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How did I get here?
So, let's tell a story about how I got here. Do I use a post or a story? Not sure what the difference is, so we'll try a story and if that's a bad idea, so be it.
I've been reading DaveNet since before Dave says it started. He got started doing these essays fired to many people back around early 1991 or so on AppleLink (the old GEISCO service with a Mac only front end that Apple ran or developers for many years). I think I ended up on his list because we'd talked at WWDC or because I signed up as a UserLand IAC Toolkit beta tester (or maybe both). I'm still subscribed to DaveNet.
Although I decided I didn't need the IAC tools (the idea was to have an IAC mechanism for System 6 as well as System 7), after I moved to the Norton Group (just about the time Symantec was eating them), Frontier looked like a tool which could be very useful (mostly as an AppleEvent tinker tool). So I dove into Frontier and eventually ended spending a lot of time using Frontier and doing beta testing (with a bunch of other crazy people on CI$ in the UserLand support forum there) on Frontier 3. I built lots of useful testing tools using Frontier and with serveral third party tools (the ToolServer suite, Steve Zellers' SourceSafe suite, a Think C suite and later a CodeWarrior 1 suite), I automated building the collection of libraries, drivers, extensions, control panels and applications that I was responsible for on NUM 3. The newly created configuration management group loved it, because my code always built. The rest of the folks I was working with weren't all that happy. Back then (early 1994), the (Symantec) utilities group built everything on Friday morning. If something died in the SCM group, the world ground to a halt. I got into the habit of coming in late on Thursday, doing an all nighter, making sure everything built for me on a virgin partition, and then waiting to hear that everything was good on my build. That got me out the door by 10 AM or so, and helped me avoid the weekly meltdown when something wouldn't build (maybe not every week, but 3 weeks out of 4, and they'd spend the next few hours finding the problem). I'd go home, sack out, and have a real Friday evening with my family (which is how I totally missed the O.J. low speed chase which everyone else in SoCal seemed to know about).
After leaving Symantec my need for Frontier was diminished and I no longer had access to CI$ where the activity continued (I did, but that's another idiotic story). So my use dwindled (3.x wasn't PPC native, which didn't help). UserLand was also wandering around a bit (3.0 was a major undertaking, and they lost focus or so it seemed to me at the time).
Fast forward a couple years and now Dave & Doug are working on Frontier 4 (4+?), doing it on the web. I'd been at EarthLink for a couple months and the young man doing daily production (custom CD's) by the name of Josh Lucas was looking for a way to learn something interesting and automate the system used to create CD's. Production was done on the Mac, Frontier seemed like a lot more useful (and interesting) solution than AppleScript. I aimed him that way and let him borrow my 2.0 manuals, which he used with Frontier 4 (I think it was free, or something). Anyway, he wandered off and played there a bit, and eventually moved into the Web Development group (he had been a part of Product Development, which five years later is now once again, Product Development; yet another long story).
By mid 1997 or so UserLand was talking about version 5.0, with a whole slew of networking tools built in, fully native on PowerPC, plus it would run under Windows! Wow! But they were talking about charging 'serious' money. A little timeout is in order, because my perceptions were skewed. Frontier was a $285 product (or had been). 4.0 was sort of free, sort of confusing, I wasn't paying a lot of attention. Now 5.0 was going to be nearly $1000. Yikes! Upgrades used to be $150 or so, spaced 18 months or so apart. I'd last been active in 3.0 (which was a free update because of my feedback in the beta program). EarthLink did purchase several (no idea how many) copies of 5.x (or a site license) for a CMS system which Josh had a part in. I think it was used for quite a while. Somehow or other, I did try 5.x, but had trouble importing all my 3.x packages (which explains the litter of Frontier versions, updates, package files, etc. which still clutter my system and were found when I went poking around the other day... sheesh, what a mess).
The weblogging thing was an outgrowth of the new capabilities of Frontier 5, and has been interesting to watch from the very early days. I've watched Dave do his thing and many others. I watched Josh move up (and on) from the time he left EarthLink, got married, came back, leave once again, have a child, dive into open source, etc. He got a couple other people interested and I had a great time watching Greg Hartling's 'blog.
With Radio 8, UserLand seems to have several things going for it. 'Blogging has become more than a geek sport. It's an outgrowth of personal journalism (keeping a journal or diary). In many ways, we all want to do it at some point in our lives, for many different reasons I would suppose. Some want to broadcast, some want to narrowcast, others simply want a personal record (perhaps to shared on a microcast basis). Many people who don't natively want to play with bits and bytes (my definition of a geek, which dates me) want digital records and could care less about more old fashioned methods, like a paper based system, which is hard to share with others. The price point is very attractive (if a bit unexplained, what does $40 buy you? The software and server, forever? What limitations?) The control that I see people wanting seems to be lacking (say a young womans diary, where most of it is private, some things can be read by a small list of people and other items are public) and it still takes a lot of clicks to get it rolling (if you're paranoid). Still, it's a huge step forward (most of the control exists in web forms, which many will find quite useful).
On the geek side of the house, I have some complaints. I can't figure out how to get into the actual outlines and screw around (outside of the menus). I know there is a way, but I have completely forgotten how. This is not a typical complaint, it's just that I know a door exists and I can't find it!
So now I'm on a new journey, trying to find a new way of doing my personal and professional journal work. I got started in 1991, as a result of something a co-worker was doing, I'm somewhat erratic, but usually manage 5 entries per week (more on that before I end). I still do it in MORE, mostly I think because I never need to use a mouse, NEVER. Last year I had people asking me how I produced some rather good looking PDF documents. Simple, use mostly old tools. I used MORE for the documents (I owe a big debt to Phil Shapiro; he sent me some Think group documents in late 1992 which showed me how much could be done in MORE with styles and I stopped using Word entirely), ConceptDraw for technical illustrations (exporting to Vector based PICT files, imported to MORE) and PrintToPDF to generate the PDF files. Somehow I need to find a way to do this in Radio, or in an external editor which pushes into Radio. It'll be interesting.
© Copyright 2002 Dave Ely.
Last update: 1/13/02; 12:13:40 AM.
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