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Good morning everyone. How's it going? Last day of February. Payroll day. Not a leap year. Springtime in California. What else to say? Only time will tell. Pause and take a moment out of your busy day to read this story by Shane McChesney. Mike Godwin: "A central goal of Hollywood's lobbying effort is to prevent unencrypted and unwatermarked content from being circulated on the Net." Ominous words from Steve Zellers for developers who use AppleEvents (like us). "A future release of the AppleEvent Manager in OS X may break some applications." Oy. Rob Fahrni, one of the Visio developers at Microsoft, is rendering OPML as a tree chart. It's a good idea, we did something like that with MORE in 1986. Since then I think it's been a lost art. It's cool that Rob is reviving it. The next step is to get PowerPoint to render and emit OPML. Hey Frank, I have a better idea, ignore the Big's and make software and sell it to users, and stick to the principles of no lock-in and user choice, and you'll win.
Special Report: What they're saying about Rob Enderle. I was hoping that Dvorak+Enderle would be a Googlewhack, but alas, they intersect at quite a few points.
Ciam Sawyer sends this pointer to a simple version of Google, very lightweight. Thanks! Mike Gray found an even lighter Google. Excellent! Chris Locke one of the Cluetrain guys explains what the Manifesto actually says, as opposed to what people who didn't read it think it says. Sam Ruby: "One of the more interesting personalities at the interop event is Keith Ballinger." Dan Gillmor: "Does the technology industry need Hollywood's permission to innovate?" Annalee Newitz: "Blogs have turned me into a nervous person." Russ Lipton explains how to update Radio. Reading this piece will give you a peek at how software subscriptions work. Today we started linking Russ's tutorials into the directory on the Radio site. Wired: "A software upgrade that shut down the Morpheus file-trading network -- a network supposedly immune from such troubles -- could be bad news for people who like to download free music." Dvorak redux According to Chris Pirillo, via Evhead, the main issue for Dvorak is whether blogging is new or not. This is an old story, imho, settled long ago. The weblog idea is as old as the Web itself, which is to say it's pretty new. Why is this concept getting so much press now? The question goes back to Dvorak. Why did you focus so much attention on the browser wars, the Java wars, etc, and not focus on what people were doing with the Web? The story was available starting in 1992. It developed through the early years of the commercialization of the Web. All we're doing is lowering the barrier to entry, giving more power to users, and at the same time they're learning more, getting comfortable with the technology that was so new just a few years ago. Nothing changed, except 15 years of progress, Moore's Law and the addition easy to use networking. Basically he's got some catching up to do. Nothing more, apparently, and that's fine. But I don't like that he entered our world with incorrect and irrelevant accusations about thoughtful people who share their ideas so generously. There's some air to clear here. I'll feel awkward pointing to Dvorak's blog, when it appears, knowing that he's treated these good people in such a shabby way. It's been quiet here Sorry this week I've been heads-down on a big project. We're working with some new partners on new ways to use and sell Radio. Some great ideas flowing in all directions. Not everyone knows everyone else, but if any of it comes to fruition there are going to be a lot more Radio users soon. "A nice problem to have," you might think, and I agree, but -- to turn the next corner, we have to package the cloud-side of Radio, so that other organizations can run their own communities. To do that we have to bootstrap a new community, so we can test the software. Corner-turns and bootstraps are the hardest things about what we do. But that's my job now, and it has been for the last three weeks, and probably will be my job for the next couple of months. But pretty soon my other flows, the other places I'm writing will be visible, and the flow of ideas through Scripting News will get back to its normal sipping-from-the-firehose mode. As someone said once, Still Diggin! Frontier 8 A necessary foundation for the "community server" product is Frontier 8.0. Doug and Brent are working on that, and have a final-final candidate will be on the support site by 11AM Pacific (if you're a licensee you know where that is). At one point I thought we'd do an overhaul of the configuration system for Frontier 8, based on what we know now about browser-based content management. But we couldn't muster the effort, given all that's on our plate, so Frontier 8 will ship tomorrow, Murphy-willing, to be quickly followed by the software described above. What's the difference? A frequently asked question is What's the difference between Frontier and Radio? Radio is our desktop product, it includes weblogging software, a news aggregator, and features that put a friendly face on XML-based services over the Internet. Radio is designed for people, the same way personal computers took the essential capabilities of a mainframe computer and made it easy to use, for people.
The difference are what apps ship with each product. Frontier is configured to serve lots of users. Radio is configured to serve one user. Frontier is $899. Radio is $39.95.
John Hiller: "Whether or not people even know what a weblog is, blogs are already having a massive impact on the lives of almost all Web users." The BlogSisters. Gotta point to em. Just got an email. "Never trust anyone over 30." Nodded my head in agreement. Essay-in-Progress: Desktop Content Management. News.Com: "StreamCast Networks' Morpheus--a file-swapping service that many have said would be impossible for courts to shut down--shut out most of its users Tuesday, citing 'technical problems.'"
NY Times: Apple Gets a Grammy. "The academy noted that Apple's products, starting with the Macintosh computer, have made it easier and less expensive for a musician to single-handedly compose, edit and mix music." DIY.
On this day four years ago, I wrote an essay that really got things moving. "It's RPC over HTTP via XML. I believe it's the next protocol for runtimes." Got a call from Bob Atkinson at Microsoft; then Don Box, Mohsen Al-Ghosein, Bob and myself designed XML-RPC, which later became SOAP. It was a big day in my life, led to lots of good things. On this day this year, a group of SOAP developers is meeting in Boston to work out interop in WSDL. Greetings to my brothers. UserLand could not be there because we're digging new holes (and filling in old ones) with XML-RPC and SOAP shovels. We're app developers, we got what we need in the simple XML-RPC spec, and the Busy Developer's Guide profile for SOAP 1.1. At the same time, I support all developers everywhere who are working for interop. A couple of Radio blogs are at the meeting in Boston, and we'll call the play-by-play, best as we can, based on what we understand. (How about doing a WSDL for Weblogs.Com? It's about as simple an interface as you can find on the Internet today.) Adam Curry: "After reading how Andrew Sullivan pulled down $27,000 from donations to his weblog I have to try out the donation system for myself. This particular experiment will be interesting because I'm already a multi-millionaire. Do you still feel inclined to donate?" 10/19/00: "In California you can hardly throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a billionaire." Bill Bumgarner reviews Mac OS X. Craig Burton: "Novell continues to wallow in irrelevancy." InfoWorld: "Microsoft announced a licensing agreement with IMlogic to embed instant messaging archiving technology into future versions of its enterprise-level IM products."
Newsbytes: "Lawyers for makers of the file-sharing applications Morpheus and Grokster say that, if their clients can be held responsible for illegal copies of music and motion pictures, then so too should companies such as Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, whose software and Internet connectivity are essential to building networks of file traders." Until reading this ZDNet article interviewing Don Box, it had not occurred to me that HTTP isn't everything we could want it to be. No sarcasm. People are jumping all over this story, but sheez, he makes some good points.
Heads-up and a bit of a tease. Last night we released a few parts for Radio 8 that generalize the connection between the desktop and the community server. This will make it easier, in the future, to switch to a new server, with new features for communities. More than one Weblogs.Com? Behind a firewall? Private workgroups? Write your own cloud-apps? All of that, and more. There's even a technical term for this. Federation. Inch by inch.
Le Monde: Le Web et moi, et moi, et moi. The FrontPage Weblog explains how to color your scrollbars with (of course) FrontPage. The philosophy of DIY is inclusive. Everyone can do it. xmlhack covers the W3C's patent policy changes. Jimmy Guterman reports from the TED conference. I gotta say this. Having a librarian in our midst is fantastic. I worshipped librarians as a kid. They are so happy to help, and so damned smart! Adam Curry, who was named an honorary librarian today (see above), says "Links are the only true currency of the web." Amen brother. If you don't link you're still ink-stained. Amy Wohl: "I don't include recipes (for cookies or anything else) because I have another website for that." Screen shot of an elusive all-blue site. I've not visited any of the links on this site. Here's a surprise. I just skimmed this new Dan Bricklin essay on weblogging, and all the links were blue, including the pointer to my site. Nice. Last night talking with Jake, after working out our plan for the evening, I said Let's Do It! and realized this is the followup to Just Do It (which is kind of bitchy and controlling, but still cool) which followed DIY, which is optimistic and powerful. The beauty of Let's Do It is that it's about working together, where the previous two were about doing it yourself. There's still a Y in Let's Do It, but we both agree to DI, which is more fun.
One more note before signing off for the night. One of the advantages the pros are supposed to have over amateurs is the time and skills they have to carefully research a topic. According to the legend, weblog people shoot from the hip, there's no time to research. This is an incorrect idea. In fact the best webloggers are domain experts. They spend their whole professional lives gathering knowledge and experience in their fields. A fantastic example of this is Glenn Fleishman, who pours his intelligence out to the Web in vast quantities. He doesn't take any shortcuts. The quality of his writing, and his integrity is in your face. Another example, with all possible humility, I've spent 25 years becoming an expert in several areas of software development. When I write about software, really, there's nothing shallow about it. I've got the scars to prove it. I wonder when some reporter is going to connect XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and Radio to my weblog. Could any of these things have happened without the ability to communicate directly to users and developers? Don't they see the economic revolution. We've cut out a middleman who was subtracting value. It must be hard for them to see because the reporters are the middlemen. How can you explain a new idea when the reporters won't believe or even express the ideas behind the software. Therefore no new ideas get out. Until the Web. No more exclusive access to people's minds. A route-around. Lots more to say about this. Lightbulbs going on everywhere. BTW, there was a time when reporters got on top of a technology story, and some still do. My career in software was launched by a NY Times reporter almost 20 years ago. I'll never forget it. OK, just one more note. I need an icon for Aunt Mary. Holding a beautiful plate of fresh-baked cookies. It's going on my todo list. Hold on. Stop the presses. Burning Bird shows her face. Hey, she could be Aunt Mary! Ducking. Doc points out that Andrew Sullivan's blogging piece doesn't contain any links. Same was true of this morning's NY Times piece, and Saturday's National Post piece. Maybe this is a fundamental difference between bloggers and pros. Worth considering. We point to them, but they don't point back? John and I have a theory about all these Aunt Mary's cookie recipe stories. The reporters talk to Evan first. He tells them about Aunt Mary and her cookie recipes. Bing. Instant story. Megnut, a weblog pioneer, has a great rant on the spate of recent weblogging articles. (Meg also has a couple of recipes on her weblog, proving that it is possible to have a mind and something to say and also like to make soup and rigatoni.) Jon Udell: "There are levels of truth. Marketing literature can be true, at one level. Journalism can be true at another. Technical literature can be at yet another. All too often these levels operate in isolation, never connecting. When awareness flows across levels, a richer and more nuanced version of the truth can emerge." Two articles by James LaRue about outliners.
Jack Valenti: "The reason pitifully few films are legitimately available on the Internet is not producer hoarding. It is that those valuable creative works can't be adequately protected from theft." Loser. Russ Lipton: What is Publish and Subscribe? Question -- how can you review weblog technology in February 2002 and not cover publish and subscribe? Dan Gillmor: "Weblogs certainly are helping to fill the void in one arena -- technology journalism. It's an economic depression, not a recession, in that field." I don't think I said that Apache is the only alternative to .Net (I don't believe it is) so they must be talking about some other Dave on the Cocoon mail list, in this thread entitled "Crushing UserLand." Heh. I know how much work they have to do to do that. BWT, we use Apache in our system. They could look on the bright side and see Radio as a fantastic application of Apache. Finally, I gave them numerous heads-ups that Apache was falling behind, in public, on this site. Davezilla: "Control Freaks. We all have to work with at least one. You’re reading a blog by one right now." Blogzilla is a weblog about Mozilla. Andrew Sullivan: A Blogger Manifesto. Move the cursor to the top line of the outline. Press return. Enter "Morning coffee notes" and then Enter. Click on the line below. Shift-click and hold it down. Scroll to the last line and click. Control-R. Click on Morning Coffee Notes. Double-click to collapse. Control-D to move it down. Control-S to save. Morning coffee notes The NY Times asks "Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad?" Wouldn't it be something if they really attempted to answer the question. The answer is of course it's here to stay, as they asked the same question in the late 80s about desktop publishing. Publishing software is getting easier to use, always, and the people are getting smarter about it, always. The BigPubs often cover this stuff with their ink-stained conflict of interest producing exactly the same story. Aunt Martha with her cookie recipes is no threat to what they do. But there are probably 100 bloggers who could write a more insightful and accurate story about weblogs than Tedeschi's. Here's why the economics work. People want more info, not less. But the BigPubs are laying off reporters as their business model erodes. Weblogs fill the void. DIY. From that premise, interview some analysts and some technology vendors. Have the guts to tell the readers your jobs are truly in jeopardy. Or let them make their own minds up. (Which they do anyway.) A good case in point. John Dvorak takes PC Mag into the blogging world. With both guns blazing. Sure you can make the Cluetrain authors sound like bozos if you're willing to be a bozo yourself. As Dvorak admits in his discussion board for the column "This is something of an attention-getting exercise." Toward what end? Improved flow? That'll work for a while, and then get old. Then what? Will his column cover the technology? He's never seen a blog be critical of another blog? He must not read Scripting News. Net-net, the BigPub's are not handling this very well. Properly dealt with, with an embrace and extend strategy, they can deliver the benefits of amateur journalism to their readers and earn a place in the publishing world of the future. Running incomplete or pissy pieces that demean the idea, only reflects poorly on them, and calls attention to the competition. I'm sure Dvorak remembers how Jim Manzi parsed Windows. He's doing the same thing. Glenn Fleishman: "Another ass-backwards story on blogging."
Tim Jarrett documents an undocumented Manila-RPC call. David Berry uses Radio to support Front Page. I want a way to query DirecTv's listings. Show me all commercial-free movies on channels I subscribe to airing in the next 30 days that were nominated for or won an Academy Award. David Reed endorses my theory of DG's vs weblogs. When was the last time you visited a weblog where none of the links were visited? So we have blog-this and blog-that, basically everything has been blogified except one thing. We don't have an official theme song. How would it go? I have no idea. It turns out my evil twin has an opinion about that. "He's just as proud as he can be of his an-at-o-my. He's goin' give us a peek." He he. Brent Ashley now has BlogChat working in his Manila site. You have to see it to get it. Michael Fraase blogs Joho blogging TED12. MacCentral: Photoshop 7.0 for Mac OS X. Quentin Stafford-Fraser continues integrating Radio w/PHP.
Of course I'm getting a lot of pushback on this. I waited a while before commenting. I think it's important, not a small thing. I'm sure there's a lot of discussion about this inside Google, if not, there should be. In any case, it's my opinion, and it's OK to disagree. You may be surprised that I have an opinion about this, and surprise is good, otherwise the world would be flat and hohum. Mark Paschal has a suite of tools for Radio 8 called "Kit." Julian Bond: "I'm still amazed by the clarity, precision and elegance of the early RFCs. They feel like polished and cut diamonds that have had everything extraneous stripped away. Just enough to get the job done and no more. I think we could do worse than go back and review the RFC process and style and apply it to the current efforts." 8/22/95: "Once you understand the platform concept, you now have all the concepts you need to understand the Internet. It's just a system for inventing new platforms. You could call the Internet a meta-platform, or a platform machine, because it contains all the collaboration tools a platform proponent needs to define and deploy new platforms. Got an idea that no one has thought of yet? Put out a RFC paper. Boom. It's a platform!" This editor's note by the NY Times shows how seriously they take integrity. One of their contributing writers wrote a fictional piece presented as factual, breaking Rule 2, he knowingly said something that was not true. The Times says they did not break rule 2, because they trusted the writer, and fact-checking was difficult given the subject matter. They said something that wasn't true, but they didn't know. But when they found out they fired the author. "The Times's policies prohibit falsifying a news account or using fictional devices in factual material. Mr. Finkel has been under contract to the magazine as a contributing writer, but the editors have informed him that he will not receive further assignments." I wonder if the Times' policies are on the Web, and if the policies for the magazine are different from other parts of the publication.
National Post: "On Sept. 11, however, there was no appetite for debating the merits of Web scripting tools, nor for discussion of Microsoft's questionable business practices. Instead, Winer posted news updates, first-person reports from the streets of New York and links to articles about everything from the history of the World Trade Center to a discussion of the knives the terrorists used." Scripting News archive for 9/11/01. Blogging John blogging me in July 2000. 802.11b News: "Wireless network advocate and writer Rob Flickenger took a spill from two stories up while installing some 802.11b equipment. He was immediately taken to a hospital and operated on for internal injuries, but is now in stable condition and is expected to be released in a week."
Steven Garrity has an essay on the state of the Web, and uses my content base as an example, but it's much worse than it appears. I put markup in every day's Scripting News, and in the all the docs we write at UserLand. In this way we're no different from anyone else. Other than that, I want to let Garrity's essay stand alone. He asks some good questions, dives into the history (which is central), and confronts head-on the migration question. A well-written thoughtful essay, well worth a read. Brent Ashley: BlogChat 1.0. Jake's Brainpan: "Here's a new little lick for all you Radio people: You can now get a counter for the number of comments people have posted, in response to your weblog posts." Fredrik Lundh: "This is a simple XML-RPC echo service. If called with a single argument, it returns that argument as is. If called with multiple arguments, it returns all arguments as an array." Follow-up on yesterday's note about standards-compliance at the websites of W3C members. Mark Bernstein: Effectively Bad Writing. "She's got the voice of a former athlete who's having a good time, a good drink, and enjoying The Game with some people who have been there, too." Morning coffee notes To members of the press, it makes no sense to cast our recent discussion of CSS as a battle. It's not a battle. If I were anti-CSS (as if that made any sense) I would say nothing. How much CSS has been deployed because of this discussion? Lots. Even more important there's been lots of learning. When an issue is exposed esp one as murky as CSS, there's an opportunity to air various positions, and people can make up their own minds. I'm still trying to understand. I never go for the sit down and shut up argument, as presented by Scott Andrew. Maybe another side-benefit is that people will sharpen their debating and evangelism skills. Maybe they'll also learn how installed bases work. Also, imho, the Web is the DIY environment. Please, no high priests lecturing from the mountain. BTW, don't overlook Matt Bridges comments, linked to yesterday. I think he nailed it. We're looking at a Don's Amazing Puzzle type situation, I think most people aren't looking for victory, because if they were they'd see that they had already won. Why fart around with the relatively complex job of converting all those old minds to do it the way you want them to. Hard job. Rolling a big rock up a big hill. But there's already so much support for various XML formats. Every Radio weblog, for example, is available both in HTML and in XML. Render it any way you want. Let's party down. Totally Semantic Web type stuff. If you've been waiting for nirvana, wait no more. And it's even worse than it appears, check this out. Scripting News is available in OPML, which is a very fine format (I designed it myself), no rendering information whatsoever, just content. Very accessible. Another party waiting to happen. This is the bait our designer friends refuse to take. Everything has to come from the W3C (infidels) through the "browser vendors" (mostly Microsoft), otherwise they aren't "standards." That's a big bug. Rick Ross at the Java Lobby is thinking about getting lots of Java weblogs going, and of course I think this is a great idea. Just skimming the thread, it's clear that some of the people there don't understand why weblogs are superior to discussion groups. Briefly, DGs are like mail lists. All it takes is one stinker to grind the whole thing to a halt. If everyone has their own weblog, people can flame all they want in their own space, but mostly they just attract other losers. And people are less likely to whine in their own lonely space. It's got their name on it (unless they do it anonymously which is even more boring, probably just a competitor without the guts to say so), and it reflects poorly on them, more than it does on the people they're complaining about.
Wired: "In a stunning turnaround, a district court judge ruled Friday that the five major record labels must prove they own thousands of music copyrights. And prove those copyrights weren't used to monopolize and stifle the distribution of digital music."
Earlier today I downloaded and installed Music City from Morpheus. John Robb has been telling me about them. Over 60 million users. Bigger than Napster at its peak. We're going to learn more about what they're doing, what protocols they use, perhaps find a way to connect up with our software. We got a nice mention on TechTV's ScreenSavers show, and there are lots of new Radio 8 users tonight. Shane McChesney: "I agree wholeheartedly with Miguel." Arthur O Sulzberger: "While Internet traffic goes up, people still love newspapers." Matt Bridges: "XML is the holy grail in separation of style from content." Oliver Wrede: "This simple Plug-In installs XML-RPC handlers to post news items to a Manila site and retrieve a department list of that site." Macrobyte: "Formz is a set of UserTalk scripts for creating, managing, and rendering HTML forms." I'll be offline till about 3PM today. Going to move some servers around. Should be fun. Morning coffee notes No coffee yet. The first thing pre-coffee notes are becoming a tradtition. First story of the day. I go to Zeldman, find a new List Apart article that's going to teach us how to write a weblog. Click on the link. Read the first screen. There's no scrollbar. The article is in some kind of a frame. I can't figure out for the life of me how to get past the first screen. I'm using IE6 on Windows. Helllp. I need help. (Screen shot.) Postscript: It's a known bug in IE6. One reader said "Dave you're going to love this." I suppose in a way I do feel vindicated. It's always bothered me that the standards crowd is depending on the good intentions of Microsoft. It's also bothered me that they're so willing to kick MS's competitors in the butt. If I were Omni I'd be pretty pissed off. Yesterday Robert Occhialini said we need another browser that we can love, not just Microsoft's. Ideally we should be able to love a dozen browsers. Not that that would ever get MS to love the Web, I don't think it's in their genes. Hey, I was able to read the article by viewing source. Not a pretty sight, but it works. Most of what Mahoney says is OK, but a tiny bit of pushback. Saying someone is an amateur doesn't mean they're inexperienced or the work is low quality. It simply means they don't do it for pay. A long time ago Olympic atheletes had to be amateurs. It was considered a higher calling, people who do something just to be excellent, not to make money. Pros inherit conflicts of interest from the people who pay them. Oy people might think I don't like Zeldman, but I do I do. Today he points to this article on the state of validation among the W3C members. A demonstrable fact, most of their sites don't validate. Given this fact you could come to a conclusion about the intentions of the members of the W3C. Or, you could come to a different conclusion. For 10 points, give me an alternate theory on why these sites don't validate. One year ago today. "People stare at me in disbelief when I say that there will be lots of Dot-Nets." An easy request I ask that no one flame anyone else in my name. I don't like being flamed. I've been the target of coordinated flaming in the past, it's humiliating, frustrating, enervating, unfair, etc etc. If I've inspired zealotry I've failed. I hope to be part of a network of thinkers and do-ers, not people who complain powerlessly at people who have only asked questions and said what they think. It's anti-Web imho to use email to try to manipulate people into speaking for you. The Web is open to your opinion too, but you are not helping the Web if you try to shut other people up.
I'm working for Frank McPherson. He asks for control over the size of the text in the viewFavoriteWeblogs macro that I released last night, so tonight I'm adding that feature. It's relaxing light work. I need some of that. Too much heavy lifting the last couple of weeks. So here's the demo. How does it work? The macro now takes two optional parameters, called pretext and posttext, they both default to the empty string. If you specify them (example), the pretext value is inserted before each item and time, and the posttext value is inserted after. To get the new version, update Radio.root. It scares me when Microsoft runs articles entitled "The Death of the Browser?" Why does it scare me? Because if Bill Gates woke up one morning and decided to kill the browser, he could do it. He could even do it slowly so no one notices. The much anticipated Comments feature for Radio 8 rolled out last night. BTW, any Manila site can host comments. So if you run a Manila site, you can have a community of Radio 8 bloggers flowing comments through your DG. You just have to turn the feature on. Shifted Librarian: How to use YACCS with Radio. Status-Q: "A bit more hacking, and the comments are now handled on my server by a PHP script and stored in a MySQL database. Congrats to Userland for coming up with such a simple scheme." Key point, the way we do comments in Radio does not require you use Manila on the back end. BTW, you can see many of the comments for the day, on this page. It's the default Manila site for Radio comments, and you can see that a lot of people are using the default. A bit of late afternoon philosophy. If a person asks "Why is the sky blue?" it does not follow that they want the sky to be some color other than blue. It could be that they do in fact want it to be some other color. But by asking the question they have not given you any information about that. Even less information is transmitted by this question: "What color is the sky?" If you believe it's blue, you can say "I believe the sky is blue." Paul Prescod: "Most people really do not have any understanding what SOAP is." I agree. Radio Bump: "We need another browser to get at least 30% market share very badly." I agree. Adam Curry: "Its brain-training." Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for the pointer to Zen Stories. I just read one. Very relaxing! eVectors has a new Radio tool called rssDistiller. "With rssDistiller you can extract rss feeds from most regular web pages."
Nick Denton: "I have a new theory: the west coast is the home of weblogs because people in New York have a real city to enjoy, and real newspapers for which to write, and there's no damn time to opine for free." I don't get it. He's blogging from NY, for free, opining. What? MSNBC: "Less than a week after its blockbuster debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange, online payment firm PayPal has been hit with a class-action suit charging it with improperly administering users accounts and poor customer service." Scott Girard: "If you have kids, you probably know about GoGurt." Blogging Dane blog David blogging me blogging Doc blogging Jacob blogging lots of other bloggers. Daniel Berlinger posts a mini-review of Six Degrees. On this day four years ago Jeremie Miller put up an XML parser in a Web page. It's still there. He went on to design Jabber, based on more low-tech XML goodness. Russ Lipton: "Software vendors aren't omniscient." Amen! Rob Fahrni: "Hey Dave, Zeldman's personal size still uses tables for layout! I think he's adopted Dogma 2000 for his personal stuff and uses his bag of tricks for paid gigs." Thanks to CamWorld for the link to this Walmart computer, $399, with no operating system. Screen shot. Morning coffee notes Good morning and welcome to Scripting News. I will be your guide today to many wonderful things on the World Wide Web. First note. Looks like CSS beat out Dogma 2000 in yesterday's survey. Maybe I should phrase it another way. If you had to choose between a plain text weblog that had something to say and one that used all the latest and greatest technology but had nothing to say, which way would you go? Another thing -- I was going to make an offer to Zeldman -- I'll convert Scripting News to CSS if he'd use Radio (or some other inexpensive CMS) to edit his weblog. We waste a lot of time looking up at Microsoft and saying how they fuck us over, but we don't use each others stuff. If Zeldman used ours and hit a deal-stopper bug, do you think we'd fix the bug more quickly than our friends up north? Something to think about. Instead, his strategy increases our reliance on Microsoft. Sorry, that's not where I want to go today (or tomorrow). BTW, Microsoft guys don't like the "stuff us in a locked trunk" metaphor. But get this, we are right now stuffed in their locked trunk, the damned Web browser, although we're mostly in denial on it. Did they ever ask us, the users and developers of the Web, if we wanted them to kill Netscape? (Or to be fair, to help Netscape to an early demise?) Had they run a survey, do you think we would have said "Oh sure go ahead and take control of the Web, we all want to be MS developers, sure." Uhhh, no. I don't think so. And speaking of fairness, why exactly should we be so fair with MS. Do they play fair with us? Ask Jim Allchin to tell you his vision for the Internet. I bet it's not a pretty picture. Does he play fair? Hmmmm.
Frank McPherson gave me an idea for a new macro for Radio. If you use the Weblogs.Com interface, we know what your favorite weblogs are, and we know when they updated. So why not have an easy way to include that in your home page template? That's what this macro does. Demo. Call the macro this way: <%radio.macros.viewFavoriteWeblogs ()%>. That's all there is to it. Paul Boutin wonders if Dig-It (get it?) is a hoax. Amazon is auctioning three Segways. Branscum: "PR is awfully helpful to companies trolling for investors, I am told." A downside to CSS I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. (And it may be a bug in MSIE.) When I visit Jonathon Delacour's site, for a few seconds, this is what I see. The formatting is applied, and then I see this. The delay is long enough that I start reading before the makeup appears. I lose my train of thought, and start reading again. Blue Robot: "Just one LINK element or SCRIPT element inside a document's HEAD element will prevent a flash of unstyled content."
Survey: "If you had to choose between the philosophy of CSS or the philosophy of Dogma 2000, which would you choose?" Patrick Berry: "CSS is even more for the writer than the reader."
At the same time, we're back on track with Google on the XML stuff. Should be pretty interesting. Can't say more at this time. BTW, in case you wanted to know, Doc is the number two Doc on Google. I'm the number two Dave, and try as hard as I can, I no longer own John Doerr. But I never give up! DHRB has comments now, so if you want to flame me there's never been a better time. Jean-Louis Gassee tours the Bay Area, en francais. 7/20/99: "Once a long time ago he asked me in his French way if I was a pimp or a whore. I had trouble answering, but when I turned the question back at him, without hesitation he said he was a pimp."
Web Services will surely die a slow death in the industry trades (it never really had much life there). But there's one light in the doom and gloom -- InfoWorld. Re-read Steve Gillmor's last column and consider what the world must look like through Microsoft-colored glasses.
Another company that is raising interesting questions is Avantgo. I've gotten a few emails with pointers to a new policy of charging information providers to flow content through Avantgo's content management system. To be honest, since I'm not a palmtop user, I'm not sure what Avantgo's system does. We publish a version of Scripting News that's suitable for reading on palmtops. It's not economically feasible for us to pay to have it distributed, so if we are presented with a bill we'll probably decline. But that may be up to our readers. Is there economic value in the content we create? Avantgo seems to be betting that there is. I can't keep up with Russ Lipton, he's writing so much about our software. This morning he has a piece called UserLand Philosophy 102, and of course Russ links to 101 from the top of 102. I think Russ understands our philsophy, if not all the tactics. It would be interesting to write other people's philsophies and see how close you get. One year ago today, Eric Raymond wrote of XML-RPC: "It's deliberately minimalist but nevertheless quite powerful."
Jon discovers an important feature of Internet 3.0. Real-time edits preserved for perpetuity. BTW, for everyone who's afraid to look bad on the Internet, I recommend Dogma 2000, the cure for all ills. "The words in your brain are not written in a correct way." Amen! Meryl Evans: "The CSS test files help you destruct a Web site, whether it be for finding leftover font tags or for seeing how a Web site has been constructed." Fox News has a weblog. Jim Roepcke is grappling with a conceptual issue relating to upstreaming. Paul Andrews: "The land of blogs is really the best and brightest Britney-free zone you can find." Lots of cats. I just did some digging and came across a very interesting number. One of our Frontier servers has taken over 37 million hits. The Radio community server, a relatively new machine, also running Frontier, has taken 11 million. Here's a site that, more or less, conforms to Dogma 2000. It's very nice, colorful, pictures of NY's ChinaTown. Lots of little imperfections, make it that much more genuine. Meanwhile Be has become a lawsuit. Rob Fahrni asks why they don't sue Apple. Good question. Slashdot says "Today Be employs a single person in a tiny office in Mtn View." A dispassionate tutorial on CSS from Apple, nicely done. Mindpixel: "New research by economists at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford in the UK has provided surprising insight into just how much people hate a winner."
Limited Pie is a weblog on markets, the economy, and trading. Nice pic of Alan Greenspan in dress with pie. Jumpgate Alwin goes CSS. Nice! 12:03PM: SH4 outage cleared. No data loss. Praise Murphy! Greg Hanek dug up this old MORE ad from MacWorld 1987. Nice lookin redesign over at Evhead. Blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging about blogs. This reminds me of the watching them watching us watching them watching us stuff we were doing in 2000. Pet peeve of the day. Someone sends an email saying you have a bad attitude because you never respond to emails. So I respond saying something pithy and original, and it bounces, and then I remember it did that the last time I responded to his complaint, and the time before that too. Andy Sylvester updates his Radio UserLand directory. Farhad Manjoo, the author of yesterday's Wired News piece about weblogs, responds to my comments about the story. NY Times: "The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said." Signs of life at Yahoo Yahoo is running a survey for people who use YahooGroups, like me. They must be getting pounded, the response of the survey is very slow. Basic feedback, I don't care about winning $1000. I only care about messages and archives, we never use files, chat, polls, photo galleries, etc. We use their service to tie together communities of developers working on apps and standards, and to support our customers. We chose YahooGroups (when it was eGroups) because their service was so fast and easy to set up. Yes, I would like to get rid of the ads, esp on archive pages, because they interfere with the readability of the pages. But most important I'd like to get more bandwidth. The service used to be very fast. Now it's very slow. I'd pay to get more hardware on their end so they could serve us more quickly. Lawrence works at UserLand I got a few emails from people who believe that I had not completely obscured the identity of the person at Google who sent me the email yesterday. I understand the confusion, but I did not reveal the person's name. Lawrence Lee, who received the email on our webmaster account, forwarded the email to me. Lawrence works at UserLand, not Google. BTW, yesterday I had a talk with my team, showing them the Google email. I said, if we're lucky someday we will grow large enough to employ people like this. We must make sure that when that happens, we remain accessible to people outside the company, so we can continue to grow. SH4 outage We have an outage on one of our servers, 64.75.32.135, also known as Subhonker4 or SH4. It's mostly used for hosting free Manila sites. One of its databases is damaged, an important one. Another set of other problems keep us from being able to access the backup, so we don't know if the backup is good. We've put in a lot of hours trying to get it back up, but it's clear it's going to take a bunch more. As far as we know, the content of the websites is not at risk. The problem is with config.root, which tells Frontier, among other things, how to map domains to websites.
New pref: Only upstream after publish. Designed for people with slower CPUs who want to use Radio. I got a response from Google about my inquiry to develop to their XML interface. I will be sure to send them a *detailed* proposal. After hell freezes over. Evan Williams: "It's hard to believe there are people at Google who don't get the web."
Jim Roepcke did an upstream driver for Conversant. Nice work Jim and thanks for the kind words about the docs. Bryan Bell started a CSS Themes discussion group.
KPIX: "The manager of an Albertson's in Half Moon Bay told Channel 5 that a local man in his late 50s came in Monday morning with his two daughters to validate the ticket." Dann Sheridan has another miracle, a real-time event viewer for | |||||||||||||||||||||||
