wiredfool

The theme for the evening was Manila. We were sorry that Brent Simmons could not join us but understood that his theme for the evening was final touches on Manila. To Brent and all of Userland- beautiful job!

Our group was a little small with Thanksgiving only being two days away. Michael Gilbert was our host and Eric Soroos did the honors of demonstrating the Manila installation process and pointing out recent Userland developments. Lauri was in attendence and balanced our conversations with the ease of a seasoned marketing person. I rounded out the group with my enthusiasm for my first Manila site ( http://www.whitney-hall.com/fishOn ).

In looking at Manila, we drilled into several areas of discussion:

• Control panel- an HTML interface for managing Frontier.
• Site Heirarchy feature- including the built in examples of FAQ and Feedback.
• Server menu, ease of creating new sites and installing sites when gDB’s are moved between machines.
• We also discussed the idea of Manila sites as sub-sites within manila sites.

Topics that we need to return to in a future FUG meeting include the Manila search engine and syndication.

One unresolved question is: How do you control the location of the calendar within your template?

Our conversations turned around many other subjects as well. I just finished “Weaving the Web” by Tim Berners-Lee and Michael and Lauri had recently seen him give a speech in Seattle. We agreed that his integrity, and vision of a future based on ideals instead of the aquisition of wealth, was the very reason for the sucess of the web. On a similar topic, we discussed the upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Sounds like the mass of dignitaries, media, and protestors is practically going to shut the city down.

We also drilled deep into some of the interface issues regarding discussion threads. We talked about the continued life of NNTP servers and various News interfaces. This led to spirited brainstorming about ways to visually reveal the structure of a discussion Group thread as a means to quickly navigate that thread. Eric got excited by this and took some notes so we are all hoping he digs further (hint). (see “Thread View”, ed.) I was also lucky to get a mini-demonstration of Eric’s mail server and his recent efforts to build a manilla like control panel interface. This looks like another item for my to-do list.

We agreed that our 4th Tuesday meeting schedule would be difficult over the holidays and that we would meet again in January.