So it has been just under a week since I moved everything over here from Radio. Here’s what I really like so far:

• I don’t have to fire up my laptop to post. I can do it from any networked device.
• I’ve got tons of space as opposed to the 40MB included with Radio.
• The technology foundation is more intuitive. It’s LAMP-based so there are a lot of resources available. Radio Userland is based on Frontier which is not nearly as ubiquitous as LAMP.
• Similar to the prior point, I love that it uses a relational back-end. I don’t have to re-publish pages when I change the look-and-feel. And the model is more like what I’m used to. Front-end web page talks to back-end database. Simple. I get it.
• My aggregator is for aggregating and my blog tool is for blogging. The built-in RSS aggregator in Radio is okay, but I didn’t want to have to fire up Radio to check my feeds. Sometimes I’d use Sage, but, again, I’d have to fire up Radio if I came across something post-worthy. Now, I use Sage all of the time–I hit the bookmarklet to post and I’m there.

In my early days of Radio I thought it might be a good tool to roll out internally. That was before I had been exposed to the server-based blog tools. And, quite honestly, I think I was forgetting the lesson we’ve all already learned about distributing and maintaining client apps versus running them on a centrally-managed server infrastructure with a thin client.

I’ll grant that it is extremely easy to set up a public blog with Radio. I tweaked my config to publish to both a public site and an internal site and that was straightforward for a technical user. When I think about folks in our sales organization making those same tweaks and maybe wanting to customize their templates, I think about what Walter said to Smokey in The Big Lebowski, “You are entering a world of pain.”

I imagine Userland’s answer to this would be, “You are right. For a big intranet project you should use Manila, our server-based product.” Maybe so. But you’d still have to bone up on Frontier.

Anyway, I’m not trying to dog Radio here. I’m just excited about my choice to switch.