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Permanent link to archive for Monday, January 21, 2002. Monday, January 21, 2002

A new Bryan Bell theme for Radio 8. "Adult Contemporary." 

New feature: Language support for main RSS feed

New feature: Weblogs.Com notification for categories

The hits keep on coming. We have a new RSS feed for all the updates to Radio.root. You can subscribe to it in the News Aggregator and know within the hour if your favorite bug has been fixed or pet feature has been added. This feed is online now and reflects the latest updates. 

Mark Paschal: Stapler 1.7.0 is a Radio 8 tool that "creates web syndication feeds from web sites. These feeds can be used with Radio UserLand's News Aggregator, or other XML syndication software. Flexible scripts for scraping with CSS-like selectors and regular expressions are included as well as several special purpose scrapers, but Stapler is expandable with your own scraping scripts written in Radio's UserTalk language." 

We're working on the next feature for Radio 8, a browser page you can go to do get the latest updates. Now I have to write the text on that page. "Click on Update Now, below, to get the latest features and fixes for Radio UserLand." Short and sweet. 

O'Reilly: How the Wayback Machine Works

Paul Boutin has Bill Gates's memo on security. 

Fairvue: "The posting of the Bloggie finalists has been delayed by a few days." 

Greg Smith is exploring FileMaker and Radio. 

Another IBM SOAP guy having fun with a Radio weblog. 

Note that we've made a lot of progress in the battle against complexity in Web Services. These days the advocates of WSDL say they are optional, no problem if they're not there, either way is OK, we're easy to please. A few short months ago they were saying "Our way or the highway," basically. Here's a very likely fact. WSDL is a delay tactic to keep the rest of us confused until Microsoft is ready to dominate the market. After reading the transcripts of the antitrust trial would you be surprised if this theory turned out to be correct? After all it is very confusing, even some of the IDL advocates seem to think so. The point I made earlier is that we didn't need them to bootstrap the Blogger API, and none of the developers using the API seem to miss them, so the assertion that they're part of the bootstrap doesn't make it with me. Do you care to know my philosophy? If so, read this piece. "I believe XML formats should be designed as end-user software is designed. Hack at the details, make every feature justify itself, reduce every three-step process to one if you can. Do it over and over, and then work on the top level. Then and only then does it get simple enough for ordinary people to use. I'm like Steve Jobs on this. I think when you lift the hood you should see a beautifully designed machine that invites you to understand and then use it." 

InfoWorld: "During its annual gathering of partners and customers at Lotusphere in Orlando, Fla., in a couple of weeks, Lotus Software plans to further its Web services strategy with tighter links between Domino and WebSphere and to move to embed collaboration components in other applications." Support the Blogger API, then Notes will work with Radio 8. Now of course I know they'll never do it, but what a trip if they did. 

Kevin Altis: "Many people, especially people using Java and C++, are under the mistaken impression that Python is not good for building real apps. For the most part, I think that is simply wrong." I totally agree. I've written system software in C. These days I write in Frontier. No problem. Today's machines are fast. Scripting environments better leverage my time. 

Dan Gillmor: "Sometimes I think the technology industry's attitude toward product quality goes roughly like this: ''If you knew how hard this is to do, you'd be thrilled that it ever works.'" 

Michael Jardeen: "MS is all about protecting revenue sources and expanding markets." 

Here we go. Some Mozilla guys have it talking the Blogger API. Very interesting. See how mind bombs work. Sometimes they take a few months to reach critical mass. What's cool about this is if people who really work on the core of Mozilla start running weblogs and get into wizzy editing. Then they'll know what tweaks to do to make it really smooth. Someday all our software will link up and then disappear into the infrastructure. Whoosh. What was that? A new layer of the Internet blinking into existence. (And of course it's just like every other layer there ever was, and like none of them too.) 

BTW, here's my commitment to interop. We will stop using the <font> tag in our script-generated HTML code. We will use CSS. We will make the news page fast, and the home page. That our HTML doesn't validate is merely some sawdust left on the floor after opening day. Sometimes there's still some construction to do after opening a new ballpark. 

Tim Jarrett: Manila Envelope 1.0.1

Jeffrey Baker sent a screen shot of Mozilla's wizzy editor. 

I'm really enjoying Sam Ruby's weblog. It's great to see one of our friends from SOAP-land use this stuff. At some point I'm going to tell Sam that the software he's using is also a SOAP 1.1 client and server. Shhh. Don't spoil the surprise.  

Speaking of SOAP, and WSDL, here's something to think about. Look at the Blogger API. No IDL. How did it work? It's very broadly deployed and quite useful. It's gotten a lot of Web people excited about XML-RPC. No one has ever, as far as I know, asked for an IDL. Why? 

BTW, it may be foolish of me to think that Web Services are for Web People, but well, I do. 

I forgot to thank Cobalt for the Qube on the 8.0 Credits page. 

Pet peeve: People who flame in public about not being thanked on the Credits page. It's a self-contained story. Be gracious and grace will find a way to you. Peace and love. 

Last year on this day: "A software guy who puts up gates that keep people out doesn't really understand software, imho. Software is about communication and sharing and working together. At least if you use computers, you'd better hope so." 

NY Times: "Now, Amazon.com, once the champion the strategy of 'get big fast,' has learned how to become small." 

Jonathon Delacour would like to pay for Radio support. Thanks for the thoughtful comments. We're going to discuss it inside the company.  

Scott Loftesness asks about searching on Radio weblogs. He's right, we don't want to run a centralized search engine. These days we use Google to search our own sites. It's a better search engine than ours. We certainly can provide a search page for you to look up stuff on your own site.  

     

Last update: Monday, January 21, 2002 at 9:58 PM Eastern.

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