Wednesday, July 28, 1999

Excellent news this morning. Dr. Matt Neuburg, the author of the O'Reilly book on Frontier 4, has joined the UserLand team. He's going to work with us and with members of the Frontier community to improve the Frontier documentation, bring it up to date, covering the new features in Frontier 6 and beyond. Our docs will go from average to market-leading with Matt at work again.

More excellent news! Netscape released the next version of the RSS spec, and it's even better than I thought it would be. They can do fat items, and they adopt all the extensions in ScriptingNews 2.0b1. I am very pleased to see that Netscape responded positively to our offer to work with them. We will support the new version in My.UserLand.Com, and we will remain compatible with the earlier format.

WebMonkey: Threaded Discussions with PHP/MySQL.

Hong Kong Zip Trip: "Anita Tong Man-Ming flew in from China to shoot 30 minutes of tape for Radio and Television Hong Kong and than hopped back on the plane to make the six o'clock news the next day."

June 1997: Scripting News Redesigns. I tripped over this researching something else. There were some really good designs in there. I wonder why I didn't use them?? Or did I? I think I might be getting Alzheimers.

Brent Simmons reviews Eric Soroos's Frontier Mail Server.

Eric Kidd: Cosource.Com goes Live. "Cosource wants open source developers to get paid in cold, hard cash. They've set up a website to help the process along. Cosource.com provides a way for individuals to help sponsor open source developers. Think of it as an open-source eBay, and you'll get the right idea."

Useful Inc: XSL stylesheet for ScriptingNews syndication files.

Salon's Janelle Brown calls Dvorak and Red Herring on sexist journalism. "Women use computers, women run computer companies; equating them with busty plastic dolls shows that no matter whether we've come a long way, baby -- not everyone has kept up." Excellent!

Wired: A Urinal is an Opportunity. "Say you want to reach hip twenty-somethings. Just what do they have in common? They get drunk and go to the bathroom, right? Why not stick your company blurb right there, above the toilet in all the hipster clubs in town?" Interesting coincidence! We were thinking about doing urinal ads at Buck's.

Glowware in Woodside. "It's not all software at Buck's. Now and then people actually have products you can pick up and hold in your hand."

OmniGlow's Bovine Beacon. "When a cow is mounted by a herd-mate, the Bovine Beacon's chemiluminescent ampoule is broken, generating a bright red glow that is easily visible from all angles - day or night, rain or shine. Its excellent visibility takes the guesswork out of heatmount detection, saving you time and money."

Something to think about next time you're cleaning a urinal.

Wired is on a roll this morning! I love this piece. "So eager are the scads of new dot coms to get their names out, they'll pay upwards of US$40,000 a month for one of the prime boards on Highway 101 between San Francisco and San Jose. A year ago, the same boards sold for $20,000 a month." Dig it. My favorite 101 billboard is Yahoo's take-off on the Tahoe billboards that used to be on 101 just before the Bay Bridge. I wish we had a picture of that one on the web. Helloo Yahoo!

Too bad someone grabbed US101.COM before I could. Hey isn't it cool that the original highway that runs thru Silicon Valley is a binary number? The other major highway, 280, is not a binary number. Too bad.

Linux Today: Eric Raymond says Microsoft is Right.