Wednesday, December 29, 1999

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!