Thursday, December 23, 1999

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.