06/08/2000
***Themes
Themes are now available on Weblogs.Com and EditThisPage.Com sites. If you run your own server, update manila.root to get the new feature.
Update: New Theme available now on EditThisPage.Com and Weblogs.Com servers.
We're shipping just a few Themes at first -- we want to stress that Themes are a wide open area, there's lots of room and opportunity for creativity. You don't need Frontier to create Themes, all you need is a Manila site. Here are the first four shipping Themes: Default, OldDays, ThickLines, and Stripes. Will there be more? You bet.
New Themes-related macros: homePageLink, themeLink, downloadTheme.
As I was working on shipping Themes last night I had a local talk radio station on in the background. There were discussing the Microsoft breakup order.
Overwhelmingly, the callers were upset, disagreeing sometimes vehemently with the decision. And, also overwhelmingly, they weren't software industry people, but people with a PC at home who browse the web, send email, write in Word, and so on. The common theme: Bill Gates is great, he's made all this so easy and convenient and cheap.
There were a few dissenters, but none of them could coherently explain why a Microsoft monopoly hurts customers.
After I got over my emotional thinking -- I just wanted to shake some sense into people who I thought were grievously and sadly deluded -- I remembered that these people are right, maybe not about Microsoft itself (they gave Bill Gates personal credit for pretty much everything good in the world of computing, often absurdly) -- but they're absolutely right about what they want from computers. And they're right that Microsoft, in conjunction with HP, Compaq, Dell, etc., offers it to them, and no one else does.
I don't offer a conclusion or lesson, just a report.
DaveNet: What the Web Wants.
There's another view: the Microsoft case is just another example of this stupid, unnamed syndrome that's been going on as long as I can remember -- we can't seem to last two minutes without there being a major news story that drags out, usually in the courts, for months and years.
From Iran-Contra to the Gulf War to Rodney King to Tonya Harding to O. J. Simpson to Monica Lewinsky to Elian Gonzalez to Bill Gates. It's so tiring. A part of me favors injustice over the dreariness of these stories. Usually we get both injustice and intense boredom. Can't we skip straight to the injustice, bypass the months and years of wondering when this thing will ever end? I'm being facetious, but you get my point.