Monday, March 15, 1999

News.com speculates on tomorrow's Apple announcement. "The company will go part way toward embracing the 'open source' programming philosophy when interim chief executive Steve Jobs tomorrow introduces a new program encouraging developers to optimize the operating system for Apple hardware, sources said. If the program is successful, the result will be both a higher-performance operating system and more developers on board."

WebMonkey looks at CVS.

Eric Kidd compares Frontier and Zope. Thank you!

Then Eric issued a challenge, which I accepted, and now, probably for the first time, Frontier and Zope are connected.

Internet News: Netscape launches new publishing program "The network is built on the RDF Site Summary format. RSS is a new, open-file format that facilitates the exchange of content summaries and e-commerce data between Web sites. RSS enables program participants to create their own channel on the My Netscape service and frequently deliver content automatically to their readers."

Our announcement: Scripting News is the first site to support RSS. Here's a link to the RSS version of Scripting News.

Compare RSS with scriptingNews format, which is richer, it includes enough information to do an elegant syndication-based search engine (coming later today). Netscape's and Slashdot's formats are basically equivalent, neither is as rich as our format.

Netscape's legal agreement was too one-sided and restrictive for us. Unless their agreement changes, you won't see our RSS file displayed on my.netscape.com. Be sure to read the agreement carefully before registering. You're giving Netscape's attorneys a lot of power over what you say on your website. Be sure there's something in it for you.

Netscape: MNN Futures. "In this release of MNN, Netscape has intentionally limited the complexity of the RSS format. However, in the future, Netscape plans to work with other organizations to enhance the RSS format to support additional tags, while making it more compliant with existing W3C standards for XML and RDF."

Slashdot.org is now customizable.

Roxen Challenger is an open source web server.

MainStay: JustMail is a Java email client.

PC Mag: Software Returns to its Source.

MetaSpy is an interesting behind-the-scenes look at a search engine.

My friend Bobby Orbach says that this product already covers the vertical search engine category. They don't. Bobby, our center is content management, not smart crawlers. We use human brains and judgement to decide what goes into our search engine, not algorithms. We're more like Yahoo or The Mining Company, with a deeper CMS and Windows/Mac workstation software.

freedrive.com offers a free password protected virtual 20MB hard drive accessible thru the web.

On the Script Meridian community list, a reminder, posted via Mail to the Future, that Frontier 4.2.3 is about to cross a big milestone. It's been 1,000,000 minutes since it shipped. We've accomplished so much in those million minutes!

I get lots of emails pointing me to iCab, a new web browser for the Macintosh. People are very enthusiastic about this software. That's great! Now, someone please help them get a site with some screen shots on it. It would make it easier to spread the word.

Josh Brauer did some screen shots of iCab. It's nice!