Evan Williams has a screenshot of the new Microsoft Word, part of new OfficeXP. I like what Microsoft is doing — increasing the interoperability of their software. Also notice how much simpler the UI is. There was recently a great long thread on the CMS-list about browser-based editing and editing files in Word that can automatically be saved to a content management system. It reminds me a lot of a Mozilla project we were working on last year called Script Editor — basically a text editor (like BBEdit or Word) built on top of the Mozilla platform. The Microsoft marketing machine is starting up. It will be interesting to see how software developers react to their Microsoft’s pitch. We all are starting to realize that software is increasingly going to be built using a distributed application framework model, but not many people have realized that Microsoft’s .NET is really just their version of what Mozilla has been doing since 1998. Wild-card player in this upcoming platform war: Sun with their Open Network Environment (ONE).
So, I finally downloaded and installed GreyMatter. Wow, what a beautiful piece of Perl programming. I am definitely moving some weblogs over to this system. As much as I like Blogger, I simply can’t rely on the servers being up when they’re needed. If I get really ambitious, I’ll ask Noah to help me reverse-engineer some of the Perl to work with my archiving standard (name schema) here at CamWorld and move it over to GreyMatter as well. In the meantime, I’m going to install GreyMatter a few more times in a couple of different places, build out some custom templates, and test it further. First impression: Wow.
PHPBuilder: Fundamentals of Web Application Development [via Aaronland]
Finally, a good use of Flash!
Interesting. EA.com is discriminating against Netscape 4.x users, redirecting them to an error page. What I normally do in cases like this is to disable Javascript and try to visit the site again. This returns a page saying “Plase turn on Javascript in your browser.” What’s even more interesting is that much of the site’s page layout seems to render just fine in Netscape 4.x, before a server-side script does a browser-sniff, redirecting you to an error page. Um, hello. [via MetaFilter]
What big business can learn from weblogs. We are currently planning on building collaborative editing into the project management tools we’re developing at CollabNet. This will allow developers using our SourceCast project hosting/management tools to create and maintain weblogs for their projects. And since our intranet runs on top of our own SourceCast technology, we’ll be able to extend this functionality to each department, group, and subgroup within the company. I can’t wait. Take this idea further.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at March 9, 2001 07:47 PM