Hey, Dave is placing the order for our new servers. Since they will not only host Scripting.com but also weblogs.com, one of the pillars of the blogosphere, we will all benefit from these new monsters.

Actually I find this move quite interesting. Since its very beginning (and even now) weblogs.com has been hosted by a company, UserLand Software. Since UserLand is working in the blogging business many have perceived weblogs.com as nothing more than a way to promote their brand or have simply given it for granted.

As I understand the server will soon be hosted (and payd for) at Berkman. It seems almost logical that such a no profit service should be controlled by a third no profit party, but we should all be aware that it has always been no profit also for UserLand.

So, whatever will happen of weblogs.com, thank you UserLand.

PS: It looks like I misanderstood the post on scripting.com. Dave will be paying our new servers.

I've been using Panther on my PowerBook since the early developers distributions. Everything I needed was working fine so today I decided to upgrade my other Macs. Bad idea.

There is one application which I had not tested with Panther and is quite important for my job: Vicomsoft InterGate. I use it to share my adsl connection with all computers on my small LAN. It's a good application and I had checked on Vicomsoft site a few days ago: not noticing any significant alert I installed the cool new OS...

...only to find out upon restart that InterGate is not compatible with MacOS X 10.3: all computers can connect except for the one running the routing application (which, btw, is my main computer).

Checking Vicomsoft FAQ I found a note (written yesterday) that warns of this problem.

So, if you are using Vicom InterGate, you'd better wait for an update before upgrading to Panther. I don't know exactly what I will do... reverting to Jaguar is probably going to be a pain. Any idea is welcome.

Update: turns out that the new and improved internet sharing feature of Panther works just fine to share my Internet connection. So everything is back on-line and I don't need InterGate anymore, (InterGate does offer some features not implemented in the basic Internet sharing feature of the OS, but I don't need them much :-)

If you have 10 minutes to invest in reading a good essay, read this one by Diego Doval. [via Scripting.com]

Marc Canter says that we, Mac users, are stuck in a ghetto. The reason should be that some developers support Mac only features (such Safari 1.1 CSS text-shadow property) or write software for the Mac.

Honestly I don't see myself stuck in a ghetto, or maybe this is a very comfortable one.

If I was in a ghetto I would not be able to communicate with the rest of the world. To the contrary the operating system I choose supports a lot of very open standards and environments right out of the box: from Apache to PHP, from XML-RPC to SOAP. Plus a very nice set of built-in applications allows me to manage my daily activities quite well, in a clean, stable and secure environment.

There are things I cannot do on a Mac (for example, something that bugs me in these days is that I cannot use Skype) and there are things that Windows users cannot do on their PC or cannot do as easily as I can on my Mac.

Maybe we are all stuck in our own ghettos, virtual places where we don't have full control of our environment and our liberties.

I don't use a Mac because I'm a Mac zealot as Marc says (I was a Mac zealot, I admit it, sticking with System 7, 8 and 9 for all those years cannot be explained differently), now I use a Mac because I choose to use MacOS X. Unlike Marc and others I've never had any personal problem with Steve Jobs or Apple and I freely choosed to live in this ghetto.

Maybe sooner or later I will move to another ghetto, who knows? Longorn seems promising and I'm curious about tablet PCs (I've never seen one), but today I think that MacOS X is the best solution for my needs.

The real challange is not letting anybody close us in any of these ghettos and throw away the keys.

Text-Shadow in Safari 1.1.

Got Panther? Good. Using Safari? Excellent. Safari 1.1, shipping with OS X 10.3 (and should hopefully be available soon as a free download for 10.2 and under), comes with support for the Text-Shadow property found in CSS2. From what I can tell, Safari is the first - and only - browser to support this property.

So if you've got Safari 1.1, click here for a demonstration. Page uses an inline style sheet, so be sure to view source to see how it's done.

[What Do I Know]

If you are using Safari 1.1 you'll see the nice soft shadow under all dates in this page, all it took was adding:  "text-shadow: dimgray 0px 3px 5px;"  to  the H2 entry of my css file (first value is the shadow color, second value horizontal shift, third vertical shift, fourth shadow's size).

Have I ever told you how much I like soft shadows? :-)

A List Apart is back with a new design, lots of feeds and some beautiful CSS tabs.

New design, new logo and new products on the SocialText site.

I have just downloaded and installed the last release of Mozilla Firebird. I have also installed the Web Developer extension. So far it looks like I might have found my new browser.

PS: I have just discovered that typing a name in the address bar and hitting return gets you to the Google's "I'm feeling lucky" result. Basically I can type my friends names instead of an url to get to their weblogs :-)

Dave - RFC:myHierarchicSubscriptions.opml

Quite interesting. I have tried doing a myHierarchicPublicFeeds.opml file for our k-collector server: here. If you have Radio try selecting "Open Url" from the file menu and pasting the url of the OPML flie. Cool, isn't it?

Thanks to BlogStreet new RSS 2 Mobile service, now I can read rss feeds on my wap cellphone. Very cool!

Find here Dave's RFC, Q&A and a question.

Currently we are using OPML to distribute topics (OPML file) to users of the application we are developing, K-collector. Not sure about mySubscriptions, but if myPublicFeeds.opml would support hierarchies we could publish an opml index of all topics managed on our servers with links to topics' rss feeds organized by classification (Who, What, Where, When, etc.). It would make a lot of sense, I like this idea.

Consider it implemented as soon / if as the specs are defined.

Post babes, get flow. :-)

Cristian Vidmar has just released a new cool Radio Theme.

For the third year in a row the Italian internet portal Clarence is going to publish a calendar with pictures of girls submitted (so we are told) by the same girls and voted by users.

This year besides uploading their pictures participants were also offered a weblog to tell their stories. Here's the list of participants with pictures and blogs (weblogs are in Italian, pictures are not and yes, they might contain nudity).

Livietta (pictures | blog), Miciamicia (pictures | blog), Angel (pictures | blog), Tuttamorbida (pictures | blog), Floriana (pictures | blog), Finny (pictures | blog), Natashap (pictures | blog), Irochka (pictures | blog), Elektra 67 (pictures | blog), Manu 76 (pictures | blog), Romina (pictures | blog), Valentina 72 (pictures | blog), Vanessa (pictures | blog), Stella 00 (pictures | blog), Loewe (pictures | blog), Shiribia (pictures | blog), Giulienne (pictures | blog), Monicamariana (pictures | blog), Denise Fenati (pictures | blog), Shura (pictures | blog), Irinovic 77 (pictures | blog), Susy 78 (pictures | blog), Marica (pictures | blog), Memole 2k (pictures | blog), Pipistrella (pictures | blog), Anna 87 (pictures | blog), Trilli (pictures | blog), Squaletta (pictures | blog), The Witch (pictures | blog), Micia 75 (pictures | blog), Lisaxwwwxslurpxch (pictures | blog), Cucciolotta (pictures | blog).

[via GnuEconomy]

4 theories by Robert Scoble on why many bloggers use Macs.

As a blogger/Mac user I agree with most of them, but I have been using Macs since 1984. These theories don't seem to consider the fact that quite a few of these users are not "traditional" Mac users but people who have "switched".  At least, this is the feeling I have reading posts by many bloggers.

One year ago today we announced Radio UserLand Francophone. Thanks to Werner Bohlmann translation work, today I'm happy to announce the German Version or Radio, licenses available on the Evectors Store.

Today it's the 9th anniversary of the first DaveNet essay (btw, congratulations!). I don't remember the first but I think I remember the second one because it included Marc Canter's email address.

I had met Marc a few years earlier, when he was still at MacroMedia and I went with my father to Paris to get the first Director training.

Anyway, having found his email address I decided to send a messare saying "hello" and that I was still working in multimedia mostly because of this early exposure to Director and his explosive presentations. In 1994 I had not been on on-line for long and the very idea of sending an email to somebody relatively famous was... well, kinda exciting.

He never replied.

Oh, well... you can never tell with this famous people, can you? I forgot about it.

About 3 years later Marc was sitting in my office using my slow dial-up connection to download a presentation he was supposed to give the next day in Trieste for an important gig. We spent most of the following year working together.

Everywhere I turn in these days I read people saying "email is broken". It's true, the content/spam ratio is making email hard to use. Even with a pretty good spam filtering system I still find myself deleting a lot of stuff. It's also true that nowadays I tend to find more interesting information in my rss aggregator than in my email client.

Weblogs and other collaboration technologies can partially replace email, but does this mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I mean: email is broken, why not try to fix it? Saying that RSS can replace email is simply wrong. The kind of content that used to belong to newsletter can perfectly fit into my aggregator, some of the work done on mail lists can probably be moved to weblogs, I can stay informed about friends' public life in this way, but that's about it.

Imagine an RSS aggregator where anyone could get you subscribed to any feed. We would get exactly in the same spam wars we have today. RSS is not better than SMTP, it's the model used by the protocol that doesn't work anymore.

News aggregators work because they are based on a subscription model, where each user decides where he want his content to come from. The equivalent with email are white lists, systems that allow users to decide who they can get email from.

But besides some basic spam filtering, what have email client developers done so far? This is another field where Microsoft rules with Outlook and where they could probably do something. I don't know exactly what, maybe some whitelist-like feature built-into the client, maybe some other smart authorization technology (hopefully which will not require to us all to have an account on some big MS server).

What I'm almost sure of is that if Microsoft would find a way to make spam disappear for its customers, spam would disappear for all of us. This is not yet another "MS vs. the world" rant: in a way or another Microsoft reached this dominant position, and from there they could do something for the whole internet.

Yeah, I know, it will be fixed in Longhorn ;-)

Dave: The Big BloggerCon Blog: Imagine a web service that read all the feeds of all participants in BloggerCon, and present them in reverse chronologic order as if we were all writing for the same weblog. Well, Ross Karchner did exactly that. It's totally worth bookmarking.

The BloggerCon topic on our k-collector test site is getting interesting too (RSS feed here). We are only aggregating a few feeds, from beta testers and a few additional ones. I will check if we can add all the feeds from the BloggerCon blogroll. Should be fun.

Update: we are adding all participants feeds, as I see posts being processed it's getting interesting. Also the blogging topic has a lot of good stuff. Don't forget to check the "Related topics" tab on the left of the window.