Dave Winer responded to my Radio problems. [Scripting News] I guess that means I now have a Dave Number of 1.

Yes, Radio needs better documentation. If it's any help, the only language I ever managed to learn purely from the product homepage was PHP. It's well organised, very easy to navigate, and the open commenting feature on each page means that the community fills in the gaps over time, as well as adding tips, caveats and useful patterns.

I get the feeling that is a lot like PHP - a simple language where the power lies in the library of available functions (and in Radio's case, the integration with the Object Database). The difference with Radio is that it's putting this power on the desktop rather than server.

I also get the feeling that Manila, while good for blogs, doesn't really have any mature templates when it comes to organising information non-chronologically. Its search function is bad enough that it makes it harder to find information (if it was absent, I'd have used google to start with), its directory template is almost painful to use, and it doesn't seem to organise meaningful relations between pages very well.

A weblog, and discussion groups/bulletin boards are accretions of knowledge. You read them day by day, and you absorb information as you go. Occasionally, you'll need to find something that happened a week ago, and you go back through the calendar. Very rarely, you'll think "Yeah, that was mentioned last year", and you'll need a search function. Other than that, the information put on a blog fades with time, and rarely organises itself along any other lines.

Compare this to, say, Wiki, where following information chronologically is impossible, directories are almost always only one level deep, but the site self-organises on the way pages (information) relate to each other.

Anyway, I've digressed.

Memo to self: write story about how Radio's price-tag makes it more likely to need good documentation than a $10,000 program, but least likely to get it than Open Source.