Simple math: There are 911 days between 9/11/2001 and 3/11/2004 (912 depending on how you count).
Just a bit conspiracy theory syndrome: If you add 911 days to 3/11/2004, you get 9/8/2006 (or 9/9/2006 if you add 912 days), which is next week.
Now, this sounds like one of those things that you receive on email, from a friend that got it from a friend that knows a numerologist that says the if you sum the characters on "Bin Landen", and add his birthdate it becomes 666. Or Bill Gates, or George Bush, or whatever...
But if something happens next week (and I hope not)... I told you so.
PS: Isn't there a guy saying that the world is going to end because of a nuclear war that will start on 9/12/2006?
Sampa is not really a competitor of ASP.NET, PHP, Wordpress, DreamWeaver or anything that requires technical expertise. We are building a service for people to create rich websites (with blogs, albums, videos, etc.) without the need to any programming.
Still, this week I started working on the new Sampa.comwebsite (check out next week!) using ASP.NET 2.0. Boy, there are so many similarities between their new page structure and how Sampa works...
ASP.NET: Themes vs. Sampa: Master Templates -- both define the basic style elements (color, fonts, backgrounds, etc.)
ASP.NET: Master Pages vs. Sampa: Page Layouts -- Defines the "wireframe" structure of the page and some fixed content (header, footer, menu, etc.)
ASP.NET: Controls vs. Sampa: Content Boxes -- Dynamic generated content.
ASP.NET: Pages vs. Sampa: Pages/Web Modules -- The "main content" of the page.
Now, ASP.NET lacks one more level of flexibility that Sampa has: Box Layouts. Basically, if you go to the Master Page on your ASP.NET app, you can only say where the region is, but you can't say what happens if the region is empty. That is important because on certain cases you want to suppress some HTML outside of a region if it has nothing on it. On Sampa, Box Layouts are only displayed if the content inside them is not empty, and you can change the Box Layout very easily.
BTW, this Site is using Sampa. See the box on the right where it says "About Me". It has two parts to it: The text inside it and the layout surrounding it (the Box Layout). There is no similar on ASP.NET (although you could hack it).
In case you haven't heard, Xanga, an on-line blogging/social network was fined US$ 1 million for failing to comply with the Child Privacy Act. Basically, a company can't accept users to sign up or collect data about users that are less than 13 years old.
This only matters if users can sign up to your site. And, the legal requirements are quite simple: Either you ask the users to agree with the Terms of Use or Terms of Service of your site when they sign up, or you ask them their age and reject them if they are 13 or less. Apparently, Xanga didn't do any of those.
For a relatively small company, being fined $1M is a lot of dough. Somebody should be fired over there, at minimum the legal counsel.
Now, to my next topic... Evan Williams (Blogger creator) new company is called Odeo. Some type of podcast site or something.
The first time I visited Odeo I was in awe at how simple their sign up was. Just asking for a Name, Email and Password.... Wait a second.... What about the Terms of Use?
Bang! That is the hit on Odeo's forehead when they get slapped with a lawsuit since it is not part of the sign up agreement to have to agree to the Terms of Use.
Here is a tip for your company. For such a fundamental thing, check with your lawyer what you can and can't do online. The Child Privacy Act is just one of the things that can get you in serious trouble!
I just watched "What the Bleep Do We Know?", a movie about Quantum Physics, how the Brain works and some other topics.
I tell you what we know now... Don't watch this movie! The value per minute is insanely low. It could have been summarized in 15 minutes (or less), it doesn't explain almost anything about Quantum Physics, and the only interesting part is about proteins for our feelings and cell receptors.
We just had a new release for Sampa (see more info here). As far as medium size releases go, this one went quite smooth. Of course, there were some problems, but we manage to fix most of them.
One of the coolest things that this release has is an integration with Blogger. This means that you can show your Blogger posts on Sampa by just adding a Blogger Connector content.
With that, we just finished integrating with the 3 most popular sites for user-generated content: Flickr, YouTube and Blogger.
And for the more stats freak users, you can very easily add Google Analytics to your Sampa site, which is a super simple way of tracking all relevant stats for your site.
Check it out at your Sampa site or sign up at www.sampa.com
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is not really a competitor of ASP.NET, PHP, Wordpress, DreamWeaver or anything that requires technical expertise. We are building a service for people to create rich websites (with blogs, albums, videos, etc.) without the need to any programming.
September, 2007