I feel out of the loop. I just now (thanks to Steve Ivy), realized that UserLand had shut down.
In reality, UserLand shut down for me years ago. UserLand Frontier was the environment that helped me learn to program. I was first drawn to it as a tool to make it possible for me to publish an E-zine by myself, and manage the hundreds and thousands of static HTML pages that went into it. It was a fun time in the late 90s building what the web would become — and I think Dave Winer’s influence, particularly through the software he made at UserLand — was a huge part of it.
Working for Macrobyte Resources, I was one of the primary programmers on Conversant, which I think I can safely say was the largest piece of software built on Frontier outside of UserLand. While building it on Frontier would ultimately be one of the failings of an otherwise very advanced web application, it also enabled us to accomplish a lot with a small team.
This blog was originally managed in UserLand’s Manila, running in Frontier on a Mac Quadra 650 sitting on my desk on a 128k DSL line — circa 1998.
There were a lot of smart, fun people in the UserLand community. Kinda sad that the punctuation mark on the end of UserLand’s story is a period and not an exclamation point.
