Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Tomalak's Realm on Scripting News

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:10/9/1999; 9:20:31 AM
Topic:Tomalak's Realm on Scripting News
Msg #:11894
Prev/Next:11893 / 11895

A quick deal

Last night I sent an email to Lawrence Lee, the editor of "Tomalak's Realm".

"Lawrence, how would you feel about me doing something interesting with your links on Scripting News home page? I'm thinking of a box like the SalonHerringWiredFool box, but just for Tomalak's Realm. It would just link to the stories, the quotes wouldn't be included. I would never do this without your consent, and you could withdraw it at any time. I would link to your home page prominently."

He sent back a brief reply:

"Wow! I would love to see that happen."

A new feature

So I whipped up a macro to create a box with the 12 most recent links from Tomalak's Realm. You can see it there, right now, down the right edge of the "Scripting News" home page.

You can see a screen shot of the link box to the right, but if you click on the links you won't actually go there (it's just a gif).

Isn't the web fun?

The thing that's so cool about this is that once I had my content server hooked up to the My.UserLand story flow, the problem was so simple to solve. The Tomalak links are in my globals when my macro runs. No XML to parse, no HTTP requests or XML-RPC calls. All the hard work is done, now I'm just playing in Idea-Land. That was the whole point of all the wire-laying we did, so deals like this could come together in a matter of hours.

Anyone on any platform can hook into the flow. Very shortly we will publish a Frontier application that makes hooking into a story flow totally turnkey. We expect to sell quite a few $899 licenses by making it easy to add syndicated content to your website. Even if we're not solving the whole content management problem for you, is it worth $899 per year to get the stories? We think a lot of people will think so. And then if you want to use more of Frontier, that's great too!

As with the pitch Tim O'Reilly made in Tokyo, we are hoping to help set the agenda for the open source world. As we have cut Vignette's $50K starting price for syndicated content, we welcome open source developers to compete with us. Our protocol is open. Here's your incentive to be compatible. Compete with us. Stop worrying so much about Microsoft. Let's make the web work better!

Dave

PS: While I was at it I factored some code and made the SalonHerringWiredFool box look prettier too. ";->"





This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:59 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.