Day: July 16, 2003

You pick the technology

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 16, 2003

In the interest of research, I thought I would publish each subsection of the forpoets.org with a different weblogging tool. Four subsections (weblogging, internet, linux, rdf), four tools. The first four essays in the weblogging.forpoets.org subsection will then be on each of these tools.

This is your chance to tell me what tool to use. Leave in comments your favorite weblog tool, why it’s your favorite, and where I can access it. Note that if there’s a cost for the tool, I won’t consider it unless the tool producer provides one free of charge for me to use. One that has full functionality, that is. Also note that the tool has to support pages on my server – I won’t go a hosted solution.

Some minimums:

The tool has to support comments, and my preference is to have a tool that supports trackbacks, but I won’t push this item as much. Also, the tool has to be ‘live’, which means that someone has to be actively supporting it.

Since I use Movable Type elsewhere, I’ll cover this in a fifth essay, but I’d like to use four new tools for the forpoets.org. I figured this will also drive out an essay or two on interoperability – from experience.

So, what should I use and why?

P.S. I can’t offer you any prize, like an iPod – but then, I don’t sell ads at my weblogs either. Ahem.

RDF Writing

It’s alive!

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 16, 2003

Browsers

Good-bye Netscape

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 16, 2003

In the golden age of the Internet, Netscape was the darling, the poster child for the Dot Com Boom. My first server-side development effort was based in Netscape’s LiveWire technology, which eventually went on to become the Netscape Application Server. My second book I wrote was on Netscape’s JavaScript.

My interest in RDF started because of the use of RDF within the early implementations of Mozilla. I defended Mozilla when others criticized it. I pushed back at the drive for standards when people used this to question Mozilla’s direction.

A member of the Mozilla team, a Netscape employee, made a trip to a hotel I was staying at for a conference to leave me a T-Shirt as a thank you for my support.

Mozilla will stay but Netscape is gone. This is the true end of the Dot Com era. This is when we know that not only is the roller coaster ride finished, but the roller coaster itself has been closed down for being a little too fast, and a bit too scary.

Diversity

Girl-ick-ism

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date July 16, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Halley has two new posts on girlism, related to the release of Charlie’s Angels 2 and Legally Blonde 2, and both are wide of the mark.

In the first she writes:

In both movies, the younger women call on a network of their girlfriends to save the day. In both movies the older feminist woman falters by turning her back on her friends and colleagues. If Girlism is about anything, it’s about women getting their power from loving their women friends and loving men.

I have no idea from where Halley gets her understanding of feminism. She’s not that much younger than me to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that women had to fight to enter any profession, and in doing so, opened the doors for those that followed. Women helping other women isn’t as much a matter of ‘hanging with the girls’, as it is attempting to make a difference – alone or with a group.

A little history in the suffragette movement might be in order right now. In merry old England, the women that marched shoulder to shoulder united in a sisterhood that transcended social class; they used to be arrested, put into jail, and force fed when they went on hunger strikes – all because they did not want to be treated as property.

Perhaps that’s why it took three girly girls to take out one old tough feminist broad, Demi Moore, in Charlie’s Angels 2 – the younger generation doesn’t really know what hardship is.

Then there’s the issue of loving men. In Halley’s second post, she writes about the Alpha Male:

He doesn’t mind her being a big wig lawyer downtown in a big law firm.

Well, isn’t that just precious – today’s Alpha Male doesn’t mind when the little woman becomes a Real Time Lawyer. Maybe the truth is he doesn’t seem to mind, but he’s really frustrated; so he spends 10,000 to shoot a naked woman, as she runs like an animal from paintball guns that shoot the pellots at 200MPH.

(I also have to wonder what lesbians think of Halley’s posts – after all, they don’t love men, not in the way that Halley uses the term. Perhaps they don’t count in this new ‘girlism’ thing. Lucky them.)

Halley’s girlism is just that, for girls only. Cute babes with nice little bods who love to baby talk their Alpha Male, kicking a bad guy and presenting a legal brief by day, sex kittens by night. The rest of us need not apply.