Radio Sucks

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Blogging
May 25th, 2003 • 7:28 pm

This is really getting to be a bit much. These days Radio fails on me almost every single day. The symptoms are always the same: for some reason, all of a sudden FTP upstreaming ceases to work properly. I post new items to my weblog and the Radio server processes them locally just fine, but the FTP upstreaming process never starts.

I try stopping and restarting the web server in Radio, but it doesn’t work. I try quitting and relaunching the Radio application itself, but it doesn’t work. I even try logging out of Mac OS X and logging back in and relaunching Radio, and it still doesn’t work. Most of the time Radio simply does not do anything. Sometimes it displays the line “FTP upstream driver: Uploading XXX” in the “About Radio UserLand” window, but then when I switch to the Radio application, that line changes back to the generic line when Radio is idle, and when I CHECK the “Events” page, I see that nothing has been uploaded. I edit my latest post and ask Radio to “Post Changes”, in case that will kick-start the upstreaming process again. Nada.

Then all of a sudden, a quarter of an hour later, Radio decides to start working again, for no apparent reason. But then it starts re-uploading my entire weblog archive! That’s hundreds (and soon thousands) of files that we are talking about here, and I only have a pokey modem connection.

I keep checking my “Events” page to try and determine what’s going on. Most of the time there’s absolutely nothing on that page. Today, I saw the following line:

Can't upstream because "Can't evaluate the expression because the name "path" hasn't been defined."

Needless to say, my “path” has not changed and has not been changed in ages. My FTP server is the same and has been behaving in the same way for ages. There’s absolutely no reason for such failures in Radio. The only reason that I can think of is that Radio itself sucks.

The Radio discussion group seems to be full of similar complaints. “Upstream doesn’t work anymore”. “Can’t upstream”. “Radio Userland won’t upstream”. You would think that by now UserLand would have got the message and fixed the damn thing!

In addition, Radio is sucking up CPU cycles like crazy when it’s upstreaming. I don’t really notice it because I have a dual 1.25 GHz G4 and it doesn’t really affect the performance of my machine, but it’s unacceptable nonetheless. We are talking about extremely simple stuff here: just uploading small text files to an FTP server!

Such flakiness is simply unacceptable. And UserLand does not appear to be willing to do anything about it. I’m running Radio under Mac OS X 10.2.6 with a modem connection to the Internet and using my own FTP server — but the problem does not seem limited to Mac OS X users.


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