Friday, February 25, 2000

TechWeb: Amazon Associates Plan Wins Patent Protection. "Patent No. 6,029,141, issued Tuesday, is granted for 'an Internet-based referral system that enables individuals and other business entities ('associates') to market products, in return for a commission, that are sold from a merchant's website,' according to the patent office website." Outrageous.

If you hate what Amazon is doing, as I do, here's how to respond when you get an email asking why it's been so long since you purchased anything from them. "If you want me to shop with you again, stop using patents as weapons against your competitors."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will be a guest on MSNBC's Summit in Silicon Valley, hosted by Tom Brokaw, airing on Sunday. They invite you to send questions in via email.

Hey I made #2 on Bloat. Having a great week. And I'm doing another tuneup of the HotList right now, as we speak. An amazing coincidence?

Milestone: surveys.userland.com is now a Manila site.

Very soon, possibly later today, we'll show you how to add surveys to your Manila site. We'll also show how the new plug-in architecture works, how developers can add commands that appear in the Editors Only menu, easily define legal macros that can be called from pages on a Manila site, even respond to incoming XML-RPC messages. This will make Frontier a more powerful web application development environment, one with a growing installed base of writers, designers and graphics people who are ready for innovation.

New site! webapps.editthispage.com.

David Carter-Tod: LDAP and Security in Manila.

Madison's Lifelog: "She happened to pick up on a word in a phrase I use often. The phrase was "that sucks" and the word she picked up was "sucks". Of course my wife and I started laughing, of which she thought was funny too. So to practice her new word, and make us laugh some more, she kept repeating it. It was quite hillarious."

Nice guys finish last. Nice site!

Feature request: Height, Width on <SCRIPT>.

A new Global Shortcut. If you include "wordnet" in a page on a Manila site hosted by UserLand, you'll get a simple form that allows a user to look up a word in WordNet's online word database. (Otherwise known as a dictionary.)

Another one. If you type "wes" in a page, you'll get a small picture of Wesley Felter with a link to his site. This is one way of honoring him for bringing so many new people into EditThisPage.Com. Also to honor him for implementing Responders in Frontier, an idea that has gone a long way!

From the Help With Surveys page, possibly standard boilerplate for a hosting policy. "As with all random content coming from the Internet at large, we reserve the right to delete anything we want to, or block individuals from contributing if they can't take a gentle hint." Feel free to use this on your site.

Example of tasteful, artistic and non-lewd sex on the Web.

Another kind of server that runs UserLand.Com.

Anyone from Wired tuned in? I wonder if they got an unusual amount of traffic over the last few days on this page.

Wow! I did a search for my name and came up with a bunch of interesting sites.

Donkeymon: "We are arch enemies. We must fight to the death!"

We've been reviewing Microsoft's agreement for Link Exchange.

Linux Capital Group is a "business incubator and venture capital company specializing in the GNU/Linux operating system." Interesting site!

Ask Tog: "While the battle lines of pro- and anti-Aqua have been drawn in blood, no one seems to be looking at the real problem, and that is that Apple, in OS-X, is doing nothing other than running a 10-year-old and 20-year-old interface together at high speed."

Brent is showcasing the faces of Manila.

An interesting site that builds on the Open Directory Project.

BTW, the best time to send me a link, for maximum flow, is any time between midnight and approx 4AM Pacific on weekdays. That's when Scripting News is emptiest, and it catches the early morning rush on the east coast of the US. The absolute best time of all is overnight Sunday, to catch the Monday surge of hits. Monday is the biggest day on Scripting News.

***Death penalty stuff

Don't read this if you don't want your emotions stirred. There are some days when you have to avoid these kinds of things. But the issue is raised, it's part of our political process this year in the United States.

Question asked of Al Gore: "Are there people on death row elsewhere, or federal death row, who are innocent? Isn't that something we should be worried about?" Good question! Now here's his answer. "I think that any honest and candid supporter of the death penalty has to acknowledge that that support comes in spite of the fact that there will inevitably be some mistakes."

Please think about this.

1/29/98: "I feel deeply sad for poor Sam Winer, to leave this life in such an awful way. There was no mercy or forgiveness for Sam in his final moment. No kindness or love. The last face he saw was someone who was going to kill him."

Marc Canter is preparing his On-Line Passover Haggadah. Jews have a special appreciation for the value of human life, especially when it's taken by a government for supposedly moral reasons.