If you notice any strange behaviour, please let me know:

Thanks.

Hey, Marc Canter got linked on the New York Times. Since his blog is sitting on one of my servers here, I'm watching the logfiles quickly scrolling by. Congrats!

iFrames Tutorial. Here's a good tutorial on iFrames or "inline frames" (which do look increasingly interesting since they are at least bookmarkable). [ Go ] [The FuzzyBlog!]

Scott has an interesting link on iframes today.

Just a little experiment with Marc Barrot's activeRenderer and iframe: check it out (it might take a while to load...)

liveTopics in RSS2.0.

Is this the first valid RSS feed with topic metadata?

Today I've finished the experimental RSS generator for Radio that exports the associated liveTopics with each post in the RSS feed.  At the moment topics are contained in a "liveTopics" XML namespace.

This will enable a smart aggregator to use the topic's for filtering & combining feeds together.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

This is where it gets interesting, very interesting. It's going to be the beginning of a new generation of knowledge management tools.

No later than yesterday morning I was discussing on the phone with Simone about how we could create xml-based backups for ideaTools sites. The idea was creating directories on the server for each data structure and store xml files there, then create one of more indexes that would allow the whole site to be rebuilt or imported into a different CMS.

A few hours later I was reading what UserLand is doing with their "blog browsers format": just perfect!

Our challange is that we are not managing only weblogs with IdeaTools, but also sites containing discussion groups, events, products in e-commerce catalogs, stories, shopping baskets, users' profiles and other kind of data.

The good news is that thanks to RSS 2.0, we can quite easily create our own namespace and manage all kind of data we store in our sites.

To create site indexes (meaning files describing the whole structure of a site) we are already using opml outlines, which are just perfect to describe where each story is published in a complex web site (for example, this is the opml file of this site).

From here, I wonder how much will it take to create specialized browsers for sites that are different from weblogs....

This article on the SF Chronicle tells the story of Frank Garza, whom I met during his Italian adventure and who introduced me (again) to Marc Canter (read the story on his blog), who triggered the domino effect that lead me here today.

So... not counting the fact that in that occasion we worked for almost a whole year taking very little money, I guess that I should be grateful to Frank .

Apple's New Net-Based Apps

Apple's latest Operating System, Mac OS X 10.2 (a.k.a. Jaguar), offers a pretty compelling example of what Internet-assisted applications are likely to look like in the next generation. Some of the applications in Jaguar [~] iCal, iSync, and Sherlock [~] use the Internet to produce highly useable and useful applications in very clever ways. Apple has also developed a low-level set of APIs that allow developers to tap into Web services from whichever development environment they use in Mac OS X, whether it be AppleScript, Cocoa, Carbon, or Java.[webmonkey]

This is why I think that Apple is getting it.

Off to Italy.

I'm off to Trieste today for a flying visit with Paolo.  It's at times like these that I really wish English schools made an attempt at teaching foreign languages (or was I just not paying attention?).  Anyway, looking forward to it!

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

I guess this is a way for Matt to make sure sure that I'll pick him up at the airport. I'd better go now

Kevin Werbach: "One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam." [via Scripting News]

Hmmm... given that quite more than half of the messages that I receive are spam, there must be a lot of people luckier than me. The good news is that new spam filtering systems are automagically taking care of about 90% of spam messages that I receive.

Amazon will be selling Segways in March 2003. [Scripting News]

When they announced the gadget there was a lot of people who could spend $5,000 on this toy. Now there are far less. Hopefully there will be more by March 2003.

pukka: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. pukka [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

We should start writing pukka apps .

Very nice little app...

Software Survivors Fend Off Microsoft. Database FileMaker, digital-imaging program Photoshop and accounting-software leader Quicken have managed to stay independent and develop markets amid direct or indirect competition from Microsoft. (Seattle Times via MyAppleMenu) [Macintosh News]

Even if FileMaker has been under Apple's control for some time, this is something that has not happened in Windowsland, uh?

A couple of days ago we opened the new version of this e-commerce web site and while we were looking at the orders management back-end we realized that it would have been cool to distribute notifications about new orders via an RSS feed (together with the regular e-mail messages). It didn't take much to implement with the IdeaTools framework (rss feeds are rendered trough our xsl system).

There are a couple of things to consider about this solution:

• The feed has to be password protected, but the only authentication that aggregators can manage is basic authentication, with username and password included in the feed's url. It's relatively simple to do with Frontier or any other web server;
• A nice thing I found out about the Aggregator in Radio is that it does not include password protected feeds in the mySubscriptions.opml public file (thanks UL);
• What we are doing at this level is just plain notification, meaning that we're just publishing some basic data about the order to be rendered in the aggregator, the next step is going to be defining a namespace for the orders and using this feed to interface to the accounting system.

Briefly, this is a client tool as you note, that is designed to work with CMS systems not replace them. For now though the only file transfer mechanism is FTP. The product is extensible though as it is built on the DMX codebase. I think more details on that will come out in time.

Great!

Meanwhile I downloaded and installed the beta and it really looks good. Time to find out more about the DMX codebase!

Macromedia has just announced Contribute, which is not only a web editor "for the rest of us", but especially a tool that allows to separate the designers' from the content amangers' work.

Now, this is what we've been trying to do for the last four years with our technology, also if we've been doing this using a different approach, since what we have developed is a server application, while Macromedia's new tool runs on users' PCs.

I think this is great news for us (and for other content management system vendors) for the following reasons:

• While we were concentrating on the server side of running a website, our editing tools were somehow limited by the fact that we were running our UIs in a browser, which has limitations that Contribute will defintely not have;
• Macromedia has a very good experience on working on html code without making your web pages explode thanks to their Dreamweaver code;
• The fact that Macromedia is entering this market is good news, it will probably help making it "a market".

Am I scared from this?

Nope, a content management system goes much further than updating contents, it allows you, for example, to dynamically create pages that adapt to specific visitors, to manage e-commerce transactions, to render contents into many different forms, so I don't see Contribute strictly as competition for us.

To the contrary, I think that having a high-quality editing tool sitting on our users' desktop can be a huge advantage for us, provided that we can tie into this power. So far I've only looked at Contribute web tour and they say that it can interact with any server via ftp. Well, is there going to be XML-RPC or SOAP support? Is there going to be a way to implement them? If the answer to one of these questions is yes, it's going to be a lot of fun (and business).

My PowerBook is almost two years old, and the new ones are twice as fast, can brun DVDs, have larger hard disks and a bunch of other cool features. Yes, but... why do I need more power?

I mean, ten years ago I used my primary computer to create graphics for videos, animations, 3d modelling and rendering, using a Macintosh II fx (boy... do you remember? that was a fast machine).

Ten years later what I'm doing with my PowerBook is mostly:

• email
• web surfing
• running Microsoft Office
• running Radio
• chatting
• using BBEdit
• managing appointments and addresses

In other words, while 10 years ago I was doing fairly complex calculations, today I'm basically moving around relatively small text files, something that does not sound to be incredibly demanding, so why do I need to upgrade? Simply because this machine feels slow doing these tasks. There must be something wrong somewhere...

Oh, well, I want one of those new PowerBooks anyway!

With the new Mail-From-Aggregator feature, this morning I found all my news in my email at home (I don't usually take my powerbook with me every night). It's really quite cool to be able to read my feeds in Mail.app, they get rendered perfectly.

The only problem has been that as I got to my desk at the office I had nothing new to read .

Apple adds DVD burner to PowerBook. The company updates its entire portable line, most notably adding its first PowerBook capable of burning DVDs. [CNET News.com]

This is what all rumors sites yesterday were saying that would have not have happened.

Today I wrote some notes about the architecture.

XML-RPC. Thanks to Paul Scott Murphy, ZOË now has a XML-RPC interface. Thanks Paul!

Check out the 0.2.7 release and Paul's demo (written in Python). Both available for download. [zoe]

This is getting interesting....

I have decided that it was time to seriously start describing the content management system that we have developed to the rest world. It's true that we have a website, but we have never worked too much on it, and the features that are described there are only a small sub-set of what is available or can be done with this technology.

There's a lot of work to do, and so far I have always avoided even starting it because... well, it looked overwhelming.

Since it probably makes sense to do it a little at a time, and since I usually find time to write for this site, I thought that it was a good idea to start blogging about it. This is why I created this new weblog where I will try, day by day, to describe what we've been doing in the last 4 years.

Today's post is about just a little history.

News.Com: IM compatibility closer to reality. Called the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, the group's instant messaging standard gives Internet users hope of one day being able to send messages to anyone on the Net, no matter what software they are using. [Tomalak's Realm]

Ok, this is what happens every day on my desktop:

• Proteus, a very good multi-protocol IM client, handles my ICQ, MSN and Jabber accounts (ICQ is our company standard)
• Yahoo! Messenger handles my yahoo! account since a few weeks ago something was broken on their servers' side and Proteus crashes if I receive a message from a Yahoo! user.
• I use iChat both with my AIM/.Mac accounts and with Rendezvous, mostly because it's very cool and allows me to easily send files around my LAN.
• Radio is always logged on a Jabber account to manage outlines update notifications.

Now, if somebody could help sorting this whole thing out, it would really be welcomed.