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Tomorrow is a Day Without Weblogs. Tomorrow is also a big day here too, the formal announcement of Manila and 6.1, coinciding with a press release with Microsoft and Developmentor about SOAP. We're just about ready to go. Looking forward to stretching a bit later this week! 5/24/99: "Now of course I don't own Word or even WordPad, but I do own an excellent writing tool that's a descendent of a tool that was loved by tens of thousands of people in the 80s, and many of them are still out there. My vision of writing for the web is a beautiful outliner, a text tool that understands structure and can easily hide or reveal detail. And has a File menu a web writer would die for." That's the other half of the Edit this Page vision, yet to be delivered. That'll be Frontier 7, its codename is Corazon. Next week, believe it or not, the delivery process for Corazon starts. Holy Cow! DanDot.Com has a draggable Abe Vigoda feature. "You can move him wherever you want to." Damn. The Dome of the Sky is "your virtual online planetarium." Liblog is a library weblog. The evangelistas found a new victim. "You were not given a court order. You just got scared for your mortgage and your Lexus payment and are in that light a coward." Something new in the XML-RPC world. Did News.Com jump the gun on an embargo? MSNBC: 24-hour human help for lost surfers. According to Matt Dornquast, this site is a front-end for an XML-RPC app. And something new in the RSS world. Interesting! Dell's answer to Apple's iMac? I'm working over in Manila-Newbies-Land this morning. Robert Occhialini on Manila: "An easy out of the box solution that allows non-technical people to edit their own content without complicated programming." Wired: What comes after Y2K? Good question! Tomorrow is the first day of the last month of the millennium. No meltdowns that I'm aware of. There must be lots of computers rolling over everywhere. So on to the next big problem? Happy Last Month! Scripting News is rising on Beebo's Weblog Rating page. I admit it, I want to be number one. If you run one of the weblogs that Beebo monitors, please point to www.scripting.com. InfoWorld: Fusion 5 Creates Sites Faster. "Fusion 5.0 is a mature Web-site design tool that allows novices and experts alike to create visually appealing and highly functional Web sites." ZopeNewbies is doing great!
Manila-Newbies: Getting Started with Manila. Bump: "UserLand released Frontier 6.1 today. I've been using the betas for a few weeks now, and have set up a server running their Manila framework. It's really, really, easy to set up and configure. It's also really easy to use to build sites. I expect to chronicle my experiences, and those of the others who are using my server to create sites, right here on Bump. Someday soon, Bump will be a Manila site. Update: I'm up to five sites on the box now. People are digging it. I'll post a list when people have stuff up and want to be pointed to." Schwinnng! Kevin Werbach on Manila. "The coolest thing about Manila is that it's as simple or as deep as you want it to be. Few other Web products scale well in both directions -- you either wind up with easy-to-use homepage-building tools that can't handle dynamic sites, or you have complicated, expensive content-management platforms that aren't helpful for beginners or small sites." Lawrence Lee has been experimenting with Manila. Qube Quorner: "What software is available for the Qube to help manage a mailing list?" InfoWorld: Sun Wary of Java Standard. Can you believe it? Red Hat is deliberately taking on Microsoft. "Our competition is not the other Linux distributions. Our competition is with Microsoft." Who makes their strategic decisions? Maybe they hired someone from Netscape? The Ptypes weblog gets the scoop on scoop-rating. We flipped the switch last night and the Store is now delivering fresh new 6.1s. Be the first in your quadrant to jump into the age of Edit this Page. Current Frontier subscribers can download 6.1 from the support site. Frontier 6.1 Change Notes. In addition to Manila, 6.1 includes browser-based installation and admin, a user interface builder for web apps, kernelized web server, safe macros, automated nightly updates, scheduler threads, lots of new verbs. Please, if you're a Frontier user or developer, post questions about 6.1 in the Frontier DG. Thanks! I find that adding a picture of Gandhi helps lighten a DG posting. BTW, since he's in the UserLand.Com glossary, you can include him by typing "gandhi". Also thanks to Keola Donaghy, I have a picture of "curly" in the glossary too. Excellent! Curly appears on today's home page on Manila-Newbies, which I am also maintaining (I hope to pass this off soon.) He says "I try to think but nothing happens!" A perfect slogan for newbies. Quote-O-Mat gathers testimonials from Manila users. 32 days to Y2K. A power of 2.
Tonight we're going to flip the switch and start selling Frontier 6.1 thru the UserLand Store. So November 29 is the official ship date of Manila, which is part of 6.1. The launch site won't be ready until Wednesday, so that's when we'll run the press release. Lots of good stuff coming from early Manila users, we want to get the real story on the web before we start beating the drums. This just in! A new slogan for Manila's Edit this Page button. "It's everywhere you want to go." Just for fun I started a GeoCities home page. See the popup ad in the upper right corner? How did they do that?? Hey, MSIE 5.01 for Windows is available tonight. (Oy! Couldn't come at a worse time. Our ISP, Conxion, is Microsoft's US download agent.) I just downloaded and installed. MSIE 5.01/Win change notes. "Where do you want to go today?" Does anyone have a decent head shot of Phil Suh? Jakob Nielsen: Usability as a Barrier to Entry. The award for the best rotating weblog ad goes to BradLands. I like tasteful animation. Key word is "tasteful". Shameless plea for help. Would someone re-do the weblog ad for Scripting News? I didn't mean to mis-spell the name. Really, it's not a stylistic thing. I gave up in frustration. (BTW, to people who accept this invitation, our current hot slogans are "We're All Newbies" and "It worked!") XML-HACK on SML. "The discussion over proposals for a simplified markup language -- essentially a pared-down XML -- is proving far from simple itself." Jorn Barger: Regular Expressions for Poets. A new domain we registered yesterday. And people say all the good ones are taken. BTW, "It Worked!" is the initial title of the home page of the every Manila site you create. It Worked! is a basic net phrase, like You Have Mail. It's what a web server says when you're viewing the home page of the server you just installed. Usually they're static sites with no content management. Of course with Manila, when we say It Worked, it means more. Dan Gillmor says goodbye to Hong Kong. Manila websites created by Dan's Hong Kong class. I thought these three sites were especially interesting: 1, 2, 3. Sean McGrath: "I have some ideas for amending RSS. Are changes to RSS coordinated somehow? Who do I approach? Netscape?"
I'm working on a press release and product briefing site for Manila, and was wondering if any of the Newbies or people watching from the sidelines had a comment, either public or private, that could help us explain Manila. MatthewKingston.Com has the rotating weblog ad. He's getting a lot of hits. Oooops. Please be kind to Matthew's server. So does Scripting News. We support Weblogs. Actually because it's in our distributed template, the rotating weblog ad will show up on the home pages of a few UserLand.Com sites. HalfBrain CEO Steve Guttman says: "We're anxious to get Mac, Unix, Netscape stuff working." The Cluetrain Weblog keeps on rollin down the track. Zope-Newbies: Transition to Acquisition. Jorn Barger: The best and worst of web design. "Good web design is about being considerate." Amen. I posted a message this morning on the XML-DEV list announcing the XML backend for Weblog Monitor. CJ Gillis asks a key question on outliners.com: "Is there a web engine that would allow me to display my work for the use of students who have more curiosity than time?" Answer. BTW, discuss.outliners.com is a Manila site. There are so many! Alamut observes that there are now twelve Dutch weblogs, and wonders how many there will be in five years. Sheila Simmons is running a kickass weblog! In Seattle. Wired: Closing the Windows on MS. "By process of elimination, the personal computer -- which had grown up serving a set of business tasks like calculating spreadsheets and tallying databases atop a multi-purpose operating system -- was pressed into duty. It was awkwardly teamed with the telephone line to become the temporary front-end for a radical new information medium." Wired, check out the Qube. It's happening to Linux too. The form factors are in flux.
Ptypes ranks the weblogs by the number of pointers coming into them, as reported by Google. Scripting News is #1. Paul Howson starts a discussion on future developments in the XMLTR suite. (Details on the XMLTR site.) Kevin Werbach is really kicking butt with the Release 1.0 weblog. ZDNet: Apple Centers to open in Manila. Excellent! A reminder, Frontier 6.1 is a Mac app, as well as a Windows app. MacOpinion: Sherlock, All Hype No Heart? An improvement to the Weblog Monitor site makes it easier to find the new stuff. We're working on ad sharing among weblogs using the Weblog Monitor. The idea started at the Robot Wisdom site, was adopted by a few webloggers, and within hours was running on the Weblog Monitor. Being a total graphic idiot, I had to struggle with Adobe ImageReady to get a 24-by-175 graphic together for Scripting News. I yearn for the days of Canvas 2.0 when graphics editing was easy. The ad sharing server is working. If you refresh this page, you should see a different ad below. Of course if you click on it, you go to the weblog.
To show how flexible this scheme is, I posted a note to the Weblogs mail list, and included the HTML snippet, and now eGroups is part of the network too! Lovin it. Washington Post: "You will see how time stood still while we all held our breath. You will feel the power and love of your family during this time, and of a caring and believing community."
Thanks to The Motley Fool for setting a shining example of the power of not taking oneself too seriously. Truth be told, our motto for Manila, "We're all newbies!" was inspired by the Fools. Thanks to all the new Manila webmasters, including but not limited to Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Luke Tymowski, Lance Knobel, Alex Cohen, Andrew Wooldridge, Leigh Dodds, Lawrence Lee, Dale Dougherty, Karl Martino, Scott Loftesness, Steven Ivy, Susan Victor and Jeff Shelton; and of course Dan Gillmor's 30+ Hong Kong University students. Together, I think we're on the ground floor of one of the biggest opportunities to improve communication, ever. Thanks to the weblog community for embracing the Weblogs.Com site, and for working with UserLand, even though some think we're the Microsoft of this little corner of the Internet. (One weblogger calls me the equivalent of Bill Gates, without the power, money or looks!) Hey, now that I think of it, thanks to the weblog community for existing! How many new logs were started this year? How many will be started next year? Thanks to the UserLand Support Associates for their patience, knowledge, professionalism, battle scars, love for the technology, and putting up with our nonsense. Our system works thanks to their passion and committment. Thanks to Jeff Cheney at MacWEEK for keeping Frontier in. Thanks to Silicon Valley venture capitalists with a twinkle in their eye. I've actually met a group of financiers who love what we're doing. That's what makes the world go round! (At least my world.) Thanks to Microsoft for partnering with us on SOAP, and thanks to Netscape for working on RSS with us. Both efforts prove that there's more to XML than drafts and proposals and debates. Thanks to all the developers who implemented XML-RPC this year, and thanks to all the publishers who syndicated their content in XML for My.UserLand. Thanks to Craig Cline for inviting me to keynote Seybold/Boston in February and to Lance Knobel for inviting me to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. I am looking forward to both the events, a lot! Thanks to all the people I knocked heads with this year. Every time that happens I work thru more of my own stuff, get more free, happier, and worry less about what's coming next. I survive all these experiences, often to my own amazement. Thanks to Brent Simmons, Andre Radke and Bob Bierman, my development team at UserLand for Frontier 6.1, which is the best release of Frontier, ever, hands-down, by far, no question about it. You guys are the best! And finally, thanks to all the people who have stepped up and bought subscriptions to Frontier in the last year and half since we've been commercial. With all the hype about open source, it's great to know that there are enough webmasters with vision to keep the team going. Our customers are the smartest people on the planet, because they were smart enough to sort thru all the hype and buy the best web content management system. And further, thanks to our customers for giving us enough cash to buy new servers! I have three shiny new NT honkers waiting for apps to run on them. When I look at these machines I think how great our customers are, for giving us the money to buy these machines. One more thanks to the people who taught me how wonderful it feels to be thankful! That's the biggest gift in life.
Things I was thankful for last Thanksgiving. How does a content management system celebrate Thanksgiving? Last year's Thanksgiving piece. Not sure if there will be one this year. A lot of computer work in the last few weeks, even for me. Thanksgiving pieces from: 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997. Karl Martino posted a list of things he's thankful for this year. You're all welcome to do the same. Happy Holidays People! Weblog Monitor now has a statistics page. Survey: Do you celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow? Seattle FUG meeting report. Qube Quorner: Installing Postfix. "Postfix is a Message Transfer Agent, or MTA. Its job is to take mail from one server to another and to accept mail from another server and deliver it to local users." An important message to people running Manila sites. Michael Rubin asks a central question about Manila. Answer. WSJ: "Makers of computer chips should be able to keep boosting chip performance for at least 15 years despite some serious technical hurdles, the industry’s trade group said."
Macros and the Glossary on the Weblog Monitor site. "Any page, even a discussion group message, can call a macro." FragDifferent is a Manila site. Nice! Hey MacWEEK has a weblog, and it's a good one. Someone had the (good) idea to register it on the Weblog Monitor. That's how other webloggers find out about you. A new page on the Weblog Monitor site lists all the errors for the day. Sites that were missing due to bad connections, servers down, bugs in our app or acts of Murphy. (Later in the day I added a pref that, if checked, sends you an email when there's an error.) Today's further developments in Weblog Monitor are described in this posting to the weblog mail list. BTW, to Frontier users, shortly after 6.1 ships we'll release the full source of Weblog Monitor. It's a Manila site, all the programmed stuff interfaces thru macros. I edit the site just like any other site. Edit this Page buttons everywhere. This functionality could be used inside large organizations to monitor changes on websites scattered over various divisions. You need more of these kinds of tools as the web grows, or viewed the other way around, having these kinds of tools makes it possible for the web to grow. Manila-Newbies: If you know mainResponder, customizing Manila is easy. "Manila has a very simple programming model if you know how to do mainResponder sites, because that's exactly its programming model." Leigh Dodds has figured out how to get user-customizable appearance in Manila, just using the browser interface, no server-side scripting. Bravo! Here's a weblog about pharmacy and family, with great photos. Lynne Siprelle: "Today I started throwing out my rags, old stale makeup, bottles of essential oils I'd had for 20 years--things I've been hanging on to because I either thought I didn't deserve better or because I was afraid I'd not be able to replace them, even though they were falling apart or too old to use." David Theige, MD: Med-Ed News. Lookin good! PC WEEK: XML Unleashes Data. InfoWorld: XML Stumbling Blocks. Clickz: "Matt Drudge was never a journalist, Internet or otherwise. He was a political activist with a links page. Real journalists check their stories, seek scoops from all sides, and don't play the games they cover."
Based on email I've gotten, it seems PacBell or Conxion did a wire-trip again and we're back down to ISDN rates. I'm going to knock heads with the ISP again, not looking forward to that. Couldn't come at a worse time. Stay tuned. Heads up. Today I'm going to start pointing to pages that document features in Manila. I've been holding back on this, but now it's time to open up to the next level. I expect we'll flip the switch before the holiday (Thurs) and the store will start delivering 6.1s instead of 6.0s. All current subscribers will receive 6.1 at no additional charge. The press release won't run until everyone is back at work next week. This will be the biggest change in functionality in Frontier's 11-year history. Now, for the first time, the power of web content management becomes easy. Manila-Newbies: How Your Home Page Works. "Manila doesn't enforce a rigid set of constraints on how your home page works, instead it provides a set of features that accomodate several different styles." Today's new Manila site is from Kevin Werbach, Managing Editor of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0. Kevin did a great report covering syndication technology, summarized here, published in July 1999. Beebo.Org: Weblog Ratings. "The score is calculated as follows: over 150 weblogs are retrieved and scanned for links to other weblogs. A link to a weblog is considered a vote for that weblog; each vote is worth 10 divided by the number of links to other weblogs. (So a weblog linking to 20 other weblogs will contribute 0.5 to the total score of each weblog it links to.)" Excellent! Jakob Nielsen: "This is almost exactly what Google is doing for the entire Web." Forbes: Online document-sharing, the next killer app? Jorn Barger may be doing something interesting with ads. Not sure exactly how it works. Wired: "Available for free, the Winfix patch peels off the space-age look from Apple's search tool, which is bundled with the MacOS 9. The patch reverts the interface back to the familiar window-and-scroll-bar that Mac users know and love." I continue to be in awe of CamWorld. He has done a brilliant job of getting everyone to point to him! Weblog Monitor got me back in touch with Chris Gulker's weblog where he asks if everyone has an Uncle Ken? I don't know about everyone, but I do! Look closely at this picture, you'll see the beginning of my uncle's affiliate program. "Recommended by www.greatvavavoom.com." Someday you'll see this sign at all the great hippy beaches. I started a new page on the Weblog Monitor site listing tools for creating and running weblogs. Press release: Lumeria announces DTD.COM. "DTD.com will also aggregate these DTDs or tags and submit them for approval by the appropriate standards committees as a way of accelerating the standardization of XML." Looks like they pulled the trigger too soon. Clicking on www.dtd.com gets an authentication request. Oooops! Technocrat.Net: Photos from Comdex. The Obvious: My Ass is a Weblog. "Inside of a year, the inevitable winnowing will be complete, and the weblog community will have matured into something efficient, useful and blessedly quiet. The remaining webloggers will go about their business, providing links and commentary, without all the noisy hoo-ha of revolution."
Ken's Wu-Tan name is "Radiophonic Skellington". 6/15/99: My Uncle Ken. "If you saw my Uncle Ken, you might believe that in a former life he was a professional wrestler. He has a big white beard and white hair, an enormously loud laugh, and is a great story-teller. In his stories he's usually the hero." When people hear the story of my uncle, sometimes they ask if he's like the Little Feat uncle (down in Puerto Rico) in Time Loves a Hero. Yes he is like that. "Left the States many years ago." Weblog Monitor: 99 Weblogs on 11/21/99. Ways to move forward and an invitation to HTML template designers. Scott Hanson: "Just to see if it would work, I tried installing the latest Manila beta in an NT4 vmware session running under Debian GNU/Linux. As you can see, it worked." Only 40 days to Y2K.
Check this out, there's a Perl-based RSS "portal" that works like My.Netscape, allowing you to choose from a set of channels that (they feel) would interest a Perl developer. Interestingly we're on the verge of being able to do this in Manila, replacing a couple hundred lines of Perl with one line of Frontier code and a bit of "wrapper" HTML. Here's a simple example. Bob Bierman has Scripting News and Wired on his home page. (We just got this stuff working last night.)
Yesterday's survey about Apple was a hit at MacWEEK. Jeff Cheney writes: "The one about Jakob Nielsen made me laugh the hardest." Python.Org: The XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL). Wired: "Once more I breathe deeply - 'Orange peel,' I report. My hosts relax in their chairs, looking immensely relieved." The Wu-Tang Namelizer is back on the air, but they changed the algorithm. Now I'm "Half-Cut Skeleton". I prefer Likeable Warlock.
Marc Canter and Bill Gates still map to the same Wu-Tan name. "Embryonic Informer." Oy. They should go back to the old system. It was mystical and fun! This one is just stupid. Red Herring: "Citing a security problem exposed in AOL's instant messaging software, [Microsoft] says it's calling off efforts to make its MSN Messenger client interoperable with AOL Instant Messenger." Red Herring is "Crafty Wife-Beatah". 12/24/97: "There were the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. What will we call the decade between 2000 and 2009?"
LinuxCare: Fear of Forking. "The fate of Unix is well known. Split by commercial vendors into into a babel of incompatible versions, today the various Unixes compete only with each other for a piece of the dwindling Unix market." Refreshing honesty! MacWEEK: Does Sherlock 2 Play Fair? Survey: What to do about Apple? Jim Roepcke: "Manila kicks ass." Thanks! Holy guacamole! Mahir is a portal. MacCentral: AppleScript Tutorial, Part 4. The Weblog Monitor now maintains two XML files, mirroring the calendar structure, and the list of registered weblogs. LarkFarm has a VB app that reads these XML files. Quick! 63 weblogs have registered as of 11:19AM. I want to get it up to 100 by the end of the day. Nicky Jones, an executive recruiter, is looking for Vignette programmers to work for a blue chip client. These posts are welcome, as long as there aren't too many. Side-benefit, Scripting News readers inside Vignette shops. How's that for a viral app? Now that I'm reading more weblogs thanks to Weblog Monitor, I see other sites giving Scripting News credit for links they pick up here. I appreciate the acknowledgment, but it isn't necessary. I feel this kind of back-slapping is wasteful for the readers. No one owns a link to another site. If you feel gratitude, that's great, there are other ways to express it. Don't clutter up your site with link attributions, at least not for us. One nice way to show appreciation is to link to the site in another section, perhaps on another day. Or to register your site with the Weblog Monitor so more people can see what you do. That's called a win-win, and that's what the web is about, IMHO. Another interesting weblog. His life as a boy is a father writing about the early years of his son's life. Lots of pictures. MSNBC: Trial hasn't slowed Microsoft. "Microsoft has studied IBM’s failed strategy, Enderle said. 'The reaction therefore is to ignore, until you’re actually ordered to do something, to ignore the event and only do what you are specifically ordered to do. In other words, don’t try and anticipate, because that’s what IBM did and it almost put the company out of business,' he said." Motley Fool: "Since the Findings of Fact came out, the market in general, and the Nasdaq in particular, have shot up, with the Nasdaq setting record highs on a near daily basis. The Nasdaq is up over 10% since Judge Jackson issued his ruling, and is up about 25% since the Judge announced that he was shortly going to be announcing his decision. This strong surge is in spite of the fact that Microsoft itself, which makes up a very large chunk of the Nasdaq index, is down about 8% since the ruling."
Introducing the Weblog Monitor website. Updated once per hour, it shows when which weblogs changed. We started reading the registered sites in today's 6PM scan. At 6:38PM there were 32 registered sites. Thanks! This experiment has already had a payoff. I found the Bad Hair Days site. Great stuff! Great Hair was a major theme in the early days. NY Times: Recruiters in Panic for Programmers. "'I was going to a funeral recently, and a friend said, Don't recruit, and I said, Yeah, I won't do it,' said Noelle Tardieu, a recruiter who works under contract for Silicon Valley companies. Weddings are another matter: Ms. Tardieu says she reads the marriage announcements in the newspaper to find names and titles of prospective recruits." Today's German Survey. "Der Kanu-Club Grevenbroich möchte allen am Kanusport Interessierten mit seinem Internetangebot helfen. Was sollten wir besser machen?" Was dieses Mittel? Salon: Who controls free software? "Red Hat is now a publicly traded corporation beholden, in the long run, to profit-hungry shareholders. Who can predict what will happen to such a company?" Mark Kennedy: "If a web site has a copyright notice on every page that states that the rights to the material on the site are reserved, why is it that another company can come and take whatever they want whenever they want without permission?" Luke Tymowsky: Why I Love My Qube. Dan Bricklin's Comdex Journal. Lots of photos! Eclectic is the XML-DEV weblog. Survey: "Our ISP says that yesterday's router problem has been fixed. Do you concur?" I did a virgin install of Frontier 6.1 on a new NT4 system. The install went flawlessly. Entirely browser based. My workgroup webserver. As transparent as a mail server. Qube-like! We're introducing a familiar idea to the web, a Control Panel, which behaves exactly as the control panels on Windows and Mac, but interfaces thru Frontier's HTTP server. It's not fancy, but it sure is simple. In a sense this is the Manila-izing of Frontier itself. The Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server vision realized and monetized. It's infrastructure. A little over two years. Not bad! BTW, there's an architecture to the Control Panel in 6.1. Developers can add their own panels, using the #wizard XML structure defined in prefs.root. It's a platform. Frontier 6.1 allows the system operator to define a set of safe macros that can be included in pages in Manila sites hosted on the server. This allows Manila service providers to differentiate services they provide to web site owners. Jakob Nielsen: When Bad Design Elements Become Standard. MSNBC: Investors Cuckoo for Pokemon. Red Herring: Web Software Makers Arm the Revolution.
Update on network problems: "Conxion is experiencing network router resets. Conxion Engineers are in the process of isolating the problem. You may be experiencing latency or packet loss as a result." Hmmm. Bob Green's Anguilla News weblog is doing updates as Hurricane Lenny is coming thru. Steve Ivy compares UserLand's aggregator to ScreamingMedia's. Hey we win! Wow.
OK, you can start the presses again. (Love That Line.) KOutline is an outliner for KDE. 90% said that after voting they want to see the results, so that's how it works. The people have spoken! QubeQuorner reviews Mutt, an email client for Linux. Papa Doc is still on the Clue Trail at Comdex. "Now it's time to hack the real world and let other people write Web sites about it." Today's Zope Newbies News. It's rollin! InfoWorld: Ellison Expounds. "The best possible remedy, Ellison said, would be for the government to break Microsoft up into three individual companies with each company gaining ownership of the company's three main product lines, Windows NT, Windows 98, and Internet Explorer." We want to run banner ads on several of our sites. We've been having trouble getting the agencies to return our calls. Yesterday we got thru to Flycast, read their affiliate agreement, and were perplexed. Are these agreements commonplace? If you work at an online pub running ads, please help us figure out how the system works. Thanks! Wired: All's Fair in Banner Ad War. "The ISP is helping competing companies stake out advertising space above the Web sites of their chief rivals." Today's DG topics: MacBird, Pokémon and CallTheShots.Com. Lawrence Lee: "Brace yourself Pokémon, here comes Jeeves." SendMail.Net: Tim O'Reilly on Cygnus. A survey in German. Andre Radke says: "Basically, he's asking whether anyone would be interested in a weblog about founding a business (in Germany, I suppose)." OS Opinion: "Once the Jabber mind set begins to creep in, the possibilities simply explode into an endless array. Jabber is the open source community's answer to a playing field littered with barely useful products and broken promises." Abby Digital: Quark AppleScripting.
PC Mag: Technical Excellence Awards. Google, Bill Joy and Linus Torvalds win. XML-DEV: "I wanted something that would be easier, and XML provided the solution." Motley Fool's Mark Kennedy questions CallTheShots.Com. "In the CallTheShots.Com model, there is no reason for the user to ever click into my site because all of the content the user is interested in can be viewed on the CallTheShots.com site." Survey: Is CallTheShots.Com fair or not? Eric Soroos did a little digging and figured out how to route around CallTheShots.Com. "Active servers are fun." Ahran Dunsmoor asks if, after voting in a survey, you should see the results of the survey. Excellent use of technology! BTW, all UserLand.Com members are welcome to use our survey facility. It's still kind of new. I'll release the source code after 6.1 is out. I don't want to get in the way of people learning Manila. Pyra's Evan Williams comments on RSS as it applies to weblogs. Next Tuesday, Seattle FUG meeting. The world's first Wu-Tan namelizer. I am Likeable Warlock. Apparently the Wu-Tan app has been turned off. :-( Both Marc Canter and Bill Gates are Flailing Fanatical Killer. Check out Jorn Barger's Wu-Tan name. It's funny! Doc Searls: On the Clue Trail at Comdex. "'This was a real town when the rackets ran it,' he said. 'A guy gets drunk and loses his money, the casino puts him up and gives him enough to get out of town. They were tough bastards, but they were gentlemen.'" Doc's Wu-Tan name is Lazy-Assed Destroyer. Tim O'Reilly in Salon: How the web was almost won. "I don't think people realize just how close we came to a Microsoft-dominated Web. If Microsoft, having trounced Netscape, hadn't been surprised by the unexpected strength of Apache, Perl, FreeBSD and Linux, I can easily imagine a squeeze play on Web protocols and standards, which would have allowed Microsoft to dictate terms to the Web developers who are currently inventing the next generation of computer applications." Excitable Misunderstood Genius. To Tim and everyone else. Remember, the net routes around outages. Microsoft trying to own it all is just an outage. No problemmo. They just screw themselves. I realllly believe this. One more thing to Tim. Have a look at what Mac developers contributed to the Web, not just the Unix crowd. We're all part of one Internet now. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. Linus gets it: "The iMac comes in five colors. Who cares from a technical standpoint? But they're obviously selling like crazy." TransMeta is a little more teasing this AM. Do a view source. Linus' Wu-Tan name is Tha 3,416th Case Study. Kurt Egger asks where would you like to be on 12/31/99? You can't hurry love no you'll just have to wait. 45 days.
A weblog for the clueless. Thanks! A new survey about web work on weekends. We completed a rewrite of surveys.userland.com. Big change -- any UserLand.Com member can create surveys for others to use. The response list is in XML. Source release to follow sooon. Gates: "We call this the personal Web. Instead of you going to a Web page and it deciding what you're interested in, you'll be able to pick pieces of information from different websites. You'll be able to create applications and programs that use that information. That will give you power to assemble news or find the best price for a product. You'll be in control of that experience. And companies like ours will provide services online such as Microsoft Office or passport authentication." News.Com: "The values that are inherent in the antitrust laws are ones that are sound in my opinion," Gore, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said. "If dominance in one area is used to prevent competition in another area, that is wrong," he added. Brad Graham explains what's behind A Day Without Weblogs. A support question from a Vignette user. Cringely: And Your Little Dog Too. What do you think of HalfBrain.Com? InfoWorld: "The real benefit of XML is that it will become a business-to-business language, so we can drop an entire database from the site right into a customer's purchasing system." Register: Red Hat Buys Cygnus. "So the rumours were true: Linux distributor Red Hat has confirmed it is to buy Cygnus for $674 million." Coverage: Motley Fool, Wired, News.Com. A brief note welcoming Doc Searls to the world of weblogs. Doc is my teacher, a former radio guy, then founder of a Silicon Valley marketing firm, and lately an editor at Linux Journal and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (coming in Jan) and the great Cluetrain website. Doc and I share a vision of the web. We finish each others' sentences. He's a frequent contributor here. PS: I got my Qube from Doc. Dan Libby, Netscape's RSS guy, posts a couple of messages in a recent thread about the evolution of RSS. Ooops! Now register.com is putting the same kind of legal agreement/disclaimer on results of queries against their WhoIs database.
Salon: Why Microsoft really does suck. "I had to enter the Windows 98 'Certificate of Authenticity' Product Key -- 30 letters and numbers proving that I had the right to start using the computer I had just bought." 8/26/99: "I always forget how humiliating the NT setup process is. I always fail to write it up. I wanted to do this now, while the experience is totally fresh, so I won't forget." Enterprise Development: "The SOAP protocol was the joint effort of three parties. Dave Winer of UserLand was a very early proponent of this idea and has been using an earlier version of the protocol, XML-RPC, in production code for a while. Don Box and company, of DevelopMentor, add a lot of RPC expertise and just general coolness to the effort. They are building the reference implementations on various platforms which you can find on their Web site as they are finished. And several software engineers at Microsoft helped out too." Dan Shafer: Are Web Applications Leaving Mac Users Behind? "Recently I was looking for a Web-based intranet service for my company's team to use. We're a heterogeneous group: some of us use Windows, some Macintosh, and one of us (guess who) Windows, Mac, and, increasingly Linux." 259 Diaries: A word from the wife. "How does one go about budgeting for home improvements?" Financial Observer: "Thanks to the dot-coms, the networks are booked solid for November and December. 'The fourth quarter has essentially sold out,' said Dana McClintock, a spokesman for CBS Corporation. Nonetheless, if a dot-com with fat pockets wants to get on bad enough, Mr. McClintock hinted that they can still buy air time–for the right price. 'If somebody walks in and offers $20 million for a 30-second spot, will we do it?' he said. 'I mean, put yourself in the business person’s shoes.'" A picture of Frontier's outliner editing XML text that is rendered as a preferences system. Because you do all your editing in a flexible structure, you get to be more creative in asking questions of your users. The prefs system is a built-in feature in Frontier 6.1, in prefs.root. For advanced architects, we have an open protocol for prefs distribution, thru XML-RPC of course. It works, we use it to glue together two LANS running a thousand miles apart. Things are really hopping on the ZopeNewbies site. Outliners, content management, web browsers and servers, XML-RPC and object databases. BTW, we have all the pieces covered, with one exception, web browsers. Are people aware of breakage in Mac IE 4.5? It's got some pretty bad bugs, we hear, from people testing Frontier 6.1. Epinions: The Easy Way to Maintain a Weblog. "In short, if you want to maintain a running list of posts like a weblog, then Blogger is a great way to go." Thanks to Robot Wisdom for the pointer. We're working with the Pyra people to make Blogger and Manila work together. They're a joy to work with, great people, as the above review says.
Denver Post: What innovations came from Microsoft? New channel: Hack the Planet. Welcome Wes! What do you think of A Day Without Weblogs? I've been playing with weblog search engines this morning, came across some interesting stuff. Linkwatcher apparently searches just the text on the weblogs, doesn't index the stories pointed to by the weblogs. Few weblogs have their own search engines, and those that do don't go deeper either. Our experimental news search engine does go two-levels deep, btw. Sun: Java and XML. Costis Dallas is pretty excited about Manila. Me too! PGPfone is "a software package that turns your desktop or notebook computer into a secure telephone. It uses speech compression and strong cryptography protocols to give you the ability to have a real-time secure telephone conversation. Secure voice calls are supported over the Internet, or through a direct modem-to-modem connection, or even over AppleTalk networks." Finally, the NY Times solves the Is It Really the Millennium? puzzle. "Celebrate both 2000 and 2001. To be safe, celebrate at both 7 p.m. and midnight. Celebrate early. Celebrate often." NY Times: An Encyclopedic Mirror of What? "For Britannica, though, the greatest risk may be not in technological excess, but in Internet access. If income depends on e-commerce, will emphases change to court clicks? Will as many resources be devoted to a rarely consulted scholarly entry on, say, Baroque opera as to a popular and commercially supported entry on, say, rock music?" Red Herring: Drilling Deeper into Transmeta. "With Transmeta's chip technology -- which translates software written for Intel's x86 architecture to Transmeta's native P95 architecture -- a handheld device would be able to run Windows CE applications without using Microsoft's OS or Intel's chips."
New Manila Weblog: Jeff Shelton is a Zope Newbie. This may become our niche. Friendly sites for people studying and exploring together. Welcome! Scott Hansen explains what SquishDot is about. MacWorld: Eddy Award Finalists for 1999. Red Herring: Transmeta Comes Into Focus. "Pundits predict Linus Torvalds, Linux operating system creator and Transmeta software engineer, will let the cat out of the bag." On Monday. Lots of juicy stories this AM on SalonHerringWiredFool.Com. Such great stories, and great headlines. I love the web! LinkWatcher is going commercial. Good idea! Whump.Com: Using a glossary to unwind comments from links. Joel Slade asks if anyone has used MORE 3.1 with Mac OS 9. InfoWorld: IBM on XML. "Other successful Internet technologies let people run their systems without having to take into account another company's own computer systems, notably TCP/IP for networking, Java for programming, and Web browsers for content delivery. XML fills the data formatting piece of the puzzle, said Phipps, who gave a keynote at the Software Development East conference." Hey I thought Sun owned Java, and doesn't MS own web browsers? Enjoy yourself.. It's later than you think! What is Manila? Looks like it's going to ship next week.
Motley Fool: Of course Microsoft is a Monopoly. "Every year for the last decade, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems has stood above ninety percent. For the last couple of years the figure has been at least ninety-five percent, and the analysts project that the share will climb even higher over the next few years." MacWEEK: Dreamweaver-Fireworks rev a hit. Eclectic is a weblog that covers the XML-DEV mail list. Leigh Dodds reads every message and points to the interesting ones. It's now a Manila site. Leigh got the site up in less than a half hour! That's got to be some kind of record. Andrew Wooldridge asks for help with XML-RPC. He's working on the connection between Dreamweaver and Manila, so if someone who knows the technology could help him out, we'd get more beautiful websites sooner. Thanks! There was a weblog newsgroup on Deja.Com. Last post was in August. Xybernaut is a wearable Pentium system capable of running any compatible OS, including Linux. SendMail.Net: Vixie Wraps Bind. "I'm coming up on ten years working with BIND, and now that the fresh, clean, from-scratch implementation has none of my code in it, I'm pretty much planning to retire from BIND. Ten years is a long time." We've got a slogan for Manila, it goes like this. "I'm a newbie, she's a newbie, we are newbies, wouldn't you like to be a newbie too?" (Sung to the tune of the old Dr Pepper jingle.) The point being, we're all newbies here, in case that wasn't clear! MacWEEK has compiled a table of contents for the Jackson findings, with links to 16 sections that refer specifically to Apple. (This is a very interesting site, done with Frontier, I wonder how.) Heads-up to people in the weblog community. I'm doing an application that works like LinkWatcher. It will keep an hourly listing of weblogs that changed in reverse-chronologic order. I'm also doing it as sample code for Frontier users to help teach how the My.UserLand aggregator works. The app is far simpler than My.UserLand, it doesn't do any parsing. LinkWatcher is great but it doesn't scan that frequently. I've gotten a few questions about the scanner, I guess it's showing up in people's logs, hopefully this should answer them. If you'd rather we didn't scan your weblog, it'll be easy to opt-out. Doug Beeferman: Random Internet Startup Generator. Awe-some! MSNBC: Microsoft, Radio Shack form Alliance. MacCentral: AppleScript Tutorial, Part III. Industry Standard: Microsoft Wins Browser War. "Microsoft's IE is the primary choice for 64 percent of respondents to the October survey, compared to 36 percent for Navigator. In April, the figures were 59-41 in Microsoft's favor, while as recently as October 1998, Navigator held a 60-40 lead." Note to Linux, don't start wars! CNN: Tiny Be carves out niche in vast Microsoft-owned pie. "So what does Be have on its side? Be's operating system, according to the company, is clean, stable and a whiz at handling multimedia tasks." Go Be! Go Be! See the difference in approach? JLG is a master of expectations. There's nowhere but up from here. By aspiring to dominance, Linux, as Netscape before it, sets itself up to be torn down, piece by piece. Better to be humble. Who me? Dominate? No way! Hey get this, they're still publishing Mad Magazine. What me worry? Holy Cow! There's a Mad Magazine CD with every issue dating back to 1952. Only $59. Hurry up and buy one before they change their minds.
Motley Fool: Is the Internet Revolution Over? "Car quotes over the Internet -- truly a great idea. I'd love to be able to shop for a car without having to suffer a dealership experience. But will I, Joe Six-Pack, change how I purchase my next set of wheels? Eh, I doubt it." MP3.COM: She Can Stay My Home. Jon Eisenzopf asks questions about the future of RSS. Very interesting! According to Francis Lu, Sun is distributing XML-RPC sample code with the Java XML parser. Apparently it's not compatible with XML-RPC. Oooops! Steve Ivy is having fun with his new Manila site. There's an important bit of info here, you can change the look of the site ad infinitum. Ours all look pretty similar. But Steve shows that you can have it your own way. Same with Dan Gillmor's site. Running the same software as XML-RPC.COM, Qube Quorner, and DaveNet. Their site templates is edited thru a web browser, of course. All are Manila sites. Salon: The Internet Illusion. "A constant diet of personal interest will leave us conspicuously unexposed to diverging points of view -- not a great way to maintain an open mind. " Linux Today: "The Linux community is friendly, interesting and helpful. I don't have Steve Ballmer's E-mail address. I could get it if I want it, but I don't. Why don't I want Steve Ballmer's E-mail address? Because I don't want to talk to him. The chances that he would actually respond are approximately one to googolplex. On the other hand, Tom Christensen usually responds to my E-mail within the nanosecond." 4/22/98: "That's why I say it isn't about open source, it's about open minds. Drawing lines alienates people to you. Attacking Microsoft verbally causes Windows users to tune out. You can't undermine by trying to dictate the terms, you have to do it by invading at night, slipping in the back door unnoticed. Then when the old folks wake up, it's too damned late." Clikz: Build Community with Weblogs. Luke Tymowski: Qube for Newbies. The Qube is like an Apple-designed Linux box. I don't think Tom Christensen would want one, but I do. NY Times: "Another idea long favored by the states would be to force Microsoft to auction the Windows source code so that two or three other companies could sell competing systems. In that case, Hovenkamp noted, the competing companies would have to set up a 'joint venture for compatibility standards' so that computers and software would work equally well with each system." Welcome to Never Never Land! WSJ: Outsiders Consider Microsoft Breakup. "The likely consequence is a lot of confusion." PC WEEK: "Everyone was talking about how push is dead," said BackWeb CEO Eli Barkat. "The showstopper with push was the technology, not the concept." Red Herring: IBM Starts Incubator with Conxion. "IBM, in partnership with the Internet service provider Conxion, is providing up to $1 million in Internet technology and services, including servers, software, Web hosting and managed services, tools, training, and round-the-clock support for six months to selected Internet startups." After last week's outages and poor communication, Conxion is no longer on our A-list. Something happens when an ISP grows. It's not a pretty thing from a customer's point of view. I offered suggestions for improving the service based on the problems we encountered, but didn't get a response. We're still using Conxion, but I don't have the confidence in them that I used to. 7/31/96: The Compaq of ISPs. Are there other Conxion customers out there? If so, I've started a Conxion customers mail list so when there are problems we can help each other debug them and get back on the air quickly.
Luke Tymowski's Qube Quorner is a weblog focused on the Cobalt Qube. Luke and I were emailing about the Qube, he asked me a question I didn't know the answer to, so I said "Let's start a Manila site!" There you go. We've got a few more in the pipe. I won't be satisfied until we're covering all the scripting and serving environments. I'm glad the Qube is the first such site, because I dig the Qube and everything it stands for. When the site gets going we're going to ask Cobalt for a pointer. Two reviews of Allaire Cold Fusion from Web Developers Journal, one positive, one negative. NY Post: Gates waits for bailout from GOP. "Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the GOP presidential frontrunner, for example, is a close friend of Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Bob Herbold and said at a conference of high-tech executives in Arizona last month his administration would 'always take the side of innovation over litigation.'" Motley Fool: Microsoft vs John Q Public? "Microsoft, with more than $19 billion in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet and a market value of almost $500 billion, is a big target. The Journal reported that lawyers and corporate attorneys are already examining the judge's statement of fact to find leverage for possible claims." InternetWeek: "Fifty percent of those surveyed said the most significant reason XML is important is that it allows application to application data exchange." Jorn Barger's sources for cribbed links. Cribbed from Jorn Barger's site! Dale Dougherty: Will the new Red Hat Fit? "Is this the future of software? To be acquired by either Microsoft, if you're successful, or AOL, if you're not." Red Hat's Russ Mitchell. "How will the old-guard, with so much to lose, fight back?" This reminds me of an old song. An interesting page on Red Hat's news site, explains how they're sharing content with The Register. The Apache XML Project includes something called Cocoon 2.0, which is an XML-based CMS. I wonder why they didn't go with Zope, which is gaining a lot of momentum and would get them XML-RPC compatibility along with Python? Josh Lucas sheds some light on Cocoon 2.0. Ted Nelson: Embedded Markup Considered Harmful. Interesting essay. We could probably implement transclusion. I wonder if Nelson has a spec for how that would work at an authoring level. Eric Neu's critique of Ted Nelson's critique. News.Com: Microsoft to Lease Office. "We are moving into the next wave of the Web where software and services are delivered together, and we are excited to offer Office 2000 to our customers in this new way," Steven Sinofsky, vice president of Microsoft Office, said in a statement. I don't get it. Microsoft's beta version of MSN. See if you can figure out what's new. Cluttered and ugly and filled with hard-sell. Better better better. If they're so much better why do they have to say it so often? These are really poorly designed sites! There's no focus, no place for my eye to land. Just a maze of shouted messages. Privacy Place is not a Manila site. It's run by a longtime friend, Fred Davis. We talked with them, but they decided to cook their own CMS. Paul Hardwick's Privacy Digest has a familiar look, and does a great job of covering privacy issues. Red Herring: VCs Yawn at Microsoft Ruling. "It's ironic this decision came down at a time when the Wintel alliance is at its weakest point in a decade, alternative operating systems are emerging for new digital devices, and Microsoft has failed to dominate in the area of content or the dot-com retail space," says Bay Partners VC Jim Wickett.
DaveNet: Microsoft's Next Step? It's been a long time since I've posted a teaser, or at least such an overt one. Tomorrow there's going to be a new site linked into Scripting News, and like Dan Gillmor's site, it's the first of what I hope will be a breed, a genre of website. Steve Ivy just started another new kind of weblog. Wow. An email I sent to the XML-RPC list re Apache and XML. "I hope the XML-RPC community is well-represented there, and that we participate with respect and professionalism." And enthusiasm and evangelism! A letter from Mahir. "The photos, the address and most of the writings in the page was mine; but there were some additions saying that I liked sex, and had the hobby of taking photos of the naked models. And also it was saying that I was inviting the women all over the world to my house. We were all surprised and laughing. They started to search for finding who did that and why, and was that a joke or a plot." Excellent! Press release: Be works with Sun on Java. Schwinnng! TechWeb: "The Bowstreet 1.0 Web Automation Factory is shipping. Pricing starts at $250,000." WebMonkey: Server-side Scripting Shootout. Forbes: The Return of Push. "BackWeb and Marimba have carved up the push pie into two distinct segments in which they are the leaders." Push pie! Dale Dougherty: What's Up With The Docs? "Documentation is the heart and soul of O'Reilly." Builder.Com is auctioning all the seats at Jakob Nielsen's workshop following the Builder.Com conference in New Orleans. Jakob's new AlertBox on Graceful Degradation of web interfaces. Just curious, why is the date on this piece 10/31/99? Jon Udell: Why isn't ODBC a standard part of Linux? Wired: "While consumers might one day turn to network computers, or Linux, or a combination of middleware and some other operating system, as an alternative to Windows, the fact remains that they are not doing so today," Jackson said. 9/12/99: "People who use spreadsheets and word processors and web browsers and email programs choose Windows in droves, and rightly so." Red Herring: Pondering Microsoft's Breakup Valuation. "He assigns the following values to the broken-up pieces of Microsoft: platforms, $57 billion; applications, $55 billion; Internet pieces, $245 billion; cash on hand, $18 billion; and unearned revenue, $4 billion." Wired: More Real Damage Control. "RealNetworks has issued another software update that addresses a privacy concern, this time in its popular RealPlayer software." Andrew Wooldridge points to Macromedia's announcement of DreamWeaver 3, which he says supports HTTP, which means that it could support XML-RPC? Let's figure this out! Dori Smith, our resident expert on JavaScript, answers a question about how scriptable DreamWeaver 3 is. MacWEEK first look at Fireworks 3 from Macromedia, with a few bits about DreamWeaver 3. Pyra has a new feature that I totally envy called Blogger. Perhaps they want to open Blogger so it can be used with any content management system? Questions questions. Do they have a patent? And congrats to Pyra, it's a good idea. Brain Sausage logs off. Oh Geeez! What's next? Mahir goes to Fargo? You betcha! News.Com: Apache and XML. "Apache will collect all the technology and improve it where necessary, said Apache president Brian Behlendorf. For example, in its first project, the organization will take the best features of IBM and Sun's XML parsers and meld them into one product." Jerry Pournelle: The Microsoft Decision was Wrong. Rogers Cadenhead (apparently) is reporting a bug in our redirector. He says that when he clicks on the MSNBC link below, it fails for him. I just tried logging off and clicking on the link and it works for me. FWIW, I blocked him from posting on our DG because I got tired of deleting his personal comments. MSNBC: iDirections.com is "promising to give away domain names, for free. The company will foot the bill for the wholesale price of registering the name, a $6 dollar fee paid to NSI which runs the domain name registry service, a database that acts as a master directory for all .Com, .Org and .Net addresses." Salon: GM's E-Xecutive. "On a weekly basis, there are over a half a billion hours of eyeball time that customers spend in their vehicles."
Dan Gillmor: "Here are the front pages of three papers I picked up in Hong Kong and Taipei the day after Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson declared Microsoft to be what everyone knew it was: a monopoly." Walter Logeman asks about collaborative filtering and the My.UserLand story flow. "My choices place me in a group of buddies, and I get the things my buddies like. It is not 'feature based' but socially determined." MSNBC: Klein Considers Microsoft Sanctions. "Joel Klein, appearing on Sunday talk shows, acknowledged that a breakup of Microsoft is within the range of possible remedies, but he stopped short of saying that’s what he’ll seek." We're working on the final check-out of Manila, so this morning I put up a new website that I've been meaning to do for quite a while. Extra bonus, there's a current picture of me on the site. More pictures. Here's one of Dave Jacobs of Marimba telling a story to me and Marc Canter at the Garden of Tranquility in SF on Thursday; and one of me explaining some complicated idea to Nina and Marc, at Marc's house, later that night. Big windstorm today, perfect weather for outages, both power and T1 line. Think good thoughts!
DaveNet: The Ancient Geeks. "The fight with Microsoft is about whether or not we will all be Windows Developers. That fight is now over, completely. Microsoft had dominance in this dimension for at most three years. The Internet wiped the slate completely clean in 1993." NY Times: "For more than a year, the Microsoft Corporation has been untarnished on Wall Street and on Main Street from the government's relentless antitrust assault on the company. But suddenly, it may begin feeling some pain as investors and the computer industry consider the likely impact of the blow delivered on Friday evening by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson." Tim O'Reilly in Salon: "The frontier of innovation has moved beyond the sphere that Microsoft controls. I think there is more competition for Microsoft now than there has ever been." It's official. Chris Nolan says "The column will start again in December in the NY Post." Cool! Doc Searls: "But when they got fixated on the semi in the rear view mirror -- Microsoft bearing down on them -- they missed their turn and flew off the cliff." MIT Technology Review chose 100 young innovators, in software, hardware, biotech and the worldwide web. Dan Bricklin has been having ISP problems. Robot Wisdom: Writing Embedded Date Bookmarklets. Loop-close. If you had a weblog hosted on My.UserLand, we promised we'd migrate it to a new way, soon. We're ready. If you want us to start a new weblog for you, please send email to dave@userland.com. 10/27/98: "It's true that software company death happens all the time in Silicon Valley, and often Microsoft is somewhere near the corpse at the time of its demise, but it's totally unscientific to conclude that Microsoft is responsible. If you field an inadequate team to play against a professional team with deep experience and deep pockets, and the other guys win, are they to blame?" Dan Gillmor: "In the shorter term, the trial has already had a useful effect. It has forced Microsoft to back away from some of its most outrageous abuses. PC manufacturers, for example, have been given more leeway in the way they set up their systems." NY Times: "Microsoft should fight for its rights under the law, but it should also recognize the sweeping nature of the government's victory. Certain facts about its behavior have now been established, and it is in everyone's best interest to achieve a solution." Dave Winer: "If we don't trust the Internet to route around Microsoft's attempts to own it, how can we trust it to route around earthquakes, nuclear bombs and political despotism?" Red Herring: Cobalt Burns Hotter than Red Hat. "Cobalt opened at $140 per share and blazed to a high on the day of $158 per share, before dimming to a close of $128. Ultimately, it shot up a whopping 482 percent on 10.9 million shares traded." Red Herring: Alan Meckler Wants to do Deals. "When I asked him where I should have entrepreneurs send queries, he said to have them email him directly. So, here it is, folks. Do your damndest. We'll soon find out if Mr. Meckler can keep 100 balls in the air. Write to him at ameckler@internet.com." The Britannica website is online. Via RobotWisdom. The Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game. Via CamWorld. LinkWatcher now has a weblog search engine. SF Chronicle: "There are a lot of smart, creative people who work in Silicon Valley in programming and they feel it helps them intellectually to use marijuana," Abrahamson said.
Wired: "The US judge overseeing the Microsoft antitrust trial didn't only rule that the company has erected a far-reaching monopoly. He also took the first step toward extreme punishments that could include breaking up the largest software company in the world." microsoftRulingDiscuss is an experiment. District Court finding of fact. PDF or WordPerfect. The NY Times coverted it to HTML. News.Com has quotes from the finding. NY Times: Microsoft has a Monopoly. "Releasing his opinion of the facts in the wide-ranging antitrust case against software giant Microsoft, a federal judge on Friday evening said the company's dominance of the operating system market constitutes a monopoly. MSNBC: Microsoft monopoly power found. "The judge in the historic antitrust trial of software giant Microsoft Corp. ruled Friday that the software giant wields monopoly power in personal computer operating systems and issued a decision highly favorable to the government." David Carter-Tod: LDAP and Security in Frontier. "This isn't completely plug and play, but it's close." Windows. News.Com: "Cobalt shares opened at 139, giving the company a market value of $3.79 billion. Later in the day, the shares had slipped to about 130." In last week's survey 59% of the voters said Cobalt's IPO valuation would be between $1 and $5 billion. People are changing their votes! LOL. Stop the presses! Cobalt IPO'd and they're booming! Excellent. We use their product, love it, and think it's one of the most revolutionary products on the market. Go go go! OK, you can start the presses again. I wrote a brief testimonial for our Qube, and linked it into the home page right below my picture as a permanent fixture. Dan Gillmor: "Welcome to the first edition of a different sort of newspaper column." Jorn Barger's start page. (This is the page he jumps to when he's scanning the web. Thanks for the pointer Jorn.) Netcraft: "www.scripting.com is running Apache/1.3.3 Cobalt (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux." Netcraft: "www.amazon.com is running Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 (Unix) on DIGITAL UNIX". The Wired Channel is back on line. The problem was less exotic than we thought. Just needed to delete a trailing slash on the URL. I like those kinds of solutions. The Red Herring Channel is back on line. This outage was caused by a UserLand wire-trip. We broke a key verb in Frontier. This only affected testers of 6.1. I'm knocking heads over this one. Bottom-line: Our showcase for the value of aggregation is back online in its full four-channel glory. BTW, head-knocking came from The Three Stooges. Moe, Larry and Curly. When Moe got angry (he was always angry) he would take Larry and Curly by the hair and bang their heads together. They'd scream. The kids would laugh. Mothers would be appalled. We turned out OK anyway. Here's a picture of Moe, getting ready to head-knock Larry and Curly, using their noses as handles. The Three Stooges were an early release of Itchy and Scratchy. The I Kiss You Guy is this generation's I Love Lucy. And the original web anomaly.. The Dancing Hamsters!
Seven weblogs from the Netherlands: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Holy cow! Today's award for the best name goes to MrEdBlog. Dan Gillmor: "Hong Kong reminds me of New York and San Francisco three or four years ago, when it was obvious the Net was going to change things and smart people began to figure out how they could get a piece of the action." MacCentral: Server Scripting. News.Com: Start-ups target real-life communities for Web page building. "Unlike the first wave of Web communities, these companies are not trying to garner advertising dollars by amassing home page publishers on their Web sites. Instead, this new breed seeks to become the invisible toolbox that bigger Web sites can rent to build the communities themselves." A question for Apache gurus. Moving day! We're switching www.scripting.com from WebSTAR on a Mac to Apache on Linux. Here's a test page. I wonder if this loads faster? (It does for me.) BTW, the Linux box is the Cobalt Qube. We love this machine, it's so cool, everyone should be issued one at birth. I think the bandwith problem is resolved. We had stepped-down channel refreshing on My.UserLand in an attempt to keep our servers running. Paul Hardwick, editor of Privacy Digest helped us track down the problem. Now the next time a channel refreshes, the change will be reflected on the choose and viewChannel pages. If you don't understand what this means, don't worry, it's not on the final exam. The next problem is figuring out why Wired and Red Herring aren't updating. Another day another dollar. Postscript: You won't believe the reason the Wired channel isn't working. And if you believe that, you won't believe the workaround. Stay tuned. Theory: Our T1 line doesn't like sunshine? According to the University of Wyoming, sunrise in San Francisco is at 6:36AM. As I write this it's 5:08AM. The net appears fast from my side of the pipe. It's now 7:01AM, the sun is up, and the net is still snappy viewed thru my portal. Excellent! 8:51AM: I'm getting traceroutes from readers who are not getting thru again, pointing to problems inside the Conxion network. Just got a call from the ISP telling me, again, to look for problems with people connecting from the West Coast. Grrrrr. 10:41AM: According to the ISP, in routine maintenence last Thursday, PacBell downgraded our line from a T1 to less than ISDN throughput. At 4PM yesterday they gave us back our T1. Last night's survey clearly does not support their belief that the problem is only on the West Coast of the US. If you've been running a Frontier web server for more than a few months here's a tip that will improve performance, possibly by a lot. It's possible that Salon is trying too hard. Salon: "Last Tuesday, when I was first forwarded the URL by a co-worker, the site counter boasted 11,000 visitors."
Tim Berners-Lee: XHTML 1.0 returned to HTML WG. "W3C Members wanted the HTML working group to revise the XHTML 1.0 specification to utilize a single namespace." InfoWorld: Red Hat extends its reach. "Branching out into what it believes will be a lucrative market, Red Hat Software on Wednesday announced it will offer a number of consulting and support services for open-source products, including the Apache Web Server, operating under distributions of Linux other than its own." With their super-high market capitalization, they have to spread out into any business that relates to open source. Their market cap practically requires it of them. BusinessWeek: Salon and Slate. "Actually, Slate and Salon don't even mention each other when you ask them to name their competitors. Slate publisher Scott S. Moore cites the Web sites of Wired or The New York Times and Washington Post, while O'Donnell has grand aspirations of Salon becoming a full-fledged news service akin to CNN." Here's another difference. Salon is a My.UserLand channel. BTW, as I was installing a new version of Frontier, I noticed that SalonHerringWiredFool.Com took over 17,000 hits today, even with all the ISP-related problems, and with just word of mouth carrying the message. That's pretty good! Survey: Our ISP thinks that people connecting from the West Coast are experiencing the problems and people connecting from elsewhere are getting normal service. Luke Tymowski reports at 4:30PM Pacific: "Whatever happened has made Scripting.com extremely quick. No more lurchy 60 second page loads. Just blasts up in one go." This is consistent with what we've seen for the past week. At about 5PM all of a sudden the problem clears up, only to reappear the following morning. Len MacDonell sent a screen shot that echoes what everyone else is saying. The problem is inside Conxion. When they ask who the ISP is, does this indicate that they're not working on the actual problem? Have I got that right?? (I'm not an expert in the router area, and I'm trying to be kind because we like them so much!) Like them or not, I am about to blow my top. I got an email from one of the customer relations people saying whether I understand why or not, they really want to know, geographically, where all you people are coming from. My response -- go down the hall to one of your competitors, dial into www.scripting.com. That's where you're geographically located. Near as I can tell, no one is getting a clean connection to this system. Why? We started a Manila site for O'Reilly Associates, hosted by Dale Dougherty. It's starting pretty quickly! Genehack: "If I was Dan Gillmor, I'd be starting a 'blog too, because that's got to be preferable to burger flipping." Cute, but when I get a pointer from the Merc, my hits go up by a lot. MacCentral: AppleScript Primer Part II. MetaFilter, the community 'blog, keeps on truckin. It's like a guestbook, with respect. I like it. Not to be confused with MetaFilter, Gabby at MetaTalk says Weblogs are Evil. She comes highly recommended by several people I trust so I removed her "randomness". To me, being random is not a bad thing. The SJ Merc is running an AP story about Chris Nolan's resignation. "The New York Post has offered to run the high-tech gossip column, Nolan said." RefererLog: Rogers Cadenhead asked Jeeves if OJ Simpson killed his ex-wife Nicole. Ever the philosopher, Jeeves answered Rogers' question with more questions! News.Com: Microsoft and RR Donnely in Pact. According to Microsoft exec Dick Brass, it's of "historic proportions." BTW, I used to hang out with Dick Brass, many many years ago. He has a very distinctive way of talking, and I can actually imitate his way. (There are only two other people I can imitate, Dick's boss, Bill Gates, and dBASE guru Adam Green.) I introduced Adam to Dick in the late 80s, and they tried to take over Ashton-Tate. I could imitate both sides of their discussions. True story! Inman News: XML Politics in Mortgage Industry. "Allowing independent groups developing ad-hoc, closed standards will eventually lead to standards anarchy," Lesher wrote. "Having multiple, competing standards is the same (as) having no standards at all." Bruce Perens: Run LinuxOne out of town on a rail. "Seeing how well the Linux IPO market was doing, they copied Red Hat's S-1 form (the form you file with the SEC prior to doing an IPO) almost word-for-word, and now they've copied the Red Hat software and are beta-testing it as their own product without any apparent enhancement, and they are violating the GPL." Have the connectivity problems eased? If not, please send me an email, again, saying who your ISP is. Our ISP seems to think it has something to do with who your ISP is, but looking at the traceroutes people have sent us, we think the problem is in their shop. We forward them diligently to the NOC at our ISP.
New channel: Patricia Seybold Perspectives. This is one of the most prestigious market research firms. It's great to get them on the RSS network. From our ISP, re the connectivity problems: "The one thing that would help is to know how the customers are getting to your site. For instance what ISP they are using. This is important so we can find out which Network Access Point may be experiencing a problem." Salon: "But then I returned home, booted up my office computer, logged onto About.com and spent my usual 20-odd minutes wading around, lost." Yup. Thanks to Flutterby for pointing me to Nibelung. I just created my own weblog rotation of the sites I visit frequently. I plan to edit this list, and when it reaches a certain maturity, to link it into the Scripting News home page. It's a very nicely done way to get quickly updated on a bunch of reverse-chronologic pages, aka weblogs. MacWorld's Jason Snell reviews Mac OS 9. "You could use AppleScript to extract an image from a scriptable database application on a Mac in Miami, then place that image into a QuarkXPress document on a Mac in Seattle -- while all the while, you're in Dallas." Happy First Anniversary to Tomalak's Realm. Tomalak Rules! Matthew Haughey: What's the most reliable Whois out there? Geek Tools WhoIs "will automatically query the correct registry, and return all of the data it can find." John West, who works at NSI, provides a key lead to the WhereIs WhoIs question. The Scripting News community is incredible! I followed John's advice, and updated our WhoIs interface. Weblogs at the Cusp of Acceptance. "The last few weeks have been incredible." Dale Dougherty: Masters of our Shifting Paradigm. "The Web was invented so that people could use computer networks to collaborate -- that is, exchange documents, discuss them...and create new documents that express the collective knowledge that emerges from this collaboration. It was, in other words, supposed to be a groupware application. Despite the astonishing popularity of the Web, it has yet to fulfill that original mission." It had to happen.. The Shockwave version of I Kiss You!!!! I'm a little disappointed with the O'Reilly cover for Eric S. Raymond's new book. I thought Eric himself would be the animal on the cover! I got my review copy of Jon Udell's new book, and read the first couple of chapters over lunch. Excellent stuff. Makes me want to set up an NNTP server. Our friend in Hong Kong snapped a shot of Sun CEO Scott McNealy. Dan's interview will be posted shortly. Here's an interesting page on Epinions. The most highly read opinion appears to have a count of 1189.
SF Chronicle: Chris Nolan Resigns at Merc. "Chris Nolan tendered her resignation this morning. She didn't offer any information about where she's headed." SF Examiner: Nolan Filed Lawsuit. "On Oct. 1, Nolan filed a charge of sexual discrimination, retaliatory firing and unequal pay with the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing." News.Com: Microsoft outlines Windows 2000 pricing. "When it debuts in February, Windows 2000 Professional will sell for an estimated retail price of $319, the same as its predecessor, Windows NT 4 Workstation. An upgrade from Windows NT will cost $149, the current price to move from previous versions of Windows NT, the company said yesterday in a briefing." New Manila site: Ken's Digest. "Music News & Views From The Bruce Peninsula." It's so pretty! Zope.Org: O'Reilly to publish a Zope book. "The book will be published under a not-yet agreed upon Open Content license. This means that during the evolution of the book, you will be able to view and download the material for your own information needs." JavaScript.Com. "The Definitive JavaScript Resource". NCSA: A Beginner's Guide to HTML. If you're experiencing slowness accessing UserLand.Com or Scripting.Com servers, please send me a private email.
InfoWorld: Weblogs mix creative expression with practical information. "Up to this point, Weblogs have existed in relative obscurity. But just last week, this burgeoning genre of online communication gained some legitimacy when respected technology columnist Dan Gillmor launched his own Weblog on Mercury Center, the San Jose Mercury News' Web site." 10/25/99: "We did the software that makes Dan's site run." Ken Dow compares Frontier 6.1 and Allaire Spectra. We gotta get this newspaper signed up as a Manila site. New Channel: SlashDot.Org. SlashDot does RSS. This is great news. We had a synthetic channel, based on their ultramode.txt file, which has gone away, and is replaced by a RSS file, perfectly suited for our aggregator. A hearty welcome to SlashDot.Org! Privacy Digest is covering developments with RealNetworks. Dan Bricklin, ever the innovator, has started a new weblog. Excellent! Are you having trouble connecting to Scripting.Com? Which is the most popular link on today's Scripting News? The redirector report reveals the truth, it's awful pulsating banner ad. I guess people love to be outraged?? SalonHerringWiredFool.Com keeps on truckin. NY Post: "People act like I've just won the lottery, but when I think about it, I don't know what I'd spend the money on. I hate shopping." Me too! On the Weblogs list, I post a plea for friendship with Robot Wisdom's Jorn Barger. Let's point to each other Jorn. Another survey! We think Frontier 6.1 will ship in mid-November. When do *you* think it will ship? (Hint, today is November 1.) Perhaps it's unbelievable that Akamai is worth almost $16 billion two days after it's IPO, but that's what the numbers say. Now, given this bit of information, what do you think the value of Cobalt will be when they IPO, later this week? In my meandering, griping, in boredom and frustration, I may have hit upon a new use for an old buzzword, describing a post-UseNet model of web-writing for the masses. An example, Sharingwood is an intentional community in southern Snohomish county, Washington. "We share meals in our common house 3-4 nights a week, have a playground, campground, 25 acres of forested greenbelt, and other shared amenities." Could the same idea be applied to a shared writing space? Since its inception in 1962, the 7,400 acre community of Reston has been one of the most innovative and successful planned communities in the United States. This is the most annoying banner ad I've ever seen. This is the most complete list of "blogs" I've seen. (Blog is another word for weblog.) Dan Lyke: "I'm going to have to implement XML-RPC in many of my applications. Like it or not, it's supported by a few tools. I should probably start by putting it in my image library and my search engine when I give y'all access to that." Thanks Dan! Scriptable search engines are a big area with lots of potential. AppleScript Sourcebook: New features in AppleScript 1.4.0. I just got eVited to a party. This is very nice. I bet it catches on. NY Times: "If RealJukebox is used with its default settings, it automatically loads each time a CD is inserted in the CD-ROM drive, and if the computer is connected to the Internet, the title of the CD is sent, together with the GUID, to RealNetworks." MSNBC: Walter Payton Dead at 45. "Though his nickname was 'Sweetness,' Payton’s running style was bruising. He vaulted over goal lines. He stiff-armed and barreled over tacklers in the open field almost as often as he dodged them." Sad to die so young! I'm changing the tagline of Scripting News. The old tagline, "News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community" has served us well. But it's time to move on. The way I work on taglines is by changing them in real-time, seeing how it feels, and then tweaking some more. It might take a couple of weeks.
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DaveNet: 
Here's a job for 
