I downloaded a 30 day trial of Radio Userland the other day because a site they hosted some of my stuff on was no longer free.

I don't think I've had a worse experience with software that is mature and commercial. I expected the unintuitive interface (though having used its predecessor years ago, Frontier, and then used a Mac I could see how the outlining worked). I didn't expect it to keep on nagging me to register every time I ran it, even after I'd registered (several times because it didn't give feedback that it had worked). It was slow to do some things, and didn't change the cursor so I knew it was working on it. Other things (export to text) just didn't work at all without an error message. It crashed on me, but fortunately I'd got my data out of it in some sort of text form which I can use in future.

If I intended to purchase it I'd log these complaints through the support channels, but seeing as I'm not I thought I'd share my experiences here.

It is powerful, it was worked on by some high fliers (in some circles) like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble (he worked in the company, I'm not sure if he worked on the product and I'm too lazy to research), so it's probably worth a look at if you can get over these annoyances. Caveat emptor though.

This really is the stuff of science fiction:
I want to know which version of SQL server I'm running. I type into Google
"find out sql server version"
and the top result tells me what to do.

You could imagine an SF novel:
"He opened his terminal to the global megabrain and typed in his question. The answer came back in a split second."

I've been doing some PHP coding and Google is my online documentation. Compared to when I last did some serious coding - 6 years ago, things have moved on so much.

I've dipped my toes into Google maps gplotter.

We've got a commercial product from AFD to do postcode to national grid mapping, but I also tried this hack, though it was slow.

I converted national grid to latitude and longitude as required by gplotter using a spreadsheet and a hand-written macro to do it on a list in a spreadsheet.

The results look good, but I can't show you them.

Edit: postcodes to grid reference data is now available for free. See my post about getting postcodes in a constituency for the source.

I finally got my answer about versioning. Or at least an explanation as to why it doesn't just do it out of the box. It makes me realise that you can't "just" add version control to a product - what about staging, branching, diffs, etc. etc.

I have a simple question - Does Plone support version control of documents? I would have thought it does, as it's a pretty basic requirement of any CMS I would have thought. Can I find the answer quickly though? No. There's a project for Zope version control which hasn't got anywhere since 2001 it appears (though some page were changed this year). It says it's going to be in Zope3, yet Zope3 doesn't appear to support it.

So I'm still searching.

I've been dabbling with Macromedia Contribute as some of the people I work with update our website. It's very impressive for the non-technical user. It leads you through, locks down things you shouldn't be fiddling with and generally make life as easy as you can get. It runs entirely client side for basic tasks. You may need an administrator who knows a bit more than you to set up things, but they won't have much to do.

Macromedia Contribute compared to Plone and others. Great article.