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Permanent link to archive for Saturday, April 27, 2002. Saturday, April 27, 2002

Heads-up: We're doing some maintenance on a static server this evening at 7:30PM Pacific for about 30 minutes. There will be an outage for Radio.Weblogs.Com sites, UserLand mailing lists and Weblogs.Com. You may also notice some broken images on Manila sites hosted by UserLand.  

Back to scripting. I've heard a lot of people say that SOAP was designed to circumvent firewalls. In fact, that wasn't one of the goals for SOAP. We chose HTTP because it was broadly supported in scripting environments, and we wanted the lowest possible barrier to adoption. It was also done with respect, don't reinvent something that already works. You can pick up the trail, starting in the strategies and goals section of the XML-RPC spec. We knew some would say that firewall circumvention was a motive, we talked about it, we used HTTP because it was a good match for what we wanted to do. 

Faisal Jawdat: "With the influx of new 'bloggers' over the course of the past few months, I've created a handy key to help newbies understand what they'll be doing." 

Really nice outline browser by Marc Barrot. 

THINK!Report on the responses to my Sharon Must Go piece posted yesterday. A few predictable name-calling emails saying (I guess) that the only way to solve the problem is to kill Palestinians. I generally don't respond, because being warlike in an email seems kind of contradictory. If you have such a will to die for your cause, go fight and good luck, but email is a tool for people who wish to reason and think. Imho, you can't do violence in email, yet some people persist in trying. Other more thoughful responses ask me to see it from the point of view of an Israeli, and that's fine, we've done a lot of that for a long time, now try to see it from the point of view of an American. Israel is a distributor of American power. If it weren't for the US, we assume, Israel would not exist. It certainly has no hope of peace without help from the US. If I have doubts about exactly what we would be going to war to protect, I imagine a few other Americans do too. I think we've made a big mistake by letting the Israeli point of view dominate the discourse. We are two separate countries.  

A picture named veneziaStatue.gifIt's really cool to see Paolo bloom as a blogger. I visited him a couple of years ago in his home town of Trieste, Italy. He took me to Venezia, and taught me the tiny little bit of Italian I know. He would send me long emails filled with great ideas for what we could do together, but I always wished he would post those on the Web so I could show them to other people. So few in Frontier community knew that there was a thriving developer in Italy of all places. Now that Paolo is blogging, there's a lot more we can do. Today he's thinking about pricing for his products and it's great that he's doing it in the open.  

The New York Times autoblog is proving quite useful. Whenever it updates, it pings Weblogs.Com, so I don't have to go looking anywhere special to see that there's something new. It just updated a few minutes ago at 10:15AM. Now that's weird, because mid Saturday morning on the west coast seems the least likely time for it to update unless there's some news breaking. During the day last week they would post AP reports on news that's happening in real-time, like Gates' testimony in Washington. Today they posted a deep piece on US strategy re Iraq that's dated tomorrow, so it's for the Sunday paper. We get it on the Web long before it appears in print. It's worth reading. Quite an article. And the autoblog idea is proving itself every day. 

BTW, it's just incredible that I get to play with new delivery systems for such excellent content. I still can't believe that the Times trusts me with this stuff. Thanks! 

Howard Greenstein: "Paul McCartney not only looked great, but he sounded amazing. So I decided to take out my Ipaq and capture the concert in 15 second snippets." 

NY Times: "The United States economy is showing signs of life. So why is the stock market still acting the part of the deadbeat?" 

Happy Tutor: "Perhaps Userland could solicit Social Venture Funding. In addition to economic survival and growth, the company seeks to create a true free-market of ideas on the web, in which peers work with peers, or as citizens, rather than as passive recipients of broadcast, mass-cult, copyrighted content. Rather than rich branded messages, or monopolies that lock us all in the trunk of brand-think, Userland creates the infrastructure that lets a thousand flowers bloom, a good democratic (actually Maoist) ideal. Userland sustains the info-commons -- what Dave calls 'the two-way web.'"  

Brian Lenihan: "I smelled like a rotting corpse but nobody said anything. Amazing." 

Lawrence posted three print-friendly versions of Frontier tutorials from 1999. The first tutorial walks through the website framework, the lizard brain that forms the underpinnings of Manila and Radio; the second covers scripting and the third is an appendix.  

Something I've wondered about. "Every screen reader except OutSpoken for Macintosh can handle tables quite adequately, so go ahead and use them." 

Berco Beute wrote his own blogging software using Jini. 

     

Last update: Saturday, April 27, 2002 at 4:57 PM Eastern.

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