www.romanvenable.net:  Downstreamer Tool for Radio UserLand

Introduction

For my desktop content management project, I wanted to use Radio UserLand to allow a user to do the opposite of upstreaming (which we decided to call 'downstreaming'. Catchy, huh?) Seth Dillingham created a wonderful tool for me called Downstreamer.root. You may download [right click] Downstreamer.root here.

In my system, I use Radio UserLand to upstream rendered or unrendered files to my own server. Students use Radio and Downstreamer to synchronize their local install with my reference set. Once on their local machine, they are no longer dependent on having an active network connection to browse content. It's all on their own hard disk!

The user can then either use Radio and browse the (rendered) content on port 5335, or use another web server to serve the rendered content. In my project, I have two MacOS X iBooks. Radio downstreams files, then renders them to the Apache document directory, where the user can browse them at http://127.0.0.1. [and MySQL, php, and phpDig can index them to allow searching!].

From the Readme [by Seth Dillingham]:

Using the Downstreamer:

Downstreamer maintains local copies of Radio Userland - managed web sites, on your desktop.

1. Choose one of the following:
   1. To synchronize an existing folder with a directory on a server, select the Downstreamer -> Add Existing Directory menu item. Choose a directory in the www folder!
   2. To create a new folder and synchronize it with a directory on a server, select the Downstreamer -> Add New Directory menu item. A new folder will be created in the www folder, with the name you provide.
2. A window will open with prefs for the folder you specified. Enter the URL of the directory.OPML file in the space provided. Example: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001277/directory.opml
3. Select the appropriate item from the Tools -> Downstreamer -> Sync Directory menu

If everything worked correctly, Radio will download all of the files in the site, and store them in the appropriate location on the desktop. When it's done, you will be told how many files were downloaded/updated.

To re-synchronize your local copy with the files on the server, just repeat step 3. Only those files which have been changed will be downloaded again, so re-synchronizing is usually very fast.

Important note: the URL's in the downloaded files will not be munged in any way. That means that if they're aren't "relative URL's", the links in the local copies will still point to the exact same files that are pointed to by the files on the server.

Automatic Updates

Some work has been put into having the directories update automatically, with absolutely no interaction with the user. This is not yet ready: for now, if you want to synchronize your folder then you must use step 3 under "To Use the Downstreamer", above.

License

The license for this package has not yet been determined. You may use the downstreamer for free, but please do not distribute it. Please see the software's web page for more information.

The Downstreamer was written in January, 2002, by Seth Dillingham (seth@macrobyte.net) at Macrobyte Resources for Clark Venable (clark@romanvenable.net) of Penn State College of Medicine (Hershey).