I just re-posted my first post from a few days ago. Not content to simply install Radio and just use it, I managed to delete my first post this morning. Quite simple to do, actually. I installed Radio on a second computer, and when it upstreamed, it overwrote my initial post with a blank one. I recovered the text from the rss.xml file, and pasted it back and re-posted. Everything’s back to the way it was except for the date. [Update: got it back on 2/7 where it belongs.]
If I had been willing to wait until I got home tonight, I could have re-posted from my first Radio install, but this was more of a challenge. I learned a bit about where Radio stores it’s data, and I was a little surprised about how it’s done. Most of the configuration info is in the www folder, but all of the actual content of posts are contained in the .root files in the Data Files folder. And while you can change the location of the www folder, theres no obvious way to change the location of the other folders–at least, not that I’ve found yet.
Why does this matter to me? Because I work from two different locations, home and work, and sometimes from other places as well. I used to haul a laptop back and forth every day, but I gradually migrated to having two desktop systems with the laptop being used mainly as a portable hard drive. I commute by train so the weight of the laptop is a primary concern. I had an ultralight subnotebook (under 3-lbs), but it wasn’t nearly powerful enough to be used as my primary system. Then, when my 5-year-old son spilled a drink on the laptop last summer, I decided to wait on replacing it, and got a portable USB 2.0 30GB hard drive instead.
So, I’ve got a nearly identical set of applications installed on both home and work desktops, and I use the portable hard drive to store the data files. If anyone is interested in exactly how I got things setup, let me know and I’ll post the details. Suffice it to say that it’s important to be able to have two different installs on two different machines share the same common set of data files. Concurrency is not an issue since it’s only me using it. Radio makes this setup difficult because it stores it’s files–system and user–all mixed together within it’s Program Files subdirectory. And while it allows me to change the location of the www directory, there isn’t a user-visible preference to change the location of some of the other critical files. I’m sure there’s some path variable buried somewhere in the object database that controls this, but until I find where it is, I’ve got another idea in mind that will solve my problem. We’ll see…