But it's a great way to meet our readers. We expected you to be technically savvy. Now we know. We expected and now know for sure that you're exceptionally loyal to Domino. That's wonderful since an enthusiastic user base is what makes for a great publication.

It is, however, a challenge for us. Imagine, if you will, a similar scenario in the print world. Let's say our business was to produce helpful printed technical journals on desktop publishing. We might do one on Quark Xpress. And we might do one on PageMaker. But as a publisher, the odds are we'd use only one of the tools for in-house production. Not for any religious or political reason, but just because templates have been developed, production people have been hired and trained, and the like. Just for simple operational reasons. So regardless of which tool was chosen, the other folks might feel a bit left out. But because, in our example, it's a print publication, no one needs to know that the Quark journal was built using PageMaker, even if the subject matter experts live and breathe Quark.

But DominoPower is a web publication and there are no secrets.

So here's the deal. DominoPower isn't based on Domino. Now, before you get all fired up, let me tell you why. But even before I do that, let me tell you my perception of Domino. I think it's an incredibly cool piece of software. I think it's incredibly powerful. And the fact that DominoPower isn't running on top of Domino has nothing to do with our perception of Domino. It's merely history and practicality. This story will take a few minutes for me to tell and for you to read, but it's worth it.

Way back (about three years ago) we were in two businesses. We sold a database add-on for Macromedia Director (which was in a declining market) and we wrote Lotus-related content for the Cobb division of Ziff. Cobb's editors (at that time) were mostly Mac users (as were most desktop publishers) and we had Macs here. We set up a web site to support our database add-on, threw it on a Macintosh-based server (mostly because we had a spare box, and the server software was cheap) and away we went.

OK, fast forward a bit. If you read my August editorial, you know that we started doing our own journals when Cobb stopped doing the Lotus-related journals. The bulk of our revenue came from the Cobb relationship and we needed to find a way into the journal business on our own. We decided we could probably do some sort of journal and since we had a Mac-based server, we'd do one called MacServer. It was to be all about WebStar (the Mac server software). We spent about six months putting this together. And then Steve Jobs struck. The Mac cloners were killed off, and Apple began to appear to be way more nutso than anyone would have expected. It just seemed a bad idea to build our first self-produced journal on what seemed to be a dying market.

So we decided on the PalmPilot. It was a growing market with excited users. It was in its second generation, which meant it would stick around for a while. And it had an aftermarket, which meant we'd be able to find targeted advertisers. So we put together a deal with 3Com for a link off their main page and started gathering articles and advertisers. Then we realized something scary: we'd have to assemble the HTML!