Remotely Blogging with Radio
I remember reading somewhere awhile back that a user of Radio was complaining about only being able to blog from one machine. I didn’t quite understand it, as I have blogged from several machines on my home network and several different machines at work. Granted, I don’t have a copy of Radio running on each machine, but it’s easy enough.
How do I do it? I have a server at home that runs Windows 2000. It acts as a fileserver for the local network and does all kinds of other cool stuff. It’s a PII450, nothing special anymore, though it was quite a beast when it was new. This server also runs radio. Did I mention that I also have a cablemodem connection to the internet? I think that helps.
You see, I set up port forwarding on my router/gateway box to forward the port I use for Radio (the default is 5335) to the server running radio. The great thing about Radio is that because it is essentially a web application with a small backend program that runs on the host computer, you can access most of it from any browser. Of course, that assumes that you enable remote access, which I have done.
This means that I can blog from my main box, at my workstation at work, or anywhere on the road, as long as my cable connection doesn’t flake out and the box is on. Of course, you can’t do everything on machines that aren’t running Radio. The one pet peeve I have with this setup is that I can’t easily save files to my local www folder. This means that if I stumble across a cool macro while at work or on the road, I need to remember to download it to Radio machine the next time I am home. The other thing that bugs me is that I can’t edit OPML files on the road. A quick search about a month ago didn’t reveal any small footprint applications that I could use at work or elsewhere that would allow me to edit or save OPML files. Of course, even if I could edit them, I would still not be able to save them to my www folder so that they are upstreamed to the internet…
As long as you can deal with the quirks, blogging with radio on several machines is quite easy. It comes naturally to me, and given the few times I’ve read that people want to blog from more than one machine, I thought I should let the world know. Of course this doesn’t solve everyone’s problems: this solution is not an option for 56k users or people who don’t have (at least one) machine running all day every day. But it does work for the geek that many Radio webloggers are. I continue to think that the $40 I paid for Radio is some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Grouping all of my news into one place via RSS feeds has not only made my web surfing more efficient, but I have expanded my reading list to include dozens of new sources that I wouldn’t have found out about otherwise.