Friday, February 18, 2000

***An open search engine

With over 2700 Manila sites hosted on EditThisPage.Com, we now have an interestingly large base of content and no way to search it. Until now.

EditThisPage: How to set up a Manila site for searching.

The interface is open and documented, implemented in XML-RPC, so other content management systems could tie into our search engine, and other search engines could support Manila sites.

A list of sites we index. Some people got in early, by being curious! But wait, there's more. A page listing the most popular searches and one listing the most recent ones.

***Regular expressions for Weblogs.Com

One of the nicest features on the home page of Weblogs.Com is its search command. For example, here's a query for all the weblogs that mention SXSW. That's an easy search string to find, it's unlikely to appear in any context other than the SXSW conference in Austin in March.

But what if, for example, you wanted to find all the sites that have the word "cool" mis-spelled, with extra o's and want to find them all in one shot, regardless of how many o's they have? Here's a Regex query that finds those sites.

So that's the little goodie. We're doing a toe-dip. We've not put Regex on a server before, so we're not sure if it's 100 percent reliable. We decided to try it on our newest server, with a crowd that might care and see what happens. There's a cribsheet for Regex, with pointers, please discuss on the Weblogs.Com DG.

***Links links links, we got links!

Hey back in the 1900s, esp towards the end, I thought how neat it would be to look back on the 1900s, but that was overly self-centered. I almost never think about the 1900s. So there!

Salon: "An avalanche is coming!" "As Iranians surge to the polls, a new generation of liberal reformers is expected to be swept into office. But it's not yet time to declare the mullahs powerless."

Reuters: Bush, McCain Push for Victory in S.Carolina.

Reuters: Big Turnout in Iran Raises Reformist Hopes.

CNN: "Men and women supporters of the reformist movement enjoyed themselves together in public, singing, swaying and clapping hands to pop music crooned by a former revolutionary guard."

Both McCain and Bradley voted *for* the Communication Decency Act. McCain sponsored legislation that would have required filtering software on computers in schools.

Mac columnist Don Crabb is seriously ill. You can post your greetings on MacWEEK.Com.

browserware.org responds fast. Excellent!

Eric Soroos: Seattle FUG Meeting 2-22-00.

News.Com: White House declares Y2K bug victory.

Schatzhalp Lunch at Davos: "This is where we had lunch at the final day at Davos. Already I had forgotten how spectacular the scenery and how collegial and friendly the spirit of Davos is. Thanks to Suzanne McCullagh, the webmaster at WorldLink, for sending this picture."

In my Let's have a meeting! post I said: "I want to have a Saturday afternoon meeting with the EditThisPage, Manila and Frontier people in the Bay Area." Some people interpreted that to mean this Saturday. That's not what I meant.

The status of the meeting: Dan Mitchell at De Anza says we can do it there. I'm waiting to hear back on available dates. In the meantime I may have to go to Australia in late March, so we'd better do it in the first half of March. Sorry for the confusion! I never thought we could possibly pull it off in just a few days.

Vitessa: XML-RPC client for Tcl v7.6.

Vitessa partners with Vignette and others.

Dan Gillmor: "Software and business method patents are a total scandal, but Congress and the Patent Office just lets the system keep rolling along. Consumers, and the free enterprise system, will be the ultimate losers in this foolish game."

This morning I took an auto trip at sunrise and captured pictures of Silicon Valley, waking up. Warning, there are a lot of pics on this page, if you don't have a fast net connection it'll take a long time to load. No whining!

Scott Mace: A big week for Quality of Service.

ZDNet: Microsoft on 'Open Windows' -- Baloney!

Luke Tymowski: "Why don't I like Domino? In brief, because it sucks hard, pretty hard."

A Picture of Weblogs is a Java applet that shows a visual relationship between the EatonWeb-listed logs.

ElectricNews: World weather now on WAP.

***Woof woof!

I say I don't like Derek Powazek's style of weblog. I say why. Then I get a bunch of links from people who would never link to me otherwise, some of whom even have Weblogs.Com banner ads, and therefore get links from me. "The sky is falling the sky is falling, Dave criticized someone! Helllp. I'm so outraged."

So like Pavlov's dog, I now know how to get links from that crowd, and I might know a few more tricks too. Woof woof!

BTW, the only reason I criticized Powazek is that I think his design sucks. I had tried it several times, so I know it had nothing to do with my mood. He preaches about his design skill so mightily. I think he's pompous, a set-up to be ragged on if there ever was one.

And a PS to Evan and Meg at Pyra, two very sweet people whose logs I read regularly, if I had known he was coming to work for you I would have sat it out. Best wishes for friendly respectful competition, that's not what this is about.

***About the cowskull

Since people mention the cowskull disaster so frequently, I thought I should explain what happened. The cowskull was originally intended to be a mode-flip, to move you from the presentation view to the editorial view of a story or picture in a Manila site, and back.

Somehow this broke during the development of Manila and no one noticed. The other side of the mode-flip, from the editorial view to the presentation view was deleted. This is an internal team issue at UserLand and should not concern anyone else, unless they're interested. So anyway, the cowskull was not correctly implemented. Whatever. Onward!

BTW, it's really silly to pick on this one glitch. Look at Manila as a whole. It's a very large community of users. That couldn't have happened if we hadn't done a lot of things right.