Sunday, December 05, 1999

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.