Saturday, January 01, 2000

Jeff Cheney runs a survey that offers some insight into my personality. I'm not going to say how I voted.

If you created a Manila site today when you tried to log in it said: "Can't get the first day in the calendar because adrcalendar doesn't point to a valid non-empty calendar structure." Brent says it's not Y2K breakage, Manila wasn't handling the year-rollover properly when displaying the Flip Home Page button. The problem is fixed, and sites created today are once again accessible.

Jacob Savin has turn-of-the-century pictures on his ETP site.

BTW, last century's closing song was As Time Goes By. So far, the song of the new millennium is Zippety Do Dah. Or maybe Hunting Tigers Out in India by the Bonzo Dog Band?

A comparative review of Pitas, Blogger and Manila. Sounds like we have some work to do. I'd like to understand the "disappearing stories" problem. I'm sure the story didn't actually disappear. I've never seen it happen. It's probably an expectation thing. The author expected something to happen, but something else happened.

I checked, the stories are there, in the story list. If I had it to do all over, I would nuke the "Make this story the home page" command. I use it for DaveNet, which is a Manila site too, but it's a very special kind of site, not one that most people want to do.

BTW, re performance on EditThisPage.Com, with almost 1500 sites, it pushes Frontier in ways it has never been pushed before. This is good! We found some algorithms that made sense in the early 90s, that no longer make sense. We're making some core changes to the way Frontier manages memory. This will make the Frontier search engine perform better too. These changes come slowly because we have to test extensively before deploying. We hope to have the new software running on EditThisPage.Com by the end of next week. Thanks for your help, all 1500 webmasters.

Last century (or last night, depending how you look at it), before going to a New Year's dinner and then to a meditation, I saw something I had never seen before. A Manila newbie, Sonja Scharrer, who also has Frontier, is using Manila to learn how Frontier works. She'd do something in Manila in the web browser, then switch over to Frontier and see what it did. You can poke around using the outliner, all Manila's secrets are revealed. Makes total sense, and it's a brilliant insight that had never occurred to me.

***Happy New Year one and all!

InfoWorld: Easy Y2K in USA. "We have been unable to find any significant Y2K incidents," said Koskinen. "I was pleasantly surprised."

News.Com: US Averts Y2K Disaster. "The West Coast greets the new century without disruption, the world's last frontier to escape the dreaded millennium bug."

NY Times: Y2K Computer Glitches Are Mostly a No-Show. "As clocks passed midnight around the world, there were a flurry of reports of apparently minor problems: a timing device at a electric plant in Wisconsin jumped ahead 35 days, but it was quickly reset; a monitoring system at a Japanese nuclear plant malfunctioned, but it did not affect the operation of the reactor; in Australia, ticketing machines on some buses jammed."

"A new beginning."