icblog

Moving from a Radio Userland based Blog to a different system was a painstaking process. This was one of the reasons for my long hiatus. (Yes, I did want time away, and yes I was busy enjoying myself while away from posting.) Getting the posts to an MT/WP import friendly format was difficult, then all of the data needed to be massaged quite a bit. Importing the comments yet was another level of complication. Several things needed to be done by hand rather than by scripting.

So without further adieu, here are the 10 things I won’t miss about Radio Userland:

1. “Funky” HTML (good luck trying cleaning it up, Radio seems to do whatever it wants to with HTML).
2. Userland’s “Web Bug” gif embedded in RU generated pages (used to create the last 24 hour referrer logs) is extremely slow to load, making your whole site seem slow even when you “self host”.
3. Lack of control over code. Sure you can make your own changes to Radio’s Engine, but there’s a chance they’ll get written over in the next root update.
4. Poor/Scattered Documentation - Userland should give users a free electronic copy of Roger’s book with the first year’s subscription to RU.
5. Not a lot product development going on. Dave has moved on to other things leaving Userland and its applications in stagnation.
6. Difficult to move you data to a different system (“lock-in”). It took me quite a while a a lot of tinkering to move my RU content to a less proprietary, more open format.
7. Year old bugs have yet to be addressed.
8. Client Application is a CPU hog (at least on Mac OS X and Mac OS 9).
9. It’s 2004 and no still SFTP available (unless you feel like creating your own tunnel).
10. Almost impossible to do anything with comments & trackback entries if they’re hosted by Userland’s servers (which by default they are and there are no easy plug-ins to other services). Moving the comments to another service is a lot more difficult than moving your posts.
11. (Bonus) You’re pretty much forced to have a static pages (unless you really want to jump through some hoops) for your site (no php/python/perl/ruby interaction sorry).