Discussion Group

Googlebombing
Critical IP sucks.

No limits
That's my new rallying call as the Conversant Evangelist. No limits. I've been doing some serious thinking about Conversant, who it's good for, why people should use it, its strengths, its weaknesses.

No limits.

I doubt Cameron Barrett would ever visit Unreason. The only friend we have in common is Brian Carnell. That said--Cam, I hear ya, man. I had an EditThisPage site for a while for Unreason. It was my first real introduction to a lot of important concepts. Browser-based administration. Central message storage. A simple group publication system. (Yay! No more cutting and pasting from e-mail submissions.) Templates.

(Aside: Oh, my, God do I love templates. The static version of this site at one point had all of 75 pages and one day I made a new logo. Since the new one was a different size than the old one, I went through and hand changed every instance of the logo on every page. Took two hours. My brain seized up like a car with no oil. Aaah!)

My wall with Frontier/Manila wasn't the HTML, which I only kinda understood how to code. At the time, to have a weblog that weblog had to be at the root (the home page). You could only have one. Bam! Wall. Seth kept telling me how I could have any number of weblogs on my site.

That's a goofy little thing, but there you are. Cam, I know how you feel about Userland. To this day I don't know where I would post Manila feature requests. I was a smart aleck on time over at Manila Newbies and they slapped me down for it. Fair enough--but I was a smart aleck to Seth Dillingham in my very first e-mail to him and he has been nothing but nice to me in return. Sometimes Dave says things that would get him booted off Unreason so fast they'd hear the sonic boom in Mystic, CT.

I'm writing this because whatever the heck is going on with Manila or Radio, there's at least one product that incorporates Frontier that I know you can dink with the HTML all you want. Unreason darn near validates as HTML 4.01 Transtional (working on it!). Clark Roman has a Glish-copied tableless design. As near as I can tell, at this point the navigation calendar on the weblog page type (like this one) and on many Conversant discussion groups (like the one at the support site) are the only bits that *can't* be templated.

No limits.

Required macros? Most pages, the only required macro is pagecontent (to, you know, display something on the page).

No limits.

Don't want to use Frontier as your database? With the proper driver, Conversant can use any database management system. It doesn't have to be the one in Frontier. (I'm being vague here because I'm not a programmer and I don't know how TWINE, the datase management layer for Conversant, works. Just that it does.)

No limits.

Really, Cam, you ought to have a talk with your friend Brian. He can rant all day about how wonderful Conversant is. Don't paint all of Frontier with the same Userland brush.

<davewiner>Thanks for listening.</davewiner>