Essential Blogging

Radio Techniques

This section explains some of the quick things you can do with Radio. Among the topics covered in this section are shortcuts, publishing to your blog via email, learning to use Radio’s automatic updating, republishing your entire blog, and backing up your Radio data.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts are a unique feature in Radio that makes entering content into your blog postings easier, faster, and more accurate. Shortcuts replace quoted text (e.g., "tds") with other, generally longer, text (“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”). The text in quotes is the shortcut’s name.

Shortcuts can include full HTML content, such as an image reference, a URL, or both. When you are writing or editing a blog post, you see the name of the shortcut not its value. When Radio publishes your posting to your blog, the shortcut’s name is replaced with its value. Shortcuts can be changed globally across all blog entries just by completely republishing your blog. Instructions on how to republish your entire blog are at the end of this section.

Automatic shortcuts

An automatic shortcut is created when you publish a blog entry with a title. Radio automatically takes that title and makes a shortcut out of it. For example, if you published a book review of Perl programming books that had a title of Perl Books you could always create a link to that post by putting "Perl Books" into a blog entry.

To prevent the "Perl Books" shortcut from being expanded, put backslashes in front of the quotes:

\"Perl Books\"

Radio ...