Sunday, March 19, 2000

Thanks to Garret Vreeland and Mike Donnelan who are helping us figure out how to use this stuff. It's confusing, I admit it. But it's always confusing when you first jump out of the plane with no parachute. Scripting.Com regulars will remember our longtime slogan, still diggin, which might be amended now with "still haven't figured out how the parachute works."

OK, so you want to get started customizing but don't know where to begin. Here's a kick out of the airplane, a source listing of the Weblogs.Com home page. What are those funny things in curly braces? They're called macros, and when the page is rendered they invoke magic bits of Frontier code called scripts. (That's why this site is called Scripting News.) Those scripts poke around in the invisible object database that makes Manila work and gets things and turns them into HTML which web browsers know how to display. If you do exactly what this page does on your home page, you'll get a home page exactly like ours. If you change the formatting, your home page will contain the same info as ours but it will look different. This is called "customization".

Andre chust arrived from Chermanee. Ve might go out for a Spicy Noodles dinner. Andre groans. "Not so soon!". "Why not?" I asked. It's even worse than it appears.

US6025810: "...thereby creating an input and output port; and generating a communications signal into the input and output port, thereby sending the signal at a speed faster than light."

SJ Merc: "If a site's not constantly under reconstruction, it's just one click short of becoming another 404 error on the cyberspacial roadside."

Another place to register your weblog.

Jon Arney: "I'm working on an XML-RPC implementation in C++ using the Xerces-C XML library from Apache."

Wow, they put a redirect on the original home page of the Web, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page he pointed to the new sites as they came online. Unfortunately this site wasn't archived, wouldn't it be great if it were? It would be like the Bible for the Web. In the beginning..

Looks like CERN wants to use the flow to create a portal of Web resources. Wait a minute, it's even heavier. They're doing something like Manila! Excellent. Tried to create a site but I'm not a member. Sad. Hey the people look pretty cool. New friends?

Washington Post: "This is the goose, it laid the golden egg," says Lessig of the system of shared ideas that created the Internet. Left to themselves, corporate lawyers will try to patent the goose and build a legal fence around it--and then wonder what happened to the eggs."

Dan Gillmor: "Picture the jaded technology watcher, contemplating a slew of announcements in recent days."

This morning one DaveNet member threatened another, a newbie, who did something understandable, but not usual. (I had already sent him a private email gently explaining how it works.) The complainer wanted me to punish the person who offended him, and also rewrite the DaveNet software, and change the culture (visible To: header) because he got one piece of email he considered spam. Oy. I took him off the list with no regrets. If you send me Old Tomatoes, you're off the list, immediately. If you want to give me your pain, look in the mirror instead, and say it to yourself. You'll find a more sympathetic ear, for sure.

I did a search for Old Tomatoes, thinking I'd find dozens of pages explaining what they are, but I found none. So here's the definitive graph on the subject. "Old Tomato" is a cute mis-pronunciation for "ultimatum". They don't work and they're easy to avoid. Write down your old tomato. Put it in your wallet. Read it two days from now. You'll very likely find you don't care anymore.

Given this data, it's not surprising that oldtomatoes.com is not taken and neither is oldtomato.com.

However, whatatomato.com is taken.

If you like tomatoes (I don't) you'll probably like this picture.

Jeff Cheney: Log Analysis for Manila Sites.

If I watched more TV I would know wazzup. True.

NY Times: A New Activist Fund Will Test Web's Clout. "We are as close to the Weathermen as you're going to get in the financial world."

Electric Dirt Farmer reviews Zaplets.

"It's even worse than it appears."