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Passover Some thoughts as I head out to Marc Canter's Passover Seder tonight in San Francisco.  When I was a kid, being Jewish was something dirty, to be ashamed of. I can't say exactly how I came to this opinion, perhaps there is no reason why. I always hated how smelly and personal Jews were. But then later in life I learned that Irish people are the same way, as are Italians and Russians, even Chinese and Indians. People are smelly and personal. It's like accepting my trees as the true owners of my "property". Jews have been through a lot of shit. Somehow we're still here. Yes, we make trouble. Always. Everywhere we go. But we also make beautiful movies, and write great books and websites and invent and discover new stuff, and we study, study and study. We Jews think we're smarter than everyone else. Everyone else has a problem with that. So what else is new? 6.2 Feature #1 -- Choose a Language The first of two big features we're working on for Frontier 6.2. In 6.2 you'll be able to choose a language for a Manila site. If you choose German, for example, all the prompts and menu items will be in German. Just like real software. The two languages we'll ship with are English and German, the two languages we speak at UserLand. This will put an end to the terrible dance that non-English webmasters have to do whenever we update. A beautiful German Manila weblog. 6.2 Feature #2 -- News Items Feature number two is "News Items". The first command in Manila's Editors Only menu will be News, just before Stories and Pictures. Click on it to see a list of pending (unpublished) news items. At the bottom of the list is a link to create a News Item. Enter a title, a URL, a description, and choose a category. A configurable approval process. A rendering template for news items. A discussion link for each news item. The underlying format (invisible to the casual editor) is XML. News Items are editable in Pike. We intend to bring the SlashDot metaphor into Manila. This is one of the top feature-request items, and it was a very tricky design problem. But it seems to work! This feature will not wait until the release of 6.2, we hope to have this online for UserLand-hosted Manila sites next week. Exodus It appears we had a 16-minute Exodus outage this morning. We moved two servers to Exodus late last year. I'm going to send an email (a friendly one) to Ellen Hancock, suggesting that we meet to talk about how we're going to work together. No doubt there will be problems. What we want to avoid are the kinds of human-level disconnects we've had with other ISPs. I want to make sure they know that we have lots of users, and that we care about whether they get through or not. In fact it's mission-critical to us. (To put it mildly.) Exodus' profile page for Ellen Hancock. Hancock was considered a possible CEO of Apple in 1997. Random stuff Survey: If you're knowledgable about Internet connectivity, would you prefer Scripting News be co-located at Exodus or AboveNet? (Later, I added Level 3 and Frontier Globalcenter to the choices.) AboveNet: "AboveNet will investigate complaints regarding inappropriate material on Web pages transmitted using AboveNet services, in its sole discretion, require that the material be removed or take action as outlined in 1.02 above. If you do not agree to be bound by these Acceptable Use Guidelines, please notify AboveNet Customer Service so that we may initiate a closure of your account." Deal-stopper. Tommy Williams looks at Service Agreements. "I don't know if you're going to be able to find a hosting facility that doesn't include some variant on the basic principle that, if there's something offensive or illegal on your site, they're going to shut you down." People thought I was talking about tools for writers yesterday, but I asked about companies for writers. "Watch as Adobe and Macromedia roll out web services for their users." B2B. Earlier this week, on the Weblogs2 mail list, Amanda Holland-Minkley wrote a longish post from a woman's point of view, about the attention she attracts where ever she goes, and how annoying it is. I wrote a response, which turned into a short essay I want to keep. MozillaZine: "Mozilla isn't a platform? Mozilla shouldn't be a platform?" OK. Now, if Mozilla isn't a browser, and it is a platform (see how agreeable I can be) where are we going to find a browser to compete with MSIE? I started an outages mail list on eGroups. I've become a focal point in these discussions, I want to spread out, so we can help each other. Let's figure this stuff out, it can't be that hard. Jeff Veen on new browser releases. Doc Searls: Abolish Intellectual Property Laws. That's a little further than I would go Doc. Robert Cassidy, UC Irvine, on Napster: "The universities are in a tough spot. We'd prefer to support such products as they would be fantastic tools in the distribution of legal materials and we tend to strongly encourage free speech. We don't support copyright violation but we feel that you need to actually target the violators, not cast a wide net over anyone that might be a violator." Jacob Levy: Dispatch #2 from the Napster and Gnutella Front. Brock Meeks took a ride on Air Force One with POTUS. Everyone's buzzin about Wes's DG. In case you didn't notice, I sorted the links in the navigation section, to the left. (The sort was by URL.) I'll probably play with the order some more, weed out some older sites, add newer ones. It's amazing to me how people tune into changes in the list. Hey the stock markets are closed today. Excellent. I'm in blue chips. Whew. Scripting News via email followup Murphy strikes again! We screwed up. (Actually I screwed up.) The emails did not go out at 10PM. I fixed the problem, set the time-to-send to 5AM, and watched them go out. Need to fix some bugs. Bugs in programs that send email suck. Hard to test without annoying a lot of people. 
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