Radio: A certain degree of unreliability
Posted by Pierre Igot in: BloggingApril 10th, 2003 • 8:33 pm
On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with Radio UserLand as a blogging tool. For the most part, it just works, and its limitations are not too annoying at this point. (I’d like to be able to handle comments locally on my server, and I’d like to have a proper server-based search engine on my own server, for example.)
There is, however, a fundamental problem that keeps affecting me on a regular basis. Sometimes, for some reason, Radio’s upstreaming ceases to work. I write a new post and post it to my blog through Radio’s web forms — and nothing happens. I CHECK the “Events” monitoring page, and nothing is happening, except for the activity of the news aggregator (which I don’t use).
I have no idea why Radio ceases to work. It typically happens after my computer has been put to sleep for the night, or after I’ve disconnected from the Internet through my modem connection for a while.
There must be something in Radio that causes it to attempt to connect to a server online and cease to function if that connection fails.
The only solution is to restart the Radio application itself. But it often takes me a few hours to notice the problem, and during that time I might have posted blog items that have not been uploaded.
This is particularly problematic in light of the fact that upstreaming is, after all, part of the core functionality of the application. I could tolerate a “peripheral” feature not working properly from time to time, but this is essential stuff, and it shouldn’t be flaky like this.