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That's it for this millennium!  We're working on the MacBird source release. Here's a draft of the license. I'm interested in a thoughtful review by people familiar with open source licenses and with UserLand. Our goals are different from those of the drafters of the licenses for Linux, Mozilla Perl, Apache, and FreeBSD which are examples we looked at. Andrew Duncan has the first Frontier server to cross Y2K. It seems to be running. Praise Murphy! Hey, it's Y2K in New Zealand, Kamchatka, Sydney, Tokyo, Beijing and Bangkok, New Dehli, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Berlin, London, Rio. We're still here! Keep on truckin and praying to Murphy. NY Times: Russian President Yeltsin Resigns. Wall Street Journal interview with Kim Polese. July1999 in review is done. Still looking for a few volunteers.. John Marden: "One day there was a fire in a wastebasket in the Dean's office and in rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. The chemist works on which reagent would have to be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. 'What are you doing?' they demanded. 'Well to solve the problem, obviously you need a large sample size' the statistician replies." Genehack has become one of my favorite weblogs. He covers stuff I'm interested in, and doesn't make a big deal about things that aren't big deals. Thanks! I had a great time at the Fillmore party tonight. Hot Tuna opened. And then a band led by Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and Roger McNamee of Kleiner Perkins took the stage. They were great! As I write this it's 9:21PM in New Zealand. Less than three hours to Y2K there. It'll happen while I'm sleeping, but I'll be up early to see how it went. config.mainResponder.sites is a table that supports URL shortening and customization for mainResponder sites. The scripts in config.manila.callbacks.newSite run whenever you create a new Manila site, allowing you to customize new sites as they are created.
DaveNet: As Time Goes By was the song of Casablanca. I added a table of times around the world to the Y2K Watch page. As I write this at 1:23PM on 12/30/99 in the Pacific time zone, it's 9:23AM on New Year's Eve in New Zealand. More Firedrop buzz, from News.Com. "According to one source, word is that FireDrop may be looking to move into the e-invitation space currently occupied by start-ups such as Evite.com, SeeUThere.com, Mambo.com and eParties." The VC buzzword for 2000 will be "dilute"? Welcome to our first digital housewife and a technographic Navy Commander who donated a kidney to his brother. A sample script that checks the cookie expiration dates on your Frontier 6 membership groups. Press Release: SJ Merc Plans Y2K Coverage. "The Web site will feature breaking stories from correspondents on 'Millennium Journal,' a weblog that chronicles news and information on Y2K's impact." OK, I've started the DaveNet 1999 year in review site. January, February, March and April are done. If you'd like to do a month, become a member of the site and send me an email. It takes about a half-hour to do a month. Here's the 1998 year in review site. It was organized by topics. So far this is the soundbite for 1999. "Remembering two locations, one for the browser and one on my local desktop, is too taxing for my mind. The flow stops, I have to use my brain to find the stuff to edit, and you'd be amazed how many times that extra work makes me forget why I was going there in the first place." Images from Casablanca. Perhaps this one should be the closing image for the year? New feature: If you're a UserLand.Com member with Bookmarks, they're now displayed on the Scripting News home page. Scroll down and look in the right margin. This was a by-product of making it my new editorial home page. I need my bookmarks to preserve my workflow. You get the feature because I needed it. Today is Broadband Mechanics Day on Scripting News (at least the beginning is). BBM is Marc Canter's latest company. It's growing like a snake. They're hiring programmers. Noah Glass is one of their artists. They exemplify the spirit of Microserfs, that's the highest compliment I can pay, it's a totally 1.0 company. Marc and his team inspire me. (They also are building on my software, sometimes we put whole sub-systems in for BBM, like the Control Panel in 6.1. I saw Jimmi Johnson, their system manager looking harried one day, and I tried to imagine how he keeps 30+ Frontier servers running.) XML.Com's Best of 1999. What about RSS? What about XML-RPC? SOAP? My vote for the most under-appreciated continent of the last millennium, Africa. I want to go there in the next millennium. 1 Days to Y2K. If you're not ready now..
Welcome to Scripting News at Exodus. We have two machines here. One is an NT2K machine running our content management system, and the other is a fully-configured Qube running Apache. The text you're reading now is being served by Apache. Is it tempting Murphy to do this kind of switch right on the Y2K boundary? I think it's a good warmup exercise. One piece of advice, it's a good idea to do a full backup in the next 48 hours. You never know what Outlook Express might do at the millennium rollover. Praise Murphy! Survey: With Scripting News available on both Exodus and Conxion, we want to know, again, which is faster for you? BTW, to webmasters who want static renderings from Manila, we have the first bits working. That's how I'm updating the Exodus site. And guess what? I have an Edit This Page button on the static version of my page! An amazing twist. This page has been read times. (That's a text hit counter.) ***An announcement Ladies and gentlemen, here's something I've wanted to do for a long time. We're going to release the source code for MacBird, a project we started in 1991, and stopped development on in 1997. Here's a paragraph that explains why we did MacBird. "There were some things I disliked about the dialog design tools I used, ResEdit, Resorcerer. I felt they should be draw programs with grouping and alignment. I also wanted features from spreadsheets. That's where recalculation came from. That was a long road too. They started life as "formulas" until experience showed that a more general approach was possible." The rest of the story is here. It'll probably take a couple of days to get the release fully ready. Just in time for Y2K. ***Today's news New feature. A page that lists the 20 most recently changed home pages on EditThisPage.Com. Robert Hess: "Myself, I rarely get drunk, I drink because I really enjoy a good cocktail. I enjoy the craft of it, the art of it. I treat cocktails like a cuisine." I never would have found this colorful site if it weren't for the new feature. "I used to be jaded but that got so boring." A newbies site for Allaire Spectra. Excellent, now we can learn. News.Com: "With Equilibrium, CMGI is looking to beef up its content delivery infrastructure throughout its network of Web sites. Equilibrium develops software that automates the way sites publish and update content." Zope.Org has a prominent link to Zope Newbies, one of my favorite Manila sites. Bravo! Another graceful act of cooperation between Unix and Windows. Jeff Cheney's Mom got a new iMac for Christmas, and now has an EditThisPage.Com site. Of course! John Marden, our statistician in residence, reviews train service between Champaign and Chicago. "It is not unusual to have snow in the winter in Illinois, but this snow was in the train." James Vornov: "Abandoned web sites don't start deteriorating like real world objects. More like lives that have ended. Forever frozen flow in time. Past, no future." Nathan Gasser on Philly Future: "If you take Radnor or Yardley and plunk it down in the middle of Nebraska, it's nothing. Proximity to a city like Philadelphia is what makes those places desirable, and those who live there should pay to keep the city running." ***Yesterday's Organic meeting I had a great meeting yesterday with David Humphries and Phil Suh at Organic. What a trip. They're in the same space that Wired used to occupy in the early days of the web. They've been using Frontier in really innovative ways. I also found out that HomeDepot.Com is largely developed with Frontier (although Broadvision takes most of the credit). They did the development in XML using Paul Howson's XMLTR suite. We also talked about the robustness of Frontier's object database. We were all surprised that EditThisPage.Com is able to host so many sites without blowing up. (1223 sites as of last night.) I gave my stock speech. Frontier is eleven years old and is the third implementation of the same basic database format. In that sense we started working on Frontier in 1979, and it's older than Oracle. My new editorial tools encourage me to be more long-winded!
Chris Nolan is up to her old tricks, spreading dirt about epinions, and a new Kleiner-Perkins startup named Firedrop. Whatever it is, I bet it plays well with Frontier. I've been working on a Weblog FAQ that explains what a weblog is, and has pointers to early weblogs. Here's one of the earliest weblogs, until now, missing from the list. It's the first What's New page on Netscape.Com from June 1993. Here's a list of 17 What's New pages from the Netscape Time Capsule. This site is an incredible resource. Thanks to whoever put this up. In yesterday's DaveNet I asked "This was the year that Netscape became the hole where the Internet used to be. Where is the Internet now?" It's great to get such a quick, concise answer! Thanks to Metafilter for the link to the Netscape archives. Richard Stallman singing the Free Software Song. CIO profiling Dan Bricklin. A weblog editor asks How do I find my ad? Philly Future has a great future, imho. Karl Martino, the guy running it, is one of the webmasters at Philly.Com, which is run by Knight-Ridder, the same company that runs the SJ Merc. Karl got interested in Manila when he heard that Dan Gillmor was using it.
DaveNet: 4 Days to Y2K. "I'm soooo confused." Philly Future: "What would it take to make Philadelphia a place you would want to live in?" No comment. Ooops, the evil twin is back! Kate Adams has taken the lead in organizing the Manila Arts and Science Festival. She says "OK boys and squirrels." Mercury-News: Top PR Blunders of 1999. "After an 81-year-old woman stepped in front of a grain truck insured by Great West and was killed, the company sued her estate for negligence, seeking $2800. 'I'm not paying them for killing my mom,' the woman's daughter told the Wall Street Journal. 'I'll sit in jail first.'" Sample: Text Hit Counter Server. "It's a way to add dynamic content to statically served pages." With over 1111 EditThisPage.Com sites, the siteRankings page was getting a bit ridiculous, so we replaced it with the Top 100 page. Some people are surprised that we can host 1111 sites on an NT 2000 server. I guess I am too. Frontier's object database is (coincidentally) 11 years old. It was the third implementation of the basic algorithm. So far to my knowledge the database hasn't lost any data. Praise Murphy! Dare I say it? I wish Phil Suh would finish his work on the Builder Live site before the end of the millennium. It's the number one site and it's really in embarassing shape. I offered to upload the pictures for him. Oy. I can also keep plugging Marc Canter's site and hope he displaces the Builder Live site. Any Allaire Spectra users here? Would someone like to start an EditThisPage.Com site to study Spectra? It seems that Louis Leigh is asking if there are any standard XML formats for email messages. It's a boy! "After a long and difficult birth, mother, child and father are happy, healthy, and exhausted!" A beautifully designed family website. A comment on Slashdot about software patents. "I love Google, but I hate the idea of patenting a search algorithm." Jakob Nielsen: Predictions for the Web of Y2K. NY Times: News organizations find footing on web. 4 days to Y2K.
CNN: Curtis Mayfield Dies. He was 57. CDNOW has an MPEG clip of Superfly. "Darkness of night with the moon shining bright. There's a set going strong. A lot of things going on.." He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. Rhino.Com biography of Mayfield. My Favorite Manila Sites. This is a tour, a list of sites I read regularly. Here's an invitation for you to do your own tour of Manila sites you respect, I've even started a Tours page with room for more than one. Yesterday we crossed the 1000-site milestone on EditThisPage.Com. There are now 1074 sites. As one logger said we're a victim of our own success! We're working on ways to boost performance. There's no other way to do it. Remembering the canonical application for client-side includes, I implemented a text hit counter. You're welcome to use it on your site. It was pretty easy, took about 10 minutes. I updated my Blogger home page to see how it handles day-flips. (It has a text hit counter.) A DaveNet piece in progress includes a Nilsson song: "Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime, sister had another one, she paid it for the lime. She put the lime in the coconut, she drank them both up. She call the doctor woke him up, and said Hey doctor! Ain't there nothing I can take to relieve this belly-ache? Doctor say Now let me get this straight. You put the lime in the coconut and drank them both up, you called the Doctor woke him up and say Doctor ain't there nothing I can take to relieve this belly-ache? You put the lime in the coconut and drink them both together, then you feel better, you put the lime in the coconut and drink them both together and call me in the morning."
Einstein is the perfect choice. A response to Hitler (he was a Jew), and (as they said) a precursor to the age of technology. It's also an international choice, Einstein was from Europe, not the US. And it shows appreciation for thought, which is something that's (imho) underappreciated in the times we live in. Too much focus on how much money one has (Bezos, Gates) and less focus on living life in our real power, the power of the intellect. But Einstein wasn't just a brilliant mind, he was courageous, he had the will to imagine the universe outside the bounds of our little planet. He taught us to understand our context, not just focus on the little picture. FDR and Gandhi were Time's runner-ups. Both are excellent choices, but I would have chosen Women as the sole runner-up for Person of the Century. This century saw a new balance between the genders and along with it, massive change. It can be hard to appreciate how substantial the change was, since most of us were born after the shift started. There's even a technological reason -- birth control. Over on Qube Quorner they're taking apart the cute blue boxes and adding all kinds of stuffff. News of a baby being born on Scott Hanson's website. I was just getting the feeling of family, as I was catching up on my favorite WLM sites. Can't get much more familiar than this! Looks more and more like Cocoon is reinventing the wheel. Why don't they use Zope??
If you celebrate Christmas, Happy Christmas!
Jesus Christ was a great guy? I'm going to a dinner, and gonna watch football. No programming today. La lala laala lalal! Fa la la la fla lala. Hippy Bersday Baby Jesus! (Where ever you are.)
This just in. Pigdog Journal has a winner in their second annual Christmas essay contest.
Football is boring. Instead I made a new Blogger website. I've been meaning to do that for a while. It's nice!
Thanks to Flutterby for this link. Here's a guy who shaved off half his beard, a big one, and here's what he had to say about it.
Tom Nelf: "In general there is no nickname for the first decade of the century. People living at the time - and often looking back afterward - are content to refer to the century instead. This was certainly true last time around." Interesting!
Jonas Beckman: The Great Santa Fakeout. "This year the kids found Santa's clothes and stole them."
6 days to Y2K.
MSNBC: The Year in Pictures. I saw The Green Mile this afternoon. The SF Chronicle says "Three hours of overstatement and schmaltz." Exactly. Skip this one. Yuck. Toy Story 2 was better. Tom Hanks stars in both. Kate Adams' Dad makes Christmas bread. "Spices from whatever part of the world may contain radioactive residues." NoLondon is Robert Brook's tour of London in digital images. I signed up for LinkExchange on dave.editthispage.com. I added a Random link on www.editthispage.com David Thiege's Carpe Diem is a news log from north of Fargo, North Dakota. That's pretty far north! Oh yah! JavaStuff has lots of Java stuff. Here's how Keola Donaghy plans to spend Christmas Eve. "Working on my site on EditThisPage.com, of course." I like the "of course" part! Keola just graduated from the University of Hawaii, and was the commencement speaker! Mazel tov Keola. (That's Yiddish for Mahalo.) Scott Hanson is spending his German Christmas with neighbors and at church and at his farmhouse with his wife. Noah Glass is one of the artists that works for Marc Canter in San Francisco. He's a great guy, with a lovely wife, Sonja (she's German too!) and I'm glad he's using Manila. End the War on Freedom is a well-updated weblog. I dig this site but I don't know what they're saying. Is it Dutch? What is it about the Netherlands? So many web people there! If you're doing something special for Christmas on your EditThisPage.Com site, please send me a pointer. BTW, a request from me -- please no complaints for the next few days. They won't be heard by anyone who can do anything about it. We're going to keep an eye on the servers to make sure your work doesn't come to a halt, but we're slowing down, a lot, for the holiday. As Keola would say, Mahalo! (Did I spell it right?)
Colin Ong: A Web Hosting/Posting Revolution. "ETP can be viewed as a hosting site like Geocities or Xoom, but it provides much better management tools the help sustain the site past the first creation." More soundbites from Colin's ePinion: "The wonder of ETP is that they have made it easy to use, while maintaining levels of power available to customize a site as users learn more." "Using this service to host your site decreases the chances of it becoming deadwood like so many other personal home pages out there. While the performance (that I'm seeing) now is sub-par, this should resolve itself in time." "ISPs would do a great business to subscribe to a Frontier license and make Manila sites available to their users as a value-add or an extra-cost option. For certain, more of their personal homepages would get used and used more effectively." "UserLand has announced that sites signing up with ETP in 1999 will get free hosting for life! They've also hinted that early adopters may get their fingers in any IPO that could come in the future. Which means get off yet butt and register before they start charging." ***Back to today's news.. Behind the scenes Manila is archiving all changes to all stories. There was an inefficiency in the way we were doing it. We tested a new version on the discuss.userland today with positive results. You should see faster performance, especially when you're making multiple changes to a single story, on all our servers, including EditThisPage.Com. I just realized what the next decade will be called. It's simple. We had the seventies, the eighties, the nineties.. What comes next? (Is it obvious to you? It is to me.) John Marden: Zipf's Law and EditThisPage. Mark Bossert's Cash Guzzling Startup. MSNBC: Top Tech Stories of 1999. In the rush to get EditThisPage.Com launched, I overlooked Andrew Wooldridge's excellent Dreamweaver Depot. Andrew is one of the leaders in the Dreamweaver user community, and we are very pleased that he is using Manila to work with other Dreamweaver developers. We have a long positive history with Macromedia, going all the way back to its founding. The Dreamweaver-Manila connection packs a lot of power, and with new XML-RPC support in Dreamweaver 3, it becomes very easy to connect their design tool with our content management server, Manila. A hearty welcome to Andrew, the Dreamweaver community, and the good people at Macromedia. Last night we ran a survey asking about the relative performance of two of our ISPs. Now let's run the same survey again, during the daytime. (Net performance has been a problem during the daytime hours in the US.) The wozjobs pics may not be a strong enough test. If you're unsure which one is performing better, first try loading this file (images served by Conxion) and this one (images served by Exodus). Dare I say it? I want to see a million Manila sites in 2000. I'm still watching the Geography category on Weblog Monitor, with fascination. For example, there are four weblogs in the Seattle area. Sounds like a Users Group to me! Wired: And the most overvalued IPO is.. "When asked to name any undervalued technology companies that went public this year, IPO analysts had a simple, direct answer: Silence." NY Times: Websites bloom in China, and are weeded. Salon: Can Linux Billionaires Carry the Free-Software Torch? MSNBC: "Microsoft Corp Chief Financial Officer Greg Maffei, a well-regarded executive known for the conservative spin he put on the company’s booming finances, Wednesday joining an exodus of young Microsoft executives to fast-growing startups." Marc Canter took his three boys to DisneyLand.
EditThisPage.Com: A holiday gift from UserLand. A brief history of EditThisPage.Com. A really simple but beautiful ETP.Com site. Good news! Two new servers arrived at Exodus today. Now we can do an A-B comparison. First, here's a picture served by Conxion. Here's the same picture served by Exodus. Survey: Which is faster? There's a new release of Mozilla today. Heads up to the people hosting the old style weblog banner ads. Heads up to all the people pointing to the story about John Rocker. It's a scam. A few years ago the baseball owners decided to bring elements of professional wrestling into their sport. In addition to being a fine pitcher, Rocker is also an actor. David Carter-Tod is working on a My.UserLand affiliate for ASP. Happy Holidays to Scripting News readers! Object-oriented database manifesto. Interestingly, one of the authors, David Dewitt, was a professor of mine at UW-Madison. I did the first version of the object database in Frontier when I was a grad student there in the 1970s. This is an Elvis Costello morning. "What a good year for the roses."
I must have been asleep while the rest of the web figured out how to do client-side includes. I first asked for client-side includes three years ago. You can't hurry love!
Dan Gillmor lists the top ten good things that happened in technology in 1999. But Dan, what about Edit This Page?? The people have spoken. 68% believe that George W. Bush is disgusting. Microsoft is looking for SOAP evangelists. "If you've ever wondered what it would be like to work with the hottest dot-coms such as eBay.com, Dell.com, Buy.com, TicketMaster.com, AskJeeves.com, Quote.com and many others - Here's your chance!" Now some evangelism of my own. As you can see from the impressions and clicks report, we're doing significant brand-bulding for the weblogs by including the banner ads on many UserLand.Com sites. It's easy to add the banners to your own sites. Please help the weblogs, the ads are colorful and the sites are personal and interesting. Salon's Scott Rosenberg: "Amazon was once a company that embraced the happy calculus of the 'network effect' -- the ability the Internet has to multiply the value of everyone's contribution to it, whether you are a book buyer writing a review on Amazon's sites, a bookselling partner in Amazon's co-op program or an investor in the company's stock." The Should-I-Use-XML debate continues. "If I'm going to create a text-based format, I either use XML or re-invent something that does exactly what XML does." Kate Adams: "To hell with John Malkovitch! I'd pay a lot of money to get inside Dave Winer's brain for 15 minutes. And come out alive!" It's actually pretty interesting in here. I had an interesting phone talk with Kate this morning about a Manila Storytelling Festival. Also talked with Jimmi Johnson today. He has a wired warehouse in San Rafael. Also talked with Kate about how Manila is going to be a back-door sell, like the Apple II was. I'm becoming more convinced of this. With isp.root you can run a Manila site hosting service. More ads on Weblog Monitor. Keep em comin!
Security Alert: You must install this fix if you're running Frontier 6.1 with the Control Panel feature enabled. Richard Stallman, a leader in the Unix world, calls for a boycott of Amazon.Com. "Please do not buy anything from Amazon until they stop using this patent to threaten or restrict other Web sites." I agree. I can live without 1-Click ordering. I can't support what Amazon is doing. Please join me in telling Amazon and other predatory patent holders that it's a bad idea to use patents as a competitive weapon. Jason Levine: Of Manila and Portability. "This is a quick missive about the process of moving a Manila or EditThisPage site -- things to think about while designing the site in the first place, all the way through things that you need to do once the site is on its new foundation." OK OK now I have to find a town that's willing to rename itself Scripting.Com. Any takers? John Marden realizes that he has Dilberts in his class. (For some reason I think Kate Adams would like this site.) surveys.root is a Frontier 6.1 app. "Full source is provided." I'm testing a new weblog ad server that uses JavaScript, no cookies, and should work (fingers crossed) in most browsers. If you're including weblog banner ads on your site, please check it out. I added impression and click tracking to the new server and reset all the counters. Hey the category browser is filling out, and even better, mistakes are being fixed. It's like an ant farm. It has a life of its own. Excellent! Lots of new stuff coming in the next few days as we empty the pipe for the 1900s and look forward to the 2000s. 11 Days to Y2K. Wow! Survey: If the 2000 US presidential election were held today, who would you vote for? Another survey: Is George W. Bush disgusting? Initial results look pretty bad for George W. An idea: I'd like to send surveys to cellphones! Brad Graham has a good idea too. He wants to hijack the Taco Bell slogan "Drop the Chalupa" because he doesn't like the stupid dog. I, on the other hand, still like the dog. Jason Levine has moved his EditThisPage.Com site to his own server, validating that the process of moving a site works. We'll work with him on redirecting his original site. NY Times: The PC Is Dead! The PC Lives! "Hot Silicon Valley companies like Phone.com, the telephone Web browser company based in Redwood City, Calif., are reporting gleefully that beginning next year, almost half the cellular phones sold will come equipped with the ability to surf the Web." Bob Frankston on WAP. "The wireless world is going to fall short of its potential as long as we are stuck in the assumptions of the early 1900’s which assume that the wireless must be managed by assigning exclusive ownership of frequencies." Here's how Kepler's, the Buck's of Bookstores, is differentiating from Amazon et al. Time's person of the year site.
Jeff Bezos was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year. Check this site out. They're syndicating content from every source known to man. Fascinating. I signed up for an iSyndicate account and within five minutes I had some of their content on my Manila site. It's very cleverly done. We have to make My.UserLand affiliation this easy and broadly accessible. I learned today that WAP is not based on HTTP. My opinion only, but you can't call it the web if it's not HTTP. Vegetarians in Austin should check this site out. China Job Search keeps updating. This site is about the Iowa State University Cyclone Football Varsity Marching Band's trip to London, England for the New Year's Day 2000 Parade. Washington Post: Garry Trudeau on Peanuts. "Schulz's message was filled with a uniquely American sense of optimism – 'Li'l Folks' with big dreams, never giving up, always trudging out to the mound one more time." Britannica.Com: Charles Shulz. Woz on the NY Times. Luke Tymowski summarizes the events of the last week. Another Luke story. It's a great one. Luke is on a roll. Discovering his power as a writer. I dig the web! Area Estrategica: "News and commentary about net strategies, in Spanish." Carmen is concerned about expanding RSS. More tags takes up more memory in her app. I hadn't thought of this! Scott Hanson has pictures of his snowy German farm.
New Feature: How to Download your Manila Site. Eliminates ISP lock-in. You own your content, you can move your site at any time. Also helps bootstrap a Manila ISP community. Full list of all post 6.1 changes. BTW, we chose a new codename for Frontier 7 today. Pike. After Pike's Peak. A quick search on Google reveals nothing controversial. I like it because it's one syllable, simple, and it connotes elevation, a breath-taking top-level view, and competitive performance. Why not keep Corazon? Too many people say Cortisone. A bunch of people ask "What would Pike be?" A hint. WAP Today notes that Allaire and Phone.Com did a deal, and they ask "What are other CMS vendors doing?" Good question. What should we do? What's the quickest easiest way for me to get a WAP device so I can play with ideas? Jason Levine likes all the customizations he can do with Manila. Jeff Cheney reports that you can get excellent donuts at the top of Pike's Peak. That's my kind of mountain! BradLands: Twelve Days of Blogging. Carmen started a Headline Viewer Status site. Good use of technology! New WLM Category: Pubs I Cover. GeekNews: "Well if you want to start your own personal web log for free you may want to check out Pitas, Blogger and Groksoup. But if you don't like free you can check out Manila for a free 60 day period, but it's $899 after that." That's not correct. Hosting a site is different from having a license to run the software to host Manila sites on your server. UserLand doesn't currently have a price for hosting, we're thinking about it. Dan Lyke has a proposal for XML for calendars. Bump: "I have two redesigns of this site to choose from now. I built one in Manila and another with Blogger. They are really similar in some ways, but way apart in others." Robert, it would be great to get a written comparison of the two. I've been emailing with Evan about projects we could do to facilitate connections between Blogger and Manila, and we gave a free Frontier 6.1 license to Pyra to help open this door. Postscript -- Robert took me up on the invite and posted an extensive comparison between Blogger and Manila, including screen shots of both writing environments. Postscript #2 -- Evan is taking a long shower today! RasterWeb: "There was a scare in an Oshkosh sküle yesterday, someone had scrawled on a bathroom wall last week, 'This school will blow up on 12/13/99'. I'm disgusted by that. It's sickening really, I mean, these kids today.." We reset the categories on Weblog Monitor and archived the old category structure in an XML file. Now we're focusing on building out the geography branch because that seems easiest and most straightforward. This morning I did some work to streamline the processing of weblog ads. They're working much better now. Here's a page showing all the ads that have been registered.
DaveNet: A millennium vignette. MSNBC: Border Arrest Yields Bomb Materials. "Authorities earlier said they fear the man — who sources said was carrying more than 200 pounds of explosive materials and sophisticated timing devices — was involved in planning millennial-related terrorism and that an unknown number of accomplices may already have slipped into the country." Hey here's a picture of Wes Felter. Survey: "I hate it when people send me email saying that the millennium doesn't start until 2001. I must have been told this 897 times. How many times have you heard it?" Weblogger.Com is offering 60-day free trial Manila site hosting. The Category Browser on Weblog Monitor is really rolling. Interesting categories: Humor, Opinions, Geography/USA, Pop culture. A category that could use some more entries. This category is a mess! I learn something new every day. I didn't know that Flutterby is about sex technology fringe culture. Here's a sample script that reads the Weblog Monitor category structure into a Frontier outline, for easy browsing. My posting on the XML-DEV list re Weblog Categories. Where do you want to go with weblog categories? Luke Tymowski: "A few minutes ago, I learned that I am now (in practice no less) absurdly poor."
Izaak Sofer is 9 years old and has his own Manila site. Hey check this out. BlogThis has a SalonHerringWiredFool box. He must be using affiliate2.root? Coooool! Dave's Picks is a plain looking site with great links. Over the last few weeks I've become a fan of GeneHack, which is an amazing site partially because "HTML is hand-edited in XEmacs 21.2 and processed with Genpage prior to uploading. There is a distressing lack of automation to the whole process." Qube: "I personally think you need your head examined if you want to use Domino." Jeff Cheney's site is rising on the charts on EditThisPage.Com. Kate Adams has advice for Minneapolis women, and Marc Canter has a picture of a woman in London who wants to be a weather girl! Have I said how much I love the energy that people are pouring into their EditThisPage.Com sites? Well I do! Keep on truckin. How can I get any work done with all the great weblogs?!??!
The Category Browser in Weblog Monitor is working. A bunch of people have already entered category information for their weblogs. You do it on the Prefs page. Each category is a slash-delimited string. Your site can be in more than one category. Separate the different categories with commas. It's an IQ test. If you get the most points you win a tank. (A vague reference to the movie I saw yesterday afternoon.) How good or interesting the category browser is is entirely determined by the webloggers. You can negotiate with each other. Use the DG on the WLM site. The hierarchy is entirely dynamic. If there ends up being nothing listed in a category, poof, it disappears. The structure is recalc'd every minute if anyone has changed their category information, so you can see the effect of your changes in real-time. Here's the deepest category I've found so far. Of course there's a public XMLization of the category structure. Dan Bricklin bought a copy of Frontier 6.1. "When I actually placed the order (online, in private, with no one to share the moment with), it felt like I was pledging to public radio. A good feeling of paying back for what I've been getting. This was not a feeling of charity (I want to try the product), but it wasn't like a normal arm's length purchase either." I wrote a little essay about Dan Bricklin on the home page, but then moved it off into the FOD website to make room for comments about categories and Weblog Monitor. Join Marc Canter for an English breakfast and Dim Sum lunch. Interesting. The top four sites on the Scoop Index are Frontier sites. And the top one is so easy to work on that it's done by a robot. I have absolutely no idea what this proves. Robot Wisdom, which is not run by a robot, is way way down the list. Not sure what this proves either, except possibly that Jorn's barking about giving credit for links has scared anyone off from linking to anything he's already linked to. News.Com: Be up on Red Hat acquisition rumor. Go Be! ZDNet: Sun to charge Java branding fee. Bugfix on the Weblog Monitor site. Matthew Haughey is testing MSIE 5.5, and reports a problem using it with Manila. CNET has a download site for MSIE 5.5.
affiliate2.root is a Frontier 6.1 app that reads a static XML file containing the current hour's My.UserLand stories, watching for changes. When there is a change, it reads the file, parses the XML and adds the stories to a Frontier object database calendar structure. Why would you want to add My.UserLand stories to your content system? Look at how I've done it on Scripting News. I've included the most recent stories from Tomalak's Realm and Salon, Red Herring, Wired and Motley Fool. You see this kind of stuff popping up all over the web. My.UserLand has the most diverse set of channels that are available publicly and free of charge. It should be straightforward to create affiliates in any content system or database scripting environment that can process XML. Josh Lucas, a Java developer and one of our Support Associates, has been working with affiliate2.root. Matt Neuburg: "I am one of those people who abhors beta software, and who believes in a clean install. I waited until Frontier 6.1 had shipped. I downloaded the clean 6.1 complete, and migrated my old data over to it, slowly and carefully. This took all day, from dawn to dark. It was worth it. I recommend this approach, and although I have isolated some bugs, I very very strongly recommend upgrading. This is a Better Frontier." In our world, no higher praise is possible. New Manila feature: Members box customization. Pyra released Blogger 2.0 today. A market is shaping up. I love the web! Performance Tip for Manila editors. A small change to your template can make your site load faster, and cause your server to do less work. I took this afternoon off to play and watch a great movie. We won! MacWEEK: Compaq to do an iMac. Fast Company: Idea Summit. Press release: Windows 2000 Done. Dan Gillmor: Photography and the Internet. "I told the students, 'You're now on the World Wide Web.' More than a few eyes went wide." Jeff Cheney, webmaster at MacWEEK, is working on his EditThisPage.Com site. Ed Draper has new puppies! Soul Detour is a San Francisco Funk and Blues band. GridBox has a new look.
Murphy is my best teacher. Last night around midnight I restarted Nirvana, our most ancient server, but did it while it was running its overnight tasks. Shrugged my shoulders, quit for the day, came back in the morning and my world was hosed! I did a save-copy on every database that could be causing a problem, and the lights came back on. I learned my lesson. I hope!
New Manila feature: Calendar Customization. Moira Gunn: One digital day at a time. "The entries for some days are short, while others are quite long. Now, think about it -- you would seldom see this in a newspaper. You pretty much write the column to match the space, but that's not so important on the Internet. He can write exactly how much or how little he wants to on any given day." Is HP's e-speak a rip-off of XML-RPC? David Carter-Tod: Serious Instructional Technology. MSNBC: Lycos searches for a sticky solution. Josh Lucas put together a recipe for installing weblogMonitor.root. Thanks! Lawrence Lee is working on something amazingly interesting, but I have no idea what it is! Zope 2.1.1 has been released. BTW, if Vignette were to post release notes publicly on the web I'd point to them too. This may the youngest Manila webmaster. Frontier is actually older than he is. I love the web! Marc's website is like his company, totally 1.0. Looks like Charlie Wood opted out. That's his right of course. It was a nice looking site. I wish Vignette had the guts to come out of hiding and do some marketing. Phil Greenspun's old review of Vignette is more fun than the newer one. "Vignette's StoryServer product does not do any of the things that their marketing literature claims it does." James Vornov: "What are the pure play investments for the Edit on the Web segment? Do you think Dave will let EditThisPage webloggers in on the Userland IPO?" Ohh you betcha! Red Herring: A VC for the Masses. "We want to allow the small investor a chance to participate in this important driver of the US economy."
I'm working on a new version of affiliate.root, should ship in the next few days. This version will work! People who use Dreamweaver and Manila will want to check this out. Andrew Wooldridge has a "floater" that allows you to edit a Manila site template in DreamWeaver. Keep going Andrew! Andrew pulls another rabbit out of his hat. He's customized Mozilla to be the perfect editing tool for Manila! Quickly, I'm going to have to fly up to Redmond to explain this one. I love the web!
Charlie also asks about our business model. Study this site carefully. How many NT and Mac networks are there? More thoughts: "I figured out my business model when Dan Shafer told me how long it would take to make a change to the production process on the Builder.Com site." Charlie's company has a different business model. However I think when his customers find out they can do what Manila does for $899 per server with unlimited sites and users, they might wonder why they had to pay $250K+ for something that isn't as easy to set up or use. What does Vignette do? Their docs aren't on the web. Frontier's docs are, of course. And we even let our competitors use the product for free. I wonder why Vignette is so tight with the specs? Maybe it isn't that good? Stephen Judd reviews Vignette Story Server. BTW, I would have rejected the name Story Server because its initials are SS, the name of the secret police in Nazi Germany, probably the most despised pair of letters in western culture. Stephen Judd: Jews in New Zealand. Dave Aiello: "Isn't most of StoryServer still written in Tcl? Why not release it all?" Excellent idea! Only on the web can competitors take shots at each other and retain their dignity. PS: I think Kate Adams is a member of every EditThisPage.Com site! New Manila Feature: Navigation Customization. "In the initial release of Manila, the navigation bar was vertical, with a paragraph tag between each item, and the text was in bold. Now you can alter the appearance of the navigation bar." Perl's Tom Christiansen to Dan Gillmor on Y2K. Served by Manila. Heidi Roizen (remember her?) started a new Internet company. Jakob Nielsen: Voodoo Usability. "The good news is that usability has been recognized as an important element of Internet success: the average speaker at industry conferences now promotes good user experience in preference to 'cool sites.'" MisterPoll.Com works much as surveys.userland does. (However it doesn't seem to remember how you voted, not sure if you can change your vote.) News.Com: Andover.Net Validates OpenIPO Concept. "The price people were willing to pay kept going up and up." Emmanuel Décarie asks "Anyone know the FXP/1.1 protocol?" A message I posted to the Weblogs mail list on eGroups re last week's (quiet) source release of weblogMonitor.root. "Imagine a weblog network within a single company. Imagine a WLM checking in with all the sites every hour. An organizational portal. A simple idea, but I think it's close to what people want for the next couple of years." A newly active mail list is discussing enhancements to RSS. I love the note at the top of today's Hack The Planet. One of the cool things about Manila sites is that you can edit your site where ever you can find a web browser. (Which is most places these days.) Leigh Dodds opens a discussion on the future of Weblog Monitor and compares EditThisPage.Com to GeoCities. Qube Quorner is cookin. Anyone from Cobalt tuned in? ThingsHopedFor.Com. "The website is used by my Sunday school class, a small group of inner city kids who now have a website to contribute to and to be a part of their learning. Sure beats flanelgrams, puppets and acrostics! Many thanks to your great company who has made this possible." You bet! Doc is back at the Cluetrain weblog. Sexism runs wild at the close of the 20th century. I know lots of bed-hopping single women, married ones too. And get this, not only are men looking for Mom in their mates, so are women. 4/9/96: The Perfect Parent. As adults "we have to look inside to find the good parent, not outside." Marc Canter: "It's the Jewish mother in me. 'A little of dis, and little of dat - Oh boy, cham I gonna have some food fur chu!'" See what I mean? Even a big man has an inner-mother. BTW, Marc was the guy going thru the divorce in The Perfect Parent, in 1996. Talk about synchronicity! I've been hanging with Marc ever since, and he becomes a better friend all the time. (We have our ups and downs, but what the heck, that's what friendship is about, it's what's left after the ups and downs.) Another cool picture from Marc's site.
Excerpts from the Cluetrain Manifesto. Internet Future asks "Do you remember HTML?" And Marc Canter is eating turkey. I'm jealous! New Rules is running a survey. The On Deciding Better weblog gives me credit for inventing the "italicized voice". I'm going to see if I can find the day that I first did it. BTW, it's not called the "italicized voice", it's actually the voice of my evil twin. Usually. The evil twin first surfaced on 7/31/97. I actually got emails from people saying that my site had been hacked. I guess in a way it had been. The voice was first identified as that of my evil twin on 8/9/97, after a comment about a picture of Elvis and Richard Nixon. EditThisPage.Com and XML. "With over 500 new sites in seven days, we're looking for new ways to get a handle on what's going on." Only on the web. "They can both be totally rude to and dismissive of each other, and we can watch from the sidelines." Luke Tymowski: Reliable High-speed Internet Access for your Servers. "Why might most users enjoy fast response times but others suffer badly? Odds are that the cause is peering arrangements." BTW, we're putting two machines in the Exodus data center, an NT machine, and our second Qube. David Strom: Measuring Web Performance. InfoWorld: XML still waiting for the spotlight. Phil Suh starts the wrap up of the Builder Live website.
Dale Dougherty: Channeling Broadband. "RSS got its start at Netscape and is now being driven by Dave Winer, the developer of Frontier, who does most of the RSS work through his site, userland.com." I guess we now have the answer to Who do you have to sleep with? to get a feature added to RSS. New Manila feature. All sites now have a page listing the people who have signed up as members of the site. Here's an example, the members page on my EditThisPage.Com site. Frontier: Safe Macros Guidelines. "This page presents some guidelines for determining the safety of a macro, a process of consideration to go through before marking a macro as safe and allowing other people to use it." Survey: Who Writes Bloat? If you voted "Other", who do you think writes Bloat? For people who doubt there's a pragmatic use for XML, check out this screen shot, showing the survey authoring environment we're using. XML replaces what would otherwise be a complex maze of HTML forms. In other words, XML makes it easier. Another pragmatic use for XML. We use it to specify the membership forms that map onto membership database records, in Manila. It's not something we're dreaming about, it's delivered. New site: Mozilla Quick News. Great logo, great story. Jason Levine rants about Netscape, as if it were a healthy company and hadn't just been split in two and acquired. MacWorld: Free software squeezes Email clients. On Friday I'm meeting with Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's top marketing guy for MSN. I'm meeting with him wearing my analyst hat, to get briefed on their big picture. What is MSN? How does it relate to Yahoo, AOL, eBay, @Home, etc. About the bandwidth situation, we did a deal with Exodus last week, and will be hosting several sites inside their Santa Clara data center. This should improve the connection, we hope. Things are hummin along at New Rules. WSJ: Can Linux Justify the Buzz? "It’s all about 'mindshare' and buzz, say analysts — not realistic projections of revenue and profits." Scott Hanson's Manila site has pictures, and also includes a reference to the global Curly shortcut.
We're starting to implement new features in Manila in response to customer feedback. The number one most requested feature is "Multiple Days on the Home Page." People also call this the "Just Like Scripting News" feature. It's ready now. "To display more than one day, change the number." And there's a new template that controls how Manila renders each day. This feature is available now on all UserLand-hosted Manila sites. BTW, Frontier 6.1 users can get the new Manila features by updating manila.root. Bring manila.root to the front and choose the Update command in Frontier's Main menu. It's the first command, so it's always easy to find. Misnomer and Queso didn't waste any time implementing the new feature. Excellent! Phil Suh finishes the Builder Live website with an ominous quote. "I spoke to a lot of different people about content management systems for websites. Everyone is in agreement, there is nothing good out there right now." BusinessWeek: Using the Net for Brainstorming. Now you can run surveys from pages on EditThisPage.Com. Please read the docs carefully and understand the limits. It's a little awkard since the surveys are managed on a UserLand.Com domain and the pages are on EditThisPage.Com. Nonetheless, these are interactive macros, a first for Manila. You can now change the colors on surveys. Looking for new stuff in the weblog world? Check out Weblog Monitor. It's really hoppin! Andrew Wooldridge explains why Netscape's new browser is taking longer than almost everyone would like. (Andrew works at Netscape.) Dennis Moser: "Greetings, Growers!" Stephane Volet: Internationalizing Manila. It's always a good idea to review your surveys, esp ones that asked people to make a prediction. BTW, the official shipdate for Frontier 6.1 was December 1. (65% chose Nov 25 or Dec 10.) If you have questions about using Manila, please post a note to the Manila-Newbies mail list or on the Manila-Newbies discussion group. With over 400 new sites in the last week, it's impossible for me to help people directly, no matter how important their work is. Use the tools, let's build a community, it'll work much better that way. I don't like being a hard-ass, but this is one of those times when there's absolutely no other way to do it. Thanks for listening. Industry Standard table of web content systems. This picture changes now that Manila is shipping. Who should I talk with at the Standard? Eric S. Raymond is worth $36 million. "I'm not going to minimize my attachments by giving it all away, though, so you evangelists for a zillion worthy causes can just calm down out there and forget about hitting me up for megabucks. I am *not* going to be a soft touch, and will rudely refuse all importunities." OK. WSJ: "Nudity was the big selling point, as a way of showing that digital downloading of software was so easy and convenient that it could be done, undressed, in one’s home." News.Com: AltaVista and Homestead Deal. "Home page publishing has become one of the more popular offerings on the Web. Proponents say users tend to spend more time and return more often to a home page service because they have a personal stake." Jason Levine is a natural weblogger. Dan Gillmor's Manila site travels with him. Last month he reported from Hong Kong. Today's report is from New Orleans. The Life of Brian continues to offer good service. A couple of sites complain that I'm watching them. I'll keep watching but I'll stop pointing. When you run a public website it's weird to complain that people are watching. (That's the point, isn't it?) Wes Felter uses his Manila site well. He always has something good, like the following link, which came from Wes's site. Zope.Org: The Zope/Mozilla Initiative. "Zope's management environment pays for the flexibility of an 'Internet architecture' by being less productive than competitive 'thick-client' environments." Hmmm. Refreshingly honest! (We like thick clients, but we like thin ones too.) I'm having trouble figuring out what Charlie Goodier is doing on his site. It looks quite interesting. MacFixit: AirPort not ready for prime time.
DaveNet: EditThisPage.Com. Dan Bricklin's Manila site now looks like Dan's "other" site. Robert Hess's Manila site. Lots of stories, about cocktails. Jeffrey Zeldman: The Day the Browser Died. A great piece. I was reading the HTML version until I found the link to the text-only version, and what a relief! To me, too much glitz is too much. Put it all on one page. I know how to use a scrollbar. No point worrying about CSS and standards. It's a big dream. Netscape is gone. <blockquote> works great. I still love Jeffrey. All his icons are in our glossary. How the Global Glossary works: If you want an icon of Brigitte Bardot to appear in a story you write or a message you post, just type The WAP Today site is weally wollin. They have a WAP version of Scripting News. Still trying to figure out what that means! Ken Dow: Types of Manila Sites. Eric Soroos posts a sample script that emails you when a DG message you posted gets a response. Release 1.0 has a scoop. "A behind-the-scenes account of how last week's AT&T announcement on open access to its cable broadband services came about, from one of the participants in the negotiations." We've been tracking hits on EditThisPage.Com. The rankings are recalc'd every night at midnight Pacific time. Heads-up: We removed the UserLand.Com membership requirement for 60-day free trial sites on EditThisPage.Com. Boston Globe: Declaring war on spam. Another stupid weblog article written from Jorn Barger's xenophobic FAQ. Dan Gillmor's talk at Builder.Com Live. "The Web development community has a lot of clout. You need to use it better." True. The Headline Viewer formerly known as Carmen's is updated. "Fetching of stories from providers is now asynchronous. This means an end to annoying lockups while Headline Viewer waits for slow or offline servers to respond." Linux.Com survey on scripting languages.
Important survey: "How does the performance of Scripting News compare to the performance of other Internet services?" Another important survey: "A lot has changed in the last week. Now, after the changes, do you have a better idea of what UserLand does?" Danny O'Brien: "Either that's an inhuman attention to change logs, or Manila is just Dave with Notepad, an open ftp client and a crate of Jolt." Excellent! A nice-looking travel website. China Job Search, find a high-tech job in China. ViewFromTheHeart, Ramblings of an Old Critical Care Nurse. Ken Dow is working on docs for Manila and posting them as he goes on the Manila-Newbies site. Links to new articles:
Check out this Manila site. It's so excellent! The WAP website has a new design. Marc Canter: "The best part about starting my Manila site was getting yelled at by somebody about me posting porno." Hey whoever yelled at Marc, that wasn't porno. A nice looking woman with no shirt on. What could possibly be wrong with that? Wired: Andover strikes it rich. "Andover sold four million shares for US$18 each, the top of its expected price range. The company netted $72 million through a process known as a Dutch auction." Wired becomes Wired, once again. It's funny that one gets sentimental about a URL, but I do. Speaking of Wired, here's their call for submissions for their 1999 Vaporware of the Year awards. Day 2 at Builder Live in New Orleans. "People seem pretty quiet, really. I expected things to be a bit more fun--perhaps it is the larger size of the show this year." Miloslav Nic: Wireless Markup Language Tutorial. I wonder if InfoWorld has seen a decrease in traffic since their redesign? I don't think I've read a single article on their site since they changed. WSJ: Ad agencies and Dot-coms. "Our culture is that we’ll try this today and try something new tomorrow," says a spokeswoman for Drugstore.com. "Nobody has a road map, so we’re all innovating and coming up with new approaches." Here's a dot-com startup that probably knows what it's doing. Here's a really nice looking Manila site. Wired: Second Stab at Linux Riches. "For developers who shelled out US$5,600 for 400-share blocks at the $14 IPO price, the deal probably seemed fair and then some. Red Hat closed at $284.13 Tuesday, so the initial investments are now worth $114,000." The Cluetrain Weblog keeps on rollin down the track! Lots of links about the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander on Dome News. PowderLog is the snowboarder's weblog. Welcome!
Chris Nolan's new column in the NY Post. "When they get around to conducting the census in Woodside, Ca., they're going to have to wear sunglasses. The glare from the Internet star power is getting that bad." Welcome back Chris! News.Com: Power Shifts in the Java World. "I weighed the options and I've made a decision. I've decided we will not submit Java to ECMA," said Pat Sueltz, head of Sun's software division, in a keynote address today at the Java Business Expo in New York. BTW, the next big thing on our To-Do-List here at UserLand is getting the Trial Version of 6.1 together. We're also working on a deal with Exodus to augment our connection with Conxion. Let's have fun! Bernhard Uellenberg is using Manila to collect lists. "We invite everyone to become a contributing editor. Just one mail away and you get the chance to become a famous lists operator." Help him out? Seems like a good idea. Allaire's Spectra is shipping. "Now, your corporation can empower individuals and embrace the Web as a strategic center of business." Perhaps someone objective would like to start a Manila site to study Spectra? It wouldn't be the first time we used our software to cover another web content system. Pictures from the Seattle riots. Warning, some of the pictures are bloody, almost all show violence.
Independent Media Center: Thousands protest in Manila. A picture of Lynne Siprelle and the world-famous Josie. Remember the rotating weblog banner ads? Now there's a report showing the number of impressions and click-thru rates for each of the ads. And we seem to have a bug in our cookie code that's keeping the whole thing from fully working. I want to get to the bottom of it. For Frontier developers, the first release of weblogMonitor.root. I know there's a lot to digest right now. WLM-like apps are a big part of the server-side future of Frontier. It runs 24-by-7 on our systems. It integrates Manila with a real Internet application. An important sample app as we go forward. Dru Ojay: Writing for the Web. Jakob Nielsen: Writing for the Web. Phil's first night in New Orleans. My 1997 New Orleans story. Two really hot companies: Phone.Com and MyAladdin.Com. Phone.Com's market cap is over $10 billion. Alain Rossman is the CEO of Phone.Com. I know Alain from the very early days of the Mac. Mike Boich, Guy Kawasaki and Alain played an instrumental role in the software we did in 1984-85. It's great to see him so well! Would someone like to start a site to cover WAP, the protocol behind this? I have a feeling we could do something interesting with this, with a pair of Manila sites. One for people using desktops and one for flowing news to people with cellphones. From the It-Never-Hurts-To-Ask Dept, Dan Garner started WAP News. If you're interested in WAP, become a member. Kate Adams is turning into one of our greatest evangelists. I first met Kate in Crested Butte in 1997 at the Digital Storytelling Festival. She was working at Apple at the time, in the QuickTime group. Kate is an incredible storyteller and just oozes intelligence and enthisiasm, as you can tell from her site. I'm so glad she's playing with our stuff. Here's my account of the 1997 DSF. The part about Microserfs was something I shared with Kate on the trip back from Colorado. "Microserfs is a beautiful book of friendship and love and confusion set in Redmond, Palo Alto and Las Vegas and in the board rooms of Sand Hill Road. Everyone in the software industry should read this book. Oh man. I wish I had written it. It has already added color to my life. Lots! I feel like I'm living in Microserfs. I bet you will too." To borrow a line from Microserfs, Manila is totally 1.0. Yeah! MSNBC: No Signal from Mars Polar Lander. "NASA scientists again failed to make contact with the Mars Polar Lander, destroying any remaining hope that the spacecraft had survived its landing on the Red Planet." Survey results: 94% of UserLand.Com members believe there is water on Mars. New URL for Wired: http://wired.lycos.com/news/. ; This Salon article gives me chills. I doubt they would treat it so lightly if the subject were female sexual mutilation.
EditThisPage: Syndicating Your Site. "It's impossible for one person to watch 267 sites, that's why it's great that we have two tools to help sites that are publishing real content to get their new developments in front of the eyes of interested readers." EditThisPage: Teaming Up. "If you have people who you'd like to get in the Manila loop, and if they're not web people by profession, instead of giving them their own site, let's have them work with you on yours." Misnomer: Accounts from WTO Protestors. "No mistaking that we are entering the secured zone that hundreds of riot police are protecting with tanks." We've come a long way in a short time. On 2/16/99, I posted a note pointing to a screen shot of a very early version of Manila. More screen shots: #2, #3, #4. Jason Kottke did a 20-minute review of Manila. Dan Hartung theorizes about our motivations for Manila. We want to make developing and editing websites easier. That's about it. Kate Adams' site has a hot tub! DanDot comes to ManilaLand. Abe Vigoda came too! The Edmonton Oilers have a weblog on EditThisPage.Com. A simple interesting resume-style website. Zeke Koch takes us on a trip to Italy, with pictures. Robb Beal has grreat plans for his Manila site. Marc Canter's Manila site is R-rated. He has a picture of a famous Hong Kong venture capitalist too. Why does Hong Kong seem to figure in everything we're doing?? Parental guidance advised. Dan Bricklin's Manila site is just getting started. Phil Suh is covering the Builder.Com conference in New Orleans. When he posts stories to his site I will link to them from Scripting News. We're going to work together to build a real-time audience for people at the conference. Let's have fun! Here's what I'd like the home page of EditThisPage.Com to look like in a month or so. (With real sites linked into all the technology areas.) Brigitte Eaton's CSS troubles are solved. Thanks everyone! Dan Gillmor called yesterday to talk about Manila Mania. Why are people so excited now? We both wondered. I gave it some more thought. "Because now we have a way to show people how cool content management is using only their web browser." Another strong intuitive thing. We're outside the envelope now. All of a sudden things are growing out of control. This is an important part of the Web Experience, as well. Gotta keep on truckin. I can see my upcoming vacation disappearing into the aether. Oy! I wonder if any Frontier developers have Manila and ContentServer running on the same machine. Wes Felter: "I'm debating whether it's better to know that the cutest person in one of your classes is engaged. On one hand, you have no chance. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about embarrassing yourself, since you have no chance." Advice from Uncle Dave: Never say never. UserLand sites top both Web Log Scoop indexes today. According to Bloat, Scripting News might be losing its status as a weblog. "Is it really a weblog if you only link to things you're involved in?" How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Screen shots of an outliner that's trying not to be an outliner? Nick Dimmock: WuName Needs New Home. Qube Quorner keeps on truckin. ZopeNewbies: "Would it be possible to create a Zope equivalent of Manila just using the ManilaRPC specs?" I'm sure it is, and when it happens, the desktop tools will connect into Zope as easily as they connect to Manila, and we'd have the most revolutionary standard since HTTP. Danny O'Brien: "Okay, but how do you create a weblog style stream?" Answer: It's explained here. Nick Potter is a Brit living in Hong Kong. What is the IETF? "Many important IETF documents speak of the IETF as if it was an already-defined entity. However, no IETF document really defines well what the IETF is. This document gives a more concrete definition of 'the IETF' as it understood today." OK.
Manila as a developer opportunity. "When I use Manila as my shell, membership is handled, I have an easy way to write Faqs and Howtos. These days applications are websites, so an easy website tool is an essential part of a developer's toolkit." Demo: A page that calls a macro that says how much time is left before Y2K. Source included. For the last couple of weeks Andre Radke has been working on a complete XML-RPC interface for Manila. The process is familiar. A table of glue scripts. A DocServer library. Sample scripts. Screen shot showing Frontier running on Subhonker1, the machine hosting EditThisPage.Com. All the sites are stored in a single object database, each sub-table is a Manila site, which is just a mainResponder site, and is a Website Framework site too. It's holding the load pretty well today, I think. Learning a lot. Andrew Duncan is having a blast with Manila, on *his* server, not ours, in New Zealand. People ask what's the difference between Manila and other browser-based site hosting tools. Manila is part of a commercial software product you can license to run on your server. Can't do that with Yahoo. Boy when it rains it pours. Tim Lundeen has deployed a test XML-RPC server for Web-Crossing that supports the DG interface we spec'd last summer. I hope someone good works with Tim and company to verify that their interfaces work compatibly. Last night we started over a 100 new sites! (129 to be exact.) You can start one too. Here's the scoop. Here's a new website that works like a weblog! Phil Suh started a site for reporting on the Builder.Com conference in New Orleans. That's a perfect use for the web, of course. (An aside to Phil, if you meet anyone in NO who wants a 60-day free trial Manila site, send them my way.) Dan Peters has a news-oriented home page. Including some very good news, his Frontier server passed the 400,000 hit mark. We usually relaunch Frontier at around 25K, just for good luck. Paolo Valdemarin speaks Italian. "Inizio adesso ad espolorarlo, mi sembra interessante e le nuove features di Manila sembrano utili." To Paolo, in his own language, thanks to Babelfish: "Spero che developers di Frontier crei le add-ons potenti per Manila. Sta andando essere un mercato grande, io pensa. Conservazione che scava Paolo!" Heng-Cheong Leong runs the excellent AppleSurf weblog and wonders what happens after 60 days. Me too! There are a bunch of commercial hosting services starting up for Manila sites. We don't want to interfere with that. But I imagine people would fall over backwards to get a marquee site like AppleSurf running on their server. Jason Levine asks good questions. Yes, we'll find a way to get you a .root file for your site if and when you opt out. You are running in the big UserLand glossary, and your own. You can over-ride any of our definitions thru the Shortcuts page. Your syndication XML is here, it's in Scripting News format, ready for registration with My.UserLand. About the list of members, got it. It's one of the top feature requests. Why haven't we implemented it yet? (Anticipating the next question.) Unfortunately there are only so many hours in a day. We'll get to it for sure, soon. Another question Jason asks, what about my peers? Where are the other sites on EditThisPage.Com? We do have a page listing all the member sites. It's not optimized yet, so I hesitate to make it public. (And it's got some bugs too, who wants to deal with bug reports on a half-finished feature?) So with those caveats, here's the link. Anyone who complains or reloads too often will enter the Idiot's Hall of Fame for December 1999. BTW, most of the sites aren't too interesting, just It Worked! and a little template editing. Another obvious idea for a site. Perhaps someone would like to do a weblog tracking development on ETP.C member sites? I'm very pleased to see Wes Felter's Manila site! Wes invented the "responder" structure that's at the heart of the web server that's running in Frontier, and running every Manila site. I can see he's figured out the key cool thing about Manila. You can update your site with just a web browser. Sometimes a picture of a baby is all that you need on a home page. What a cutie! Vince Outlaw is experimenting with membership options. Little-known fact, Manila has a membership system for *your* users. The schema is edited in XML, of course, proving that XML is not just for academics! CIO: The rise of the techno-geezer.
A new site..
And some new tools..
27 days to Y2K. "Still Diggin!"
MacWEEK: UserLand Unfolds Manila. Nice! Doc Searls: "Call it the World Wide Write." Dan Bricklin: Build your own log. Dan accepts my invitation to work together to create a new literary medium. That's powerful. I've known Dan for over 20 years. Brilliant developer, hard-working, even tireless, ever cheerful, been thru the ringer and came out smilin. I think we'll even compete, eventually, but it's a big space, and I'm sure we'll stay friends. Go get em Dan! CamWorld: Defining the design and production process. Why Andrew Wooldridge likes Manila. "Another cool thing for me is the upcoming exposure of Manila's power via XML-RPC. I use Dreamweaver extensively for my web-editing. With DW3 you get the ability to talk directly to Manila through DW3. So you can build all your cool interaction in DW, then serve it via Manila - all because of standards." This morning I spoke with Joel Klein, US Assistant Attorney General, about the Microsoft anti-trust case. He asked what they should do, and I said I don't know. There was more to the conversation, but that was the gist of it. A followup email I sent to Klein. Meanwhile back at the ranch, all I want for Christmas is an XML-RPC interface for DNS. I want to be able to make a call to my domain name server to map curly.stooges.com to 206.204.24.2. Pretty simple. (Christmas came early this year. QuickDNS is scriptable, we have it running on one of our servers, we're going to put an XML-RPC interface on it from Frontier. We're working on it right now.) Steve Ivy has been working with MacLaunch on updating their listing for Frontier, but they still miss the point. Frontier is a server. It's not really about XML and COM. It's about Edit this Page. Today's top story, the search for water on Mars. Survey: Is there water on Mars? The SOAP 1.0 spec is now on the IETF website. UserLand's Andre Radke posted a list of changes between SOAP 0.9 and 1.0. Microsoft's press release for SOAP 1.0, it accidentally ran a few days early and we missed it. Microsoft reviews SOAP. Andre says: "Just FYI, the MS article seems to have been written for the previous version of the spec, so most of the examples are now out of date." More new stuff on the Release 1.0 weblog. Press release: Zope and Microsoft Sittin In A Tree. Dr Dobbs has a weblog. Welcome! Luke Tymowski reviews Manila. "I can't think of an easier way to publish a Web site. I can't think of an easier way to allow a group of people to work together on a Web site. The closest tool I can think of to Manila is Squishdot, a product which runs on Zope. But Manila is more mature and flexible. Out of the box, Manila is in a class of its own." Regular Expressions reviews Lingo in a Nutshell. "Director users are just like the rest of us who work on overdue and ill-defined projects, with one exception: they've never been paid for good programming. Instead, they must deliver creative content, with zero scheduled downtime, and learn a programming language at the same time. That even 10 percent of them have become competent Linguists, as Epstein believes, is a tribute to the comfort level that Lingo offers." Somehow I missed this story (must have been shipping a product) about Apple's new policy about authorship and design credit. There's a simple solution. Start a website. Allow anonymous posts. When Apple ships a new product, create a new section. Wait five days to see if anyone's name appears. Publish the list. It would be interesting to see if any names appeared. The best web ad I've seen so far. I've been looking for an excuse to put Curly on the home page, then I realized I didn't need one.
Matt Neuburg: A Gentle Introduction to XML-RPC. "The RPC client/server mechanism inside Frontier is called Betty. I don't know why, and I'm not sure I want to." There's an XML-RPC implementation underway for Apache. This is excellent news. We run Apache at UserLand. It's the one machine on our LAN that we can't XML-RPC into. MetaFilter has one of the neatest tools I've ever seen. A floating window of links. I want one of these! I just started a news site at VelociNews. What do you all think? I like Pitas better. Hmmm. I love getting email like this. The Frontier installation wizard is an innovative piece of software that not too many people have seen. It's a server app, running on a UserLand.Com server. The machine that's being configured sends XML-RPC messages to the server every few seconds saying "Are they done yet?" When the user clicks on Finish in the last wizard panel, the server responds "Yes, and here's the info." The copy of Frontier that's being configured then does what it was told to do. We used the browser to configure a desktop app, alleviating the need to write custom dialogs and installer scripts for different OSes. Mike Murry is fusing Manila and Cold Fusion. New sample: serverMonitor.root: "If you operate more than one server, as we do at UserLand.Com, wouldn't it be great if there was one page you could go to to quickly find out if all your servers are running and how they are performing?" MacWEEK: "Two vector-animation packages enter; one vector-animation package leaves." Michael Wolff in New York: The E Decade. (Cover story.) Ken Dow, the new Managing Editor for the Manila-Newbies site posted a survey asking what the favorite feature is. A great use of new technology. (I voted for Edit this Page, so did everyone else, so far.) InfoWorld changed their template again. Every non-subtle change in a website I frequent is as jarring as re-arranging the commands in a piece of software I use frequently. It's a risky proposition for the site, every time they pull a major switch, they might lose users. Sometimes it takes months before I re-learn how to use a site after a re-design. One of the things you hear a lot on the InfoWorld discussion boards is that they should try out a redesign with a few users before flipping the switch. I totally agree. Well, in that spirit, we're working on a new design for Scripting News. What do you think? A reminder to the gullible. Scripting News started on 4/1/97. If you still don't get it, look at the URL.
DaveNet: It Worked! Press Release: UserLand Ships Manila. This is the first official UserLand press release since 1993. It's also the first time we've had a product with mass appeal. Wish us luck! About Manila: "Manila is an Internet server application that allows groups of writers, designers and graphics people to manage full-featured, high performance web sites thru an easy-to-use browser interface. Manila is included with Frontier 6.1." Manila-Newbies: Quick Start Guide. Heise.De: Standard für Web-Anwendungen vorgeschlagen. Screen shot of a Manila site in development, from Austria. To the people in the weblog community, UserLand makes software. Servers and writing tools, network applications. We grow as you do. And that goes doubly for other weblog toolmakers. Let's create a new literary medium together. From the It-Doesn't-Hurt-To-Ask Department, now MacInTouch is pointing to Manila. Thanks! MacCentral ran the press release. MacWEEK is working on the story. AppleSurf is great. All is well. Sneak preview: SOAP 1.0 Spec. BTW, if there are press people tuned in, esp editors who cover web development software, if you'd like a trial Manila site hosted on our server, please send email to pr@userland.com. We say yes to all reasonable requests. We want press people to start using Manila asap. Also, we're working on an app that will allow all current Frontier subscribers to have one free UserLand-hosted Manila site. We want to get it right before we roll it out.
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and our system will replace that with the picture. This works on all UserLand-hosted servers, including EditThisPage.Com. 
