Rodent Regatta

Dave Winer is one of the parents of this weblog. He’s written an interesting essay that looks back on why some of the conflicts seem to arise in the technical and developer worlds. As in any area of thought, we divide ourselves into camps. We set up competition. We draw battle lines. We defend our turf. At some point the battles cease to be about the subject, and they become personal. Dave does a good job of thinking much of that through.

If you go to Blogtree and look at the left side of your screen, you’ll see the parent weblogs for this one. I learned how to use Radio Userland and something they call ”upstreaming” before I learned to use FTP software. In other words, Radio Userland marked my first attempt to put something on the Internet. Actually, I had toyed with a product from Trellix that later was sold to Globalscape, but that’s another story.

A consistent, real presence on the web began for me with Radio Userland. Then, I stopped using it. There was really on one reason I stopped. I simply couldn’t depend on the product. I lost 3 lengthy entries after doing precisely the same thing I had done for all the other entries. Those three simply vanished. Then, I suffered a lengthy outage due to upstreaming problems. I began to see that something in the product wasn’t as rock solid and dependable as I needed and wanted it to be, or it required know-how that I didn’t have.

Those factors had nothing to do with Dave Winer. In fact, appreciation for Dave’s work made me stick with Radio Userland longer than I might have otherwise.