitter. You can turn off posting to Twitter through the Platforms panel in the Radio3 settings dialog, even though you must be signed in to Twitter to use Radio3. So you can't depend on idTweet being there.

guid is the value of the guid sub-element of item in the user's RSS feed.

I'm pretty sure the meaning of the other fields is self-evident. If there are questions, please post a comment below.

Identifying a post

The combination of twitterScreenName and when uniquely identifies a post.

When Radio3 starts up, if there's a failure to connect with the server, rather than present a confusing display with no posts in the history table, we show a simple message saying there was a failure to connect with the server, and ask that the user reload the page.

This can happen when you have a bad Internet connection or when the server crashes. Which happens sometimes. It's usually a matter of a few seconds before it reboots. (Like Radio3 the server is new software, and hasn't been fully burned-in yet.)

Here's what the screen looks like.

Thanks to Michael Lopez for great help tracking down this issue.

This is an advanced technical feature, primarily for developers at this time.

What if you want to hook your Radio3 flow into a service that we don't have built-in support for? You can always use the RSS feed to make the connection, but then you have to poll the feed to see when it updates. That seems inefficient.

So there's a new feature in 0.53 that allows you to specify the URL of a service that we will ping whenever the RSS feed updates. It sends along one parameter, the URL of the feed.

There's a new Advanced settings panel where you can enter this URL.

Please don't post comments about this feature on the main mail list, if you have questions post a comment here. If there's enough interest we'll start a Radio3 developers list.

More info

The URL you provide must be of the form:

http://server.com/page?url=

In other words, all we do before calling it is add the URL of the user's feed to the end of the string you provide. If you don't include the ?url= (or whatever you call the param) then it won't work.

If you want to include a podcast with your Radio3 feed, this is what you do.

1. Paste the URL of the media file in the enclosure section of the Radio user interface. Screen shot.

2. Publish the item.

That's it. Radio3 will automatically figure out how big the enclosure is and what its type is and include it in the feed.

When the item shows up in the history table, there will be a headphone icon next to the other icons. It links to the media file.

Note that the enclosure link will not be sent to Twitter, Facebook or WordPress. If you want the link to be sent, repeat it in the link field of the Radio3 user interface.

Editing WordPress and Facebook posts

In Radio3 v0.51, if you edit a post that was sent to Facebook and/or WordPress, when you save changes, the Facebook and WordPress posts are updated too.

Unfortunately we can't do this for items that were sent to Twitter, there is no provision for updates in the Twitter API.

As a result, there is no 140-char limit on updates. Here's a screen shot showing a post that I'm updating for WordPress and Facebook.

Of course the changes flow to your RSS feed, as before.

The Link column of the history table

The Link column of the history table now connects to the full URL and displays the domain that it points to. This is more informative than what was there before, the hash code of the shortened URL. Screen shot.

New items in the Docs menu

I try to keep the Docs menu full of links to things people ask about frequently.

So if you have a question about Radio3, look there first. You might save time.

When you go to Radio3 the first time, instead of seeing a blank screen, now there's three paragraphs worth of instructions and an explanation of what the product does and its philosophy. When you sign on to Twitter, this is replaced with the edit box and history table.

Here's a screen shot of the new sign-on screen.

You can test it by signing off Twitter, and signing back on.

As you know, Radio3 is a cross-platform linkblogging tool that works with Facebook, Twitter, and posts to a feature-full RSS feed. Now, with this release, we add WordPress to the list of publishing surfaces for Radio3.

Setup

1. In the System menu (at the right edge of the menu bar) choose Settings. Click on the WordPress panel, screen shot.

2. Enter the address of your WordPress site, your username and password. We only use this information to post to your site, when you tell us to do so. The login information is stored on our server.

3. In the Platforms panel, click the checkbox for posting to WordPress.

How to

Use Radio3 exactly as before. Now your links will flow to your WordPress site as well as the other surfaces you've enabled.

What is posted

The text of the post goes in the title of the WordPress post, and the link goes in the body. I tried to mirror the behavior of Radio3 with Facebook and Twitter. It's pretty amazing how well today's WordPress deals with embedded media.

Example

Here's a post I sent to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress.

Questions, problems?

Please report any problems on the mail list or in a comment here.

In this release, as an experiment, we send full links to Twitter, not shortened links.

How it happened

I was going to fix a bunch of problems related to link shortening, thereby making the code more complex. But then I remembered, from my experience with Little Pork Chop that these days shortening links doesn't do much, other than hide the URL from the reader, and add another level of indirection. So I tried an experiment to see if it would work if I sent the full link, even if it was very long, and of course it did.

Please watch carefully for any problems, and report them on the list.

Entering posts by-hand

I also tested creating a post by going directly to Radio3 and entering the text and link manually, without using the bookmarklet, and it now works in this mode as well.

Being conservative

For now, we're still generating the short link, you'll see it in the Link column in the history table. But if this stands up, I imagine that will be taken out of the product sometime soon.

I know there are a few serious programmers using Radio3, so I'm going to explain what I've learned about possible sources of the data-losing bug we're seeing.

Crucial places

There are two places where the contents of your storage can change.

1. When you post something.

2. When you change settings.

So just before doing both those things, the app reloads the data. On a reasonable net connection this takes about 1/4 second. Not something to worry about.

The other place Radio3 loads the data is at startup.

I found a race condition

I'm carefully analyzing how it works, and I've found one place where there's a race condition, where theoretically we can update the data before it's been loaded. That's is almost certainly how we're losing data.

In the v0.46, that race condition is eliminated.

One more robustness change

Now there's another thing I'm doing that should make the data loss impossible, at least this way. A bit of sloppy too-quick programming, meant that if it fails to load the data, it wipes it out. I think this is less likely than it sounds, but I've fixed this too. Instead of continuing after an error (the sloppy programming), it puts up an unmissable error dialog, which relays the message from the server, and asks the user to reload the page.

Instead of losing data, you'll get the dialog. I'm hoping people will take a screen shot of the dialog, if they see it and post it to the list.

Now we can officially unveil Radio3 -- my newest linkblogging tool.

Facebook, Twitter and RSS.

It's a cross-platform linkblogging tool.

The idea is to start a great flow of news to Twitter and Facebook, while enabling new networks to boot up on the open web, building on the RSS support.

When you post using Radio3, you're helping a new open web news network boot up. It's like using solar or wind energy, or riding a bike instead of driving. It's good for the environment.

Getting started

Here are the instructions for getting started with Radio3.

It has history too

The first Radio was Radio UserLand released in 2002. The second was Radio2, a server-based linkblogging tool that ran in the OPML Editor environment. Until last Friday I did all my linkblogging in Radio2. Radio3 is a browser-based JavaScript app with a thin server that runs in Node. The 3rd Radio is by far the best, but of course I'm biased.

The Supremes want to sing for you

Support

Here, in a comment, or on the new Radio3 mail list.

I was curious to see what people were posting through Radio3 so I whipped up a quick app to produce a reverse-chronologic list of tweets.

The list

This is where the list is...

http://radio3.io/tweets.html

It is interesting. However there's a caveat.

Caveat

Centralized resources like this tend to flame out. At the first sign of trouble, someone using this list to complain about Radio3 or about some individual (most likely me) I'll take the application down. So don't use this as a way to stink things up, and expect it to have a short life, and you won't be disappointed.

You can leave it open

If you leave the page open, it'll look for new stuff once a minute and insert it at the top.

If you have a question about using Radio3, please post it here.

You can also use the support mail list.

The idea is to start a great flow of news to Twitter, Facebook and WordPress, while enabling new networks to boot up on the open web, building on the RSS support.

When you post using Radio3, you're helping a new open web news network boot up. It's like using solar or wind energy, or riding a bike instead of driving. It's good for the environment.

Radio3 is a cross-platform linkblogging tool. Your links go to Facebook, Twitter and a new feature-full RSS feed that will make it possible to build new innovative networks on the open web web.

Setup

1. When you go to Radio3 for the first time, click Sign on here in the right corner of the menubar. Choose Sign on Twitter in the menu.

2. Authorize Radio3.

3. Choose Sign on Facebook to authorize Facebook. Note: Until they approve the app, posting to Facebook won't work.

4. Choose Bookmarklet howto in the Feed menu for instructions on installing the bookmarklet.

How to post a new item

Find a news story you want to share with your followers.

1. Click on the bookmarklet.

2. Edit the text.

3. Click Submit.

Repeat.

We only post

We post the items you tell us to. We don't read your tweets, or see who you follow, or follow new people or update your profile (all things Twitter would allow us to do).

Your feed

To see your RSS feed click on the orange RSS icon next to the Submit button or choose Linkblog feed in the Feed menu.

To see your linkblog home page, choose Linkblog home in the Feed menu.

The bookmarklet is an essential part of Radio3.

To install it, drag the "R3" link below into the toolbar of your browser.

R3

Using the bookmarklet

When you're on a page you want to link to, click the bookmarklet. Radio3 will open with the fields of the dialog filled with the title of the page. The link is included, along with a shortened version for Twitter posts.

Questions

The toolbar works differently in each of the browsers. If you have questions, post them here and we'll try to get the answer.

Privacy

• Radio3 does not receive your login information for Facebook.

• Your preferences are stored on our server, but they are stored in a private space on Amazon S3. We can access these preferences.

• We don't receive your Twitter password, but your credentials pass through our server. We maintain a copy in a cache, but only use that for performance purposes.

User support

• Support is provided on the radio3 mail list on Google Groups.

Terms of service

• Use the software to post links to any of the services we support. We reserve the right to cancel the service at any time, for any user, for any reason, or for all users, without notice. Only use it for legal purposes.