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Permanent link to archive for Tuesday, April 09, 2002. Tuesday, April 09, 2002

A picture named grandpa.gifI don't know if you've seen the Simpson's episode where the town first tears down the whorehouse and then decides to rebuild it. There's a great musical piece at the end of the show where all the main characters (including my favorite, Grandpa) sing a song about the whorehouse and how wonderful it is. Nelson and his two bully cohorts show unusual vulnerability and sing, touchingly, "We didn't even know this place existed." Hearing them sing so beautifully you get the idea that they're going to be regular customers, starting very soon. Anyway.. 

Here's a place I didn't even know existed. Thanks to Jon Udell for pointing to Marc Barrot's excellent developer site. I just read all his archives going back to early March. He's onto something.  

Oh geez John Robb is leaking again!  

Bryce reviews the new design of the WSJ. "I was stunned." 

John Robb had dinner tonight with Adam Green in Boston. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that. So many IQ points at one table. 

New prefs for Manila discussion groups. "You can optionally display the full text of responses to a specified depth, and choose the order in which responses are listed. You can also choose whether pictures, stories, home pages and news items appear in discussion group listings." 

New advanced pref for Radio. "Today we released a set of parts that makes the upstreaming of directory.opml optional, and disabled by default. If you run an application that depends on it, you have to turn it on." 

A heads-up -- we moved the Radio site to a faster server. It may take some time for the DNS change to percolate, in the meantime we've redirected, and the only impact for users who wish to post to the discussion group is that they may need to re-log in. Good news -- the new server is much faster.  

Two new boxes in the right margin on Weblogs.Com, one connecting to Google, and the other to the NY Times. In the Times box, which first appeared yesterday, we show seven random stories from the last 24 hours. When you refresh, you might catch a story in a section you don't subscribe to or normally read. By our count there are over 300 new Times stories every day. The Google box links to the Top 10 hits for the term "weblog" and the Google logo links to a full search. How did we do it? I can't tell you. Now.  

Martin Burns: A Quick and Dirty Blog using Zope

To Markpasc, happy to help get people to look at Stapler.  

Use Perl: "About four months ago there was Phrack article named RPC without borders which describes quite serious security hole in SOAP::Lite module." Postscript: Randy Ray is digging in. "Looking forward to comparing notes with you guys tomorrow." 

Russ Lipton: What is Content Management? "Userland is doing its utmost to package Frontier's content management features in sugar so the medicine goes down easy." 

A picture named shuttle.gifBTW, a heads-up. The next thing on our plate is a release of Frontier that installs as easily as Radio. We've learned a lot about installing Web servers in the two years since we've done a new installer for Frontier. The goal of this release is similar to the one we had for Radio. Five minutes after download you should be entering text into your first Manila site. The core difference between Radio and Frontier: Radio is personal, one weblog per installation. Frontier is for groups. Hundreds of personal weblogs per server. Radio is distributed. Manila is centralized. Zig-zag. 

Another way of looking at it. Manila, which is bundled with Frontier, competes with Movable Type. Radio, at this time, appears to not have any competition (of course it's coming). Blogger, which so far doesn't license its software, is the free site king. Their challenge is to convert free users into paying customers.  

A what-if about search engines. What if one of the leading search engine companies decided to license their technology in a way that allowed communities to determine their own crawling policies. What led me to this idea? A quote at the end of yesterday's NY Times article about Google, from a competitor. "There was a two-year window when Google was the only company focused on building search. No more." Competition is going to open new vistas. The race is on. The big gaping hole in search? All the content on my desktop, and yours. The goal? Easy five minute install, instant results, integrated with all the knowledge of the www. Why do we need to tweak the crawling policies? If search is going to work on local area networks, page rank means nothing unless people have weblogs. A passive crawler won't give people what they want. But if a popular search engine supported the simple Weblogs.Com ping protocol, they could re-index weblogs when they update, making search much more valuable because the currency of the index goes way up. 

SoapWare.Org: Weblogs.Com SOAP 1.1 Interface. As search engines become part of the web services world, this very simple interface will become central to distributed content networks cooperating with search engines, without compromising the integrity of the search engine.  

Masukomi: "Wouldn't it be great if there was an OPML debugger?" 

Doc's father's last words: "Am I still alive?" The answer, which he never heard, was No. Ouch. 

Eric Norlin and Doc are getting interested in Web Services. I wonder if they'll find the revolution

Eric Olsen: "As the volume of blogs has ballooned well into six-figures, the need for links from 'star' blogs has become an absolute requirement to be noticed." 

Patti Smith: "So you want to be a rock and roll star well listen now to what I say. Get yourself an electric guitar and take some time and learn how to play." 

     

Last update: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 at 9:37 PM Eastern.

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