DaveNet: Friday, November 14, 1997; by Dave Winer.

Dornquast Profile

We first got to know Matthew Dornquast, mdornquast@shl.com, in early 1996 when he was a webmaster at the famous Minneapolis ad agency, Fallon McElligot.

He used our software to develop and run some great websites, most notably at the time, the BMW USA site, which was heavily promoted by Apple. He developed a Frontier application to let you design your own BMW. It's still running, to this day, on a Mac. (So much for people who say Macs don't make great web servers.)

Somewhere along the line Matt switched from Mac to Windows and left Fallon. Now that we're in private testing mode on our Windows software we're relinking with great people like Matt. He's been an active contributor on the Windows-Newbies list, and has been using the initial versions of Frontier 5/Win.

I asked him for a list of software he uses. It reveals a lot, this is what a smart Windows-based web developer keeps around, these are the tools he uses. If you're doing web work on Windows, this could help you. I know it helped me.

Dornquast profile

Hardware: 760XD ThinkPad by IBM. Video in/out, thousands of colors on 1024-by-768, and GREAT NT driver support!

Software:

• NT 4.0

• NT Service Pack 3

• NT Option Back beta 3
  • MS Explorer 4.0 (Note I can not use release version on 4.0 because it is in conflict with NTOPbeta3)
  • PWS
  • Transaction Server
  • ASP

• Visual Interdev
  • Music Producer
  • Image Composer
  • Media Manager

• Microsoft ADO 3.5

• Visual Interdev Service Pack 2

• Visual J++

• Office 97--Note! I use Access 97 as my ODBC datasource for most development, not SQL.

• Various outlook extras including InternetMail fix, Rules Wizard and Timex Datalink export

• Adobe Photoshop

• Debabalizer Pro 4.0 (Hey, there is a new 4.5 that just came out!)

• MacroMedia Director 6

• MacroMedia Extreme3d

• Winzip 6.3SR-1

• WinzipInet

• PC Anywhere32

• MS Powertoys (Let's you boot NT without login! YAY!)

• MultiEdit for Windows 8.0 + Weblair Beta 9

• AOL Instant Messenger- Screen Name is "durund" for those interested in chatting.

• SuperJpeg

• Quicktime 2.12 + 1.1 plugin + QTVR

• Microsoft Personal Fax

• Frontier 5

• Various Java Libraries, too many to list.

• Internet News (Note, I don't use Outlook express because I need Outlook features, so I need a news client)

• Microsoft Chat

• Microsoft Bookshelf/Reference Doc (Most of it is on CD-ROM)

This installation is relatively new for me on NT 4.0, so some of my Windows 95 tools have not yet migrated over. This list is bound to grow over next month or so.

Fallon websites

I also asked for a list of sites Matt worked on at Fallon:

• http://www.bmwusa.com/

• http://www.tidycat.com/

• http://www.nikonusa.com/

• http://www.millerlite.com/

Check em out!

How those sites use Frontier

In giving permission to link to these sites in this context, Matt Jannusch, mattj@qm.fallon.com, explained how they use Frontier on these sites. He said:

On the BMWUSA site we are using Frontier for all of the Build Your Own vehicles (328 series, 5-series, 7-series, M3, Z3).

On TidyCat it is used to deliver some random images in some portions of the site. NikonUSA uses it for the GO menu to jump to various portions of the site, however in the near future we will be replacing that functionality with a small Java servelet.

Miller Lite is using Frontier for the login age-verification page. We used to use it on the Miller site for creating random ID's for Postcards, but have since wrapped that functionality into Tango.

It was also used previously in the BMW site for sending requests for vehicle brochures, but has been replaced with NetForms as we were having some chronic problems with TCPCMD randomly crashing our servers.

We also use Frontier for automated archival of logfiles (they are moved to a central log repository and GZipped where Analog then processes them) and the translation of URLs in the site builds between our "work in progress" server and the live sites.

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me any time, and thanks for Frontier!

Thanks!

Thanks to Matt and Matt.

Interesting stuff!

Dave Winer

PS: I wish Dornquast had a personal website. I've never even met the dude. Oh well... At least we know what his computer looks like!