OmniPortal Blog

OmniPortal 2005.0 out in the wild

I am starting to get many responses from people interested in OmniPortal. While I am going to hold off the party until I actually see some solid progress I am happy to see the wonderful responses from everybody.

Hello World.

How to Start a Startup

I found this great article by Paul Graham. It basically tells you how to start your own startup. In the article he gives you three basic rules when starting your own business.

start with good people
make something customers actually want
spend as little money as possible

He goes on to explain, "Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed." I totally agree with these three rules, they are rules that I have been trying to drive into a friends head. He is a big idea person, and while he flies high, I tend to try and ground hime with the reality of these three rules. If he is still flying high after he has these three things worked out then it is probably a good idea.

WinFS To Be Available on Windows XP

Microsoft may not be willing to talk file-system futures, but it is working to back-port its future file-system technology to Windows XP.

How Google Maps Works

Found this great article that explains how Google Maps works. It seems to be an original combination of DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, and XSLT. The built in XSLT engine transforms the XML to HTML which also explains why Google Maps only works on IE and Mozilla, it appears that this was a Microsoft technology that was later copied by Mozilla. The others such as Safari and Opera lack a built-in XSLT processor.

In the future it may look like Google will open up the API or at least allow XML packets to be sent from the Google Maps site. As Jon Udell points out you use to be able to append the term "output=xml" to any Google Maps URL, the server then sent back an XML packet, however since Udell's writing of this the feature has been disabled.

The article can be found at http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog everybody is welcome to take a gander at what I am doing. I put together this blog to show case and to demonstrate the capabilities of OmniPortal. Periotically I will be posting to this blog to explain some of the new features that are included with the most current release of OmniPortal.