Getting my feed list to show up here

I wanted the blog/news feeds I subscribe to in Radio to show up in my sidebar. When I was publishing this weblog with Radio that was simple. It just involved inserting a macro ([%radio.macros.mySubscriptions ()%] but with angle brackets, not square ones) into the appropriate place. To get it to show up here was more complicated, but not impossible, since I’m running all (OK, most) of my sites from the same server, and I’ve still got Radio running.
(Radio is powering my mediajunkie.com home page right now, and I plan to keep tinkering with it, probably moving the major media feeds into their own RSS boxes, making more use of ActiveRenderer and generally having fun with the Radio toolkit in a more experimental zone.)
Here’s what I did. First I set up a new category in Radio called “feeds,” telling Radio to render it as HTML, not ping weblogs, and to use no theme. Then I created a file called #homeTemplate.txt in my new Radio Userland / www / categories / feeds folder. The file contains just the macro I mentioned above. Finally, I changed the #upstream.xml to direct this new category over to the directory hierarchy housing the RFB domain. The next time it upstreamed, it sent a file containing just my list of feeds to the server.
It’s not even a proper HTML file as it has no document declaration, no HTML tag, no HEAD, no BODY. I didn’t want it to have those things, because the last part of my solution involves using a server-side include in the index-page template to put the raw HTML onto this page. When it still didn’t work, I remembered to go update my httpd.conf file to permit includes in that domain. After republishing and reloading the page, I saw that it worked.
The little orange buttons don’t look great with my color scheme, but this is kind of a temporary design anyway. Also the little coffee mugs are kind of Radio-centric, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.
I will have to republish the Feeds category any time I change my subscriptions.
Another approach I considered was using blogrolling.com’s new OPML-import feature, but it choked on some invalid XML – I think it was – in my current mySubscriptions.opml file.
Another weird thing about this file is that I’ve been trying to synchronize (or to use the new term Dave Winer floated recently, to harmonize) my feed subscriptions among NetNewsWire, Radio, and FeedDemon. NNW has trouble importing my Radio subscriptions file. It conks out before getting everything.
So next I tried exporting my NNW subscriptions as OPML and that seemed to work. I opened both the NNW export file and the mySubscriptions file in Radio and manually copied over all of the NNW subscriptions, sorted by name, and removed duplicates. Here’s the weird part, though: Radio did not update my subscriptions to reflect the new content in the OPML file.
In effect, there is a harmonization problem just within Radio. I don’t know if it’s keeping the list somewhere besides in the mySubscriptions.opml file or why it otherwise might not recognize the entries added from the NNW export file. So far this is still am ystery to me. I could manually subscribe to the delta in Radio, but that’s tedious (I hate the slow-loading web-based interface) and I resent it when computers make me do the donkey work.
So, any ideas?
What else? Oh, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing the RSS feed for my old friends page at LiveJournal, and deduced that this was because my paid year has elapsed. It’s strange to me that LJ never sent me a notice encouraging me to pay them again! Anyway, I just paid for another year and, sure enough, my friends reappeared in my aggregator today. Cooool.
Since I write about technical matters, I don’t mind the overhead involved in paying for LJ, Radio, Movable Type, Blogger Pro, and eventually probably TypePad as well. Someday I may consolidate and abandon one or more platforms, but for now I consider the outlay justified as a research expense.
One last unrelated query: When I ported the RFB design over to Movable Type most of it appears to work the same way (I’m using CSS layout whenever possible). But there is one strange new artifact. When a line of copy contains a link, I am seeing a line break appearing before the linktext, and sometimes no space between that paragraph and the next. I’ve noticed this on other pages before. It’s almost as if the page-drawing algorithm is mistaking the anchor-tag-with-href as visible text that would make the rest of the line too long.
Thing is, I don’t know what’s different or why the problem would just start happening now. The only thing I can see is that MT’s bookmarklet inserts a TITLE attribute into its anchor tags, but why would that make any difference?
Again, I would welcome any diagnoses or solutions. Thanks!