On a serious note…
Craig has some links and facts about the death penalty today. It’s also being discussed in this MetaFilter thread.
Even more Blog You
They have now reviewed The Curmudgeon (John), dangerous meta (Garret), Blivet (Hal), Duncan’s Jotter (Duncan) and I really must insist you leave (PattiAnn) as well. (And none of the anchor links seem to work… sigh!)
Heh, they didn’t even realize that Duncan uses Conversant to maintain his blog. To them, anything that looks similar to some Manila blogs, is a Manila blog.
All in all, it seems to me that Tom puts much more work into his reviews than Ed. He can spell better than Ed, seems to be able to click his way around one site more easily, and tends to give a higher rating.
For additional comments, check out the discussion group (for today and tomorrow).
Wie die Zeit vergeht…
Fühlen Sie sich alt? Da kann ich nur sagen: Ja! Ich kenne noch Raider und Treets, und Eis gab’s früher für 50 Pf die Kugel. Allerdings muß ich zugeben, daß ich mich kaum an die Zeit vor Kanzler Kohl und Papst Johannes Paul II erinnern kann… also ist’s vielleicht doch nicht sooo schlimm. 
Link via Bastian.
Academy Awards Nominations
Besides Tiger & Dragon, I’ve seen three of the films that have been nominated: Julia Roberts, nominated as best leading actress in ‘Erin Brockovich’, which has also been nominated for directing, best picture and writing (original); ‘Oh Brother, where Art Thou’, nominated for cinematograpy and writing (adapted); and ‘Space Cowboys’, nominated for sound editing.
Kino
André and I went to the cinema tonight and watched Wo hu zang long, better known as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or just Tiger & Dragon in German(y).
We really enjoyed the film. The story is excellent, the fighting scenes are breathtaking, and the old Chinese clothes and buildings are interesting. We just kept wondering whether large parts of the landscape shootings were done in Death Valley…
I especially liked the scenes in which the main characters seem to run up walls, fly over roofs and through forests, or walk on water. Those reminded me of dreams I had in which I could fly or walk on water. The feeling was just right!
And by the way, Tiger & Dragon has been nominated for the Oscar in ten categories: art direction, cinematography, costume design, directing, film editing, foreign language film, music (score), music (song), best picture, and writing (adapted).
Across Antarctica
Have you been following the Bancroft Arnesen Expedition? Well, the two women made it across the whole continent. They are now on the Ross ice shelf and have only some 800 km left, I think. Read their latest updates here or look at a map of Antarctica to see where they are.
Community News
Hey, Garret started an image gallery!
It seems everyone is going ego-surfing for his/her first name: Duncan, John, aka The Curmudgeon, Al… Anyone else?
Flatrate?
Heise Newsticker: Flatrate von T-Online möglicherweise vor dem Aus. Was? Möglicherweise wird die Flatrate für ISDN eingstellt, die für DSL aber nicht.
Klasse. Wenn’s nach André und mir ginge, hätten wir längst DSL statt der ISDN-Flatrate, aber die Telekomiker kommen mit der Technik nicht nach. Das wird ja immer schöner, wenn der Benutzer jetzt teuer bezahlen soll, daß die Telekom mit DSL-Anschlüssen nicht nachkommen!
Link via Bastian.
Blog you
This morning I received an email from Edward Champion, informing me that my weblog has been reviewed at Blog you. You can find it at http://www.edrants.com/_blogyou/a.html#andrea, but the anchor doesn’t seem to work, so you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom of the page. And they got the name wrong and write about “Andrea’s World”.
Update: They corrected the name. Thanks!
The best part? Tom writes: “Andrea is bilingual […] I’m barely lingual.”
Other than that, there’s not much to say about the review, we have talked about this a couple of days ago.
However, I have a few things to say about their design. They criticize the “drastic limitations of Manila”, but don’t really seem to know a thing about Manila. I don’t know whether they use any software to build their pages, but something seems to keep their anchor links from working, for example on the index page of Blog You. And on that page, the whole text is a link to the page itself. Does that make sense?
And have you noted that many headlines appear at the end of the last line of the previous paragraph, for example here?
our two jovial boys are merely repeating the tired old unfounded rumor about manila that’s circulated around the net for a while. for anyone who has actually spent a reasonable amount of time with it, manila’s a first-class weblogging tool.
they can’t seem to decide whether they want to be a parody or not …
Drastic limitations of Manila???? Alright, the gloves are off now, kids. I’ll give ’em drastic design limitations… *mutter mutter mutter*
Well, within the confines of my own meager talents, of course…
Heh. I’m with you, Al!
I’ve been thinking about a redesign for months now, but I don’t have the time. Well, maybe next year.
It seems that to them, everything with a calendar is a Manila site, ’cause they didn’t even notice that Duncan’s Jotter is managed with Conversant.
[Manila limitations]
I’ve sent an email to Edward Champion and received an answer. He claimed he fixed the problems (wrong name, anchor not working) in two minutes, “more than you can say for Manilla”.
I suggested he should sign up for a Manila site and try it out. Somehow, I have the impression he has used none of the weblog tools – neither Blogger nor Manila, Greymatter, Conversant, Zope, Pitas, whathaveyou.
Anyway, they should not complain about the design of Manila sites when they can’t seem to be able to provide a good and working design themselves. I’m no HTML guru, but I wouldn’t dare to put pages on the web with anchors not working, headlines sticking to the previous paragraphs and the like.
they can’t seem to decide whether they want to be a parody or not…
Right. Maybe they should have thought about a concept before starting this project…
there are drastic limitations in manila. we always hit unnecessary boundaries and sometimes even push them.
however, for example i hate that i cannot change the word Discuss under a so-called news item. a bit more flexibility would certainly help.
about these critics: just cound the number of reviews written during the last two or three days. need i say more?
there are drastic limitations in manila. we always hit unnecessary boundaries and sometimes even push them.
Yes, you’re right. But they aren’t design limitations in the sense those critics mean.
about these critics: just cound the number of reviews written during the last two or three days. need i say more?
No, you don’t. Garret put it this way:
But they aren’t design limitations in the sense those critics mean.
that’s true, but i suppose manila attracts simply a different crow and they don’t care so much about design.
i suppose manila attracts simply a different crow and they don’t care so much about design.
Maybe they don’t care about design, or maybe they don’t have the abilities to create a great design.
The great thing about Manila is that you can start writing without knowing a single thing about HTML. You can use the default theme, or choose one of the others. The best example for that is Sailor Jack, I think. He’s 74 and likely the oldest Manila user. All he knows is how to flip the home page, write something in the little edit window, and push the post button. Voilà !
If you use Blogger, you need your own webspace and need to be able to create web pages – plus, you need to be able to figure out how to make Blogger work and post into the pages. (Okay, this is not strictly true any more because of Blogspot.)
I guess that Manila is a great tool for people who would not be able to create web pages from scratch (and after all, that’s what UserLand says!), and if you know your HTML and have cool desing ideas, it doesn’t matter much if the blogging tool is a little more complicated – they use Greymatter, Blogger or Zope.
BTW, have you Netdyslectics ever thought about using another tool for your blog instead of Manila? Just wondering…
The great thing about Manila is that you can start writing without knowing a single thing about HTML. You can use the default theme, or choose one of the others.
almost same is true for blogger. okay, you need webspace and some ideas about ftp to excess it. but an introduction to these things takes not longer then a manila introduction.
The best example for that is Sailor Jack, I think. He’s 74 and likely the oldest Manila user.
good for schockie :)
All he knows is how to flip the home page, write something in the little edit window, and push the post button. Voilà !
have you ever tried blogger? once the site is up (5 minutes if you know how to or if you get help) it is the same. you go to blogger write some news and press publish. apart from that they have a much better designed interface (usability and looks).
BTW, have you Netdyslectics ever thought about using another tool for your blog instead of Manila? Just wondering…
sure. i could even think of closing our site forever. things are getting boring. neither manila nor weblogs as a medium are getting anywhere at the moment.
we remodelled the behaviour of our site as a challenge. As soon as the current feeling of doing something new starts to wear off we need something different. i know actually more, but i won’t tell you, because the current situation is neither fish nor flesh.
there are drastic limitations in manila.
Yes, there are. Most of them were designed in. Userland was perfectly capable of producing Conversant, but chose not to; they are explicitly targetting simple.
That said, Radio Userland + Manila makes for one hell of a combination… assuming you are interested in pushing content boundaries. XML-RPC makes some awesome things possible, like pushing content (like LinkBack result pages) onto XML-RPC-interfaced websites. You can do things like directly upload something onto to somebodies’ site without dealing with FTP, which has the nasty problem of being the equivalent of handing over the keys to the site to somebody else.
If all you care about is “design” issues to the near-exclusion of content, what are you doing using pre-prepared tools anyhow? All tools will impose a certain order on the resulting web site. If you are truly concerned about design, then leave Manila, Blogger, and everything else alone.
Yeah, it’s hard to make your own tools, but it’s the only way. The best “designed” weblogs tend to be home-grown tools.
Personally, in the race between design and content, I’ll take content every time. iRights oozes that, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of functionality in that site, not much design. I don’t have the skills and I know it (plus any design I could use would technically constrain me too much).
however, for example i hate that i cannot change the word Discuss under a so-called news item. a bit more flexibility would certainly help.
A workaround is to replace it with a picture of whatever you want. It’s documented somewhere, I don’t recall how I did it. Not perfect, no.
That said, Radio Userland + Manila makes for one hell of a combination… assuming you are interested in pushing content boundaries.
yep, but it misses a lot of chances that would be possible if they gave the users more choice to change notions. think about community sites like dsr. its a metafilter-clone i set up on an afternoon. this makes manila superior over other tools. unfortunatley this site has some really nasty interface and unsability bugs, because of this.
xml-rpc is quite nice and handy, but face it: manila seems to be marketed as weblogs tool. xml-rpc empowers manila to do greater things, but its limitation prevent the use for other things.
A workaround is to replace it with a picture of whatever you want. It’s documented somewhere, I don’t recall how I did it. Not perfect, no.
not the discuss-link under new items. i tried a lot of dirty macro tricks and my sites are full with ugly hacks to improve usabilty, but there is no chance to rename this.
Umm, I don’t want to contradict older and wiser heads, but…
Under Prefs, Discussion Groups, go to ”Specify an image tag to link to the discussion group:”
Write in whatever you want to change it to.
See http://viewfromtheheart.editthispage.com
the question, when mentioning ‘limitations’, is really this:
“is there anything you can do in blogger that you *can’t* do in manila?”
name them.
There may be some things that show up in Blogger on a Wintel machine that aren’t there on a Mac. I have a Blogger based ‘blog (ok, I share it as a group ‘blog) and the interface is pretty barebones. I remember being surprised at having to insert my own <P> tags when I thought a simple double carraige return would do the trick (like in Manila).
It may be a richer enviroment on the PC side, but it doesn’t show up on my Mac (neither do any of Manila’s Wintel enhancements, either :-( )
have you ever tried blogger?
Actually, yes, when they opened Blogspot. You’re right, it is easy to use with Blogspot. However, you can’t post pictures there, and they don’t have a discussion group. I know there’s BlogVoices now, but it seems to be very slow, and it’s much simpler than Manila’s discussion group.
I’d say it’s the other way round – there are things you can do in Manila that you can not do with Blogger.
You can post pictures in Manila, but you can’t in Blogger (you have to upload them by hand, and if you use Blogspot (which is free like ETP or ManilaSites, but features an ad on the top of the page!), you still need webspace elsewhere to upload pictures. And BlogVoices is much simpler than the Manila discussion group.
i know, but this only affects the cow skull, but not the word discuss under a news item.
I am not comparing Blogger with Manila. All I am saying is that Manila misses lots of chances out by its buit-in restrictions. I would like to do more things with Manila (thing you could never do with bloger), but I can’t because of these limitations.
really quick (i have to get to a meeting) …
i’m not picking on you, kris. my point is that the blogyou boys don’t know what they’re talking about. everything you can do in blogger, you can do in manila. and more.
when you talk of limitations, you’re talking more about limitations in the advanced features of manila. part of those may be ‘built-in’, but i’d wager quite a few of them can be altered with an intermediate knowledge of the frontier scripting environment. andre, if he has time, can clarify this, surely.
it would be more equitable to throw manila up against greymatter, and then judge limitations.
as for interface, i sell manila solutions to my clients. show a newbie the blogger interface, and the manila interface. there’s no contest. show a person who *cannot program* blogger’s interface and ftp scenario, and you’ll see their eyes roll back in their heads. they can’t set it up. show them manila, and they immediately get juiced, shove you away from the keyboard, and want to do it themselves. 20 minutes, and i’ve got a newbie using manila, albeit in a very basic form.
making ‘geek tools’ doesn’t generate $$. it’s a limited market compared to the general public. manila is a unique tool in that it empowers the newbie, but gives a reasonable amount of depth for the geek. it can’t be all things to all people, and it would be idiotic to try.
[nothing like having a ‘zope dope’ defending manila, huh?]
i’ve written this instead of updating my blog … i hope my readers will forgive me …
my point is that the blogyou boys don’t know what they’re talking about.
Sure. That’s the point.
Let’s quit it here. A discussion about the lacks of manila and the marketing of it has actually nothing to do with the initial topic.
Whilst it’s true that technically Userland would have the skills to develop Conversant, I think the real reason that they didn’t was that such a toll wouldn’t scratch Dave’s personal itch.
If you look at the development of Frontier, Manila, RU, XML-RPC, these are all things in which Dave has a really deep personal stake. Whereas, Conversant has been much more customer/needs driven and IMHO is mush better for it.
Now that Seth has publicly stated – http://support.free-conversant.com/2245 – that Conversant will grow to include an XML-RPC interface amongst other things I am a very happy chappy. RU has a lot going for it too but it’s in such a state of flux that I am taking the stance of ‘wait and see’.
I really like Conversant – to the extent that I pay for my weblog to be hosted there. And for Scotsman that’s a pretty ringing endorsement.
The line between “scracthing a developers itch” and “listening to customers” is a very fine one. I’d lay money (not much), even not knowing the developers of Conversant personally, that Conversant scratches some of their itches too.
Now that Seth has publicly stated – http://support.free-conversant.com/2245 – that Conversant will grow to include an XML-RPC interface amongst other things I am a very happy chappy.
I’m also interested in seeing what will come out of that. I’ve been keeping an eye on it.
RU has a lot going for it too but it’s in such a state of flux that I am taking the stance of ‘wait and see’.
Well, in some ways its in flux, in other ways it’s as stable as can be. It’s still a baby version of Frontier (although not very baby)… if you develop something for it today, it’ll still work tommorow. The things that are in flux are the things Userland is putting on top of it, and I’ve stopped touching those until they are reasonably done :-)
In fact, part of the flux is that RU is Frontier… RU and Frontier really remind me of Zope and Python. From outside of the community, it’s easy to think that Zope === Python, but in reality, Zope is simply built on top of Python. “My Userland On The Desktop” and “Music Playing” and all the other things that RU is being taught to do are built on top of RU, but that’s difficult to market and express to people “outside” the community.
I really like Conversant.
If I hadn’t had so much invested in iRights when I first heard of it, I’d probably be there right now. Actually, it would have burned me later when I ended up using XML-RPC seriously on my site :-) , but I’m sure I could have come up with something else that would have worked. It is a fine product.
Don’t get me wrong I really like RU too although at the moment I’m using the ‘Radio’ part rather than the ‘Userland’ part. The development of things like OPML, etc., are welcome indeed. It’s just that I’ll need it to interface to Conversant before it’ll become an indispensable part of my Web toolkit.
I keep meaning to delve more deeply into the innards of RU – and eventually, Frontier 7 – but at the moment I don’t have the time to act as a beta user.
Cheers,
Duncan
Please notice my example, chelah. No cow skull, just text. Look again.
http://viewfromtheheart.editthispage.com
i’ve seen it, al. it is cool, but it does only work as a substitute of the original cow skull. you cannot replace the word discuss under a news item. check
http://netdyslexia.editthispage.com/
or
http://searchrequests.weblogs.com/
Oh. I didn’t know that the news item feature took that choice away. My bad; sorry.
Is there a Manila programmer in the house?
Let’s get this fixed!