yesterday i took another look at radio userland. and i am really peeved. actually, i – obviously just like the inventor of this piece of software – did not have a clue what radio userland should be in the beginning.

last summer i installed it for the first time and used it as a mp3 player with community features. i chatted with one of the developers and was bored pretty soon.

however, just a little bit later, it was possible to use radio userland as blogging tool (version 7.0b32). and i considered the simple way it works and the great comfort of the outliner as a real alternative to blogger (especially regarding the latest developments at pyra).

now yesterday i did the upgrade to version 7.0b39 – and what the heck: now the former little, cool weblog outliner turned into the same bloat, slow manila-like browser interface and simultaneously stepping back into the sluggish times of frontier's website framework... best of all: the new blogging tool cannot render special characters (umlaut etc.) anymore. and i am close to bet that this (and other bugs) will never get fixed because the next reincarnation of radio userland is just around the corner (remember manila?).

well, to understand userland one simply needs to take a look at the taglines of their applications: in the beginning, the ru tagline said "program your personal internet radio station". from version 7.0b30 it was "the first internet outliner" (that's when i liked it). and now i read "the first personal web application server".

i certainly think that change is a good thing. but i absolutely hate it when people run zigzag just because they cannot decide which path they want to follow first and do not even feel their responsibility towards those who are willing to accompany them on their way. i hope other software developers are smarter (wink, wink, nudge, nudge!)...

btw: the latest version of the brasilian telenovela "what is radio userland?" goes like this. "it's a web server that runs on your desktop computer, like apache or iis, but designed for people, not geeks. it gets news over the internet, formatted in xml, it crunches and grinds it right here and then presents it to you in the web browser". now, do i have to be a geek to know xml or not?