The HAM install method has been released for public consumption. It's undergone a lot of internal (and some external) testing, and we feel it's a hell of a lot easier. It can be used to install both H3 and H4, register for a trial, download everything you need from our servers, import and export in a variety of standard and custom formats, and much more. Y'all do please give it a try for us!

A features list has been posted for the upcoming Hazel 4 ("H4"). We hope to release the official version in the coming months!

Almost two hundred years ago today, Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark. While the Hazel documentation ain't no Thumbelina, it may provide you with slight humor-laden edutainment. Check out recent updates to the HZML documentation.

If you registered your Hazel 3+ years ago, you might have encountered a bug in old H2 code which will cause the key to expire 987,654,321 seconds after 1970, which happened to be a little past midnight last Thursday, April 19.

Charles Darwin died on that day in 1882, and the evolution of Hazel will save you.

To resolve the situation, you'll need to upgrade. Give us a call at 585-232-5670 and we'll take care of you.

Today in 1987, Ronald Reagan proposed the first trillion dollar US budget. We at Netsville don't have an extortion branch like the IRS to fill our coffers with the coin of decent citizens, so we get by with charging fair prices for excellent products...and services.

Which brings us to the point of this news item!

Our support policy allows a 30-day "free support" period beginning with the initial trial download. Subsequent trials and purchases do not afford further support graces and require the purchase of an incident or support contract.

Full support details can be found on the Hazel Support Page.

As always, questions posted to hazel-talk are answered gratis, in pursuit of the glorious enlightenment of the Hazel community.

We've linked in a new section devoted to Hazel resellers. If you're an ISP or web integrator interested in reselling Hazel, do take a look!

Adolph Hitler was announced as Time magazine's "Man of the Year" today in 1939. Following in his footsteps this year is George W. Bush.

As the previous H4 beta keys are expiring and we've yet to release Hazel 4, here are some new ones to last a bit into the proper new Millennium.

HAZEL_SERNO:1111111111                             # (serial number)
HARDGOODS_KEY:DBfissAs2o7ok99zHNCvouMnLFab1TidFszQ # (04/12/2001)
SOFTGOODS_KEY:XuX4RDDDzZHaGHIIFMOzOH7xQgwNLtn92FpB # (04/12/2001)

See the H4B1 story for details on downloading.

Ted Nugent is 51 today! CAT SCRATCH FEVER, BABY!

HG Wells and Stephen King were born on this day. Take a terrifying time trip into the spooky realm of web development and return triumphantly enlightened by reading our new sections on HTML basics and CGI tips.

Happy Independence Day, Belize!

We've released a public beta of the Hazel 4.0 "H4" code. Not a whole lot is different on the outside, but much internal code has been re-written. The most remarkable change is with the search engine, and you'll notice in the new templates that match results can be paged through, and the total number of matches is discovered and displayed at the onset of a search.

All betas should use the following keys:

HAZEL_SERNO: 1111111111
HARDGOODS_KEY:GB5r9Ts277A7MM9wQvoIruMnF6ab1poMCIA5
SOFTGOODS_KEY:MucAaLEWqqqHtpHafImOzH7xEgwNt38oUps5

Note no options or search keys. Those features are now included in the purchase price of Hazel beginning with 4.0. Furthermore, all licenses support unlimited products.

The distro is available at ftp://ftp.netsville.com/pub/hazel/misc/4.0B1/. Individual binaries can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.netsville.com/pub/hazel/updates/hazel/H4/.

Binaries are downloaded as with the 3.5B1 distro, through a new hello-hazel.cgi which locates the best one for your architecture.

We'd much appreciate y'all stress-testing the code, particularly if you're able to install into a test directory. The install.pl is back for those with shell access on their machines.

1047 years ago today, Julius Caesar said, "I came, I saw, I conquered" upon defeating Pharnaces at Zela. Here's hoping Hazel can one day stand triumphantly over the battered and bloody bodies of her competitors and proclaim the same!

The renowned Hazel School of Design celebrated the 52nd birthday of famous ice-skater and cultural icon Peggy Fleming today with the introduction of several new courses designed to help freshmen in the field of Hazelcataloguery towards e-commerce success.

As a bow to the 60th anniversary of Bugs Bunny's cinematic debut, we've swanked up the documentation footers with a CSS-embellished table.

Comments, questions, vitriolic verbosity? Visit the Netsville.net Portal. See up in the top left corner, that list of people associated with the noise a cow makes? Maybe your favorite Netsville personality is online right now. Go forth and chat, young person!

The Hazel-talk Knowledgebase has finally been re-done. This is where ALL the Hazel-talk messages have been archived (since 1997!). This storehouse of information is updated nightly. Perhaps the answers you seek are already here!

The search engine documentation has received a major re-write. Much easier on the eyes, with better reference tables for search comparison characters and logic, and pointers for embedding search queries into HTML links rather than forms.

We've added a list of Hazel-friendly hosts, confirmed to work well with Hazel. Contact us if you wish to have one added!

The products file documentation has been amply augmented to include all fields recognized by, written by, and reserved by Hazel. Do check it out!

Also, a late notice that the supported platforms page was updated with the last batch. It's where to go when you want the latest Hazel for your platform.

The options documentation has been greatly expanded, including explanations of some nifty new 3.2 features. Updates also to the shell and FTP walkthrough documentation, and a new section on initially configuring Hazel which sheds light on some of the most common hazel.config fields--including some new ones!

Mongol emperor Genghis Khan died 772 years ago today. To commemorate the passing of this most brutal conquerer, we decided to forego the traditional rape and pillage of the east coast and instead just release Hazel 3.2. Enjoy, AND TREMBLE BEFORE HER MIGHT.

The latest 3.2 distribution may be downloaded from our FTP site. New users should first register for a trial key.

Without fanfare (save for the exclamation point above), Hazel 3.1 is released. This release includes a new sample catalog and default template layout, obliteration of most of the known problems, and enhancements to the Hazel CGI and the HAM (Hazel's Admin Module).

Printemps, the largest department store in France unveiled their new Hazel driven web site late November. An English version debuted earlier this week. The developers of the web site, Business lab, tried two of the biggest players in E-commerce before they settled on Hazel as their E-commerce solution! Visit the Printemps site now and see why! Only Hazel has the flexibility to work with a site this intricate!

Hazel is fully Year 2000 compliant. Always has been and always will be. See the official statement.

Hazel definately runs on the DEC Alpha platform. If you are a Mindspring customer and are having your website switched from Solaris to OSF Unix (DEC Alpha...or is that Compaq Alpha now?), click here for how this relates to Hazel and what you have to do (it's quite painless, really).

The demo store has been updated. It now includes examples of various methods of adding products to a Hazel shopping cart (including optioned products), an orderable softgoods item, and various templates in the 3.0 style.

Hazel now runs on Mindspring's new Alpha servers and the executable will be included in the regular Hazel distribution. We'll also make the binary file available by itself for customers of Mindspring that will be switching over to their new machines. For more information, email us at hazel@netsville.com.

Netsville has become a member of Digital's Association of Software & Application Partners Program (ASAP). As a result, we have Hazel running on DEC Unix 4.0 and are looking for people willing to test this version. Email us if you are interested. Thanks.

Hazel has been written up at Poor Richard's Web Site. This innovative site offers geek-free, commonsense advice on building a low-cost website...or you may jump directly to the review. Peter Kent lists quite a few shopping carts at his site, but Hazel is the one he's using to actually sell his book! Quite an endorsement. Thanks, Peter.

Today Netsville and Dujour.com announced in the April issue of dujour-BIZ a contest where members of the business oriented mailing list Tip-dujour can register to win a free license for Hazel. Further details will be released in the May issue of dujour-BIZ. For details on Dujour.com, the Tip-dujour mailing list and dujour-BIZ website, go here.

Learn how to better market your website and get the chance to win Hazel! What could be better!

We have successfully compiled Hazel on a SCO OpenServer 5 system. So if you're running SCO OS5 then you can obtain this new binary in the ftp binaries directory.

To see a list of all the systems Hazel currently runs on check this out.

We were notified today that starting this weekend all new customers on Mindspring will be placed on Digital Unix servers. We DO NOT currently have a Hazel compile for Digital Unix, but we are working toward that goal. Please stay tuned!

This does not affect existing Mindspring customers, yet.

We've added some notes for those upgrading to Hazel 3.0. Give them a look-see to make sure you haven't missed anything critical in your upgrade. ATS users should pay particular attention to the section on upgrading their ATS templates.

The known problems page has been updated-- of special interest if you've had problems with products showing up as "Missing SKUID" during the course of a shopping session. Short solution: remove duplicate SKUID from your products file.

With this redesigned website comes Hazel 3.0 -- check out her new features!

Updated FAQ can be found here

A list of problems you may have with Hazel is now available, with solutions (where applicable). We refer to this page in the office as "Microsoft Technical Support -- Netsville Branch".

Also restructured the support page.

With all the dissension among various web servers and how they handle CGIs, a little tweaking is unavoidable. Here are some very important instructions regarding Hazel and her use under the influence of Microsoft Internet Information Server and O'Reilly's Website:

Main FTP Site link to ftp.netsville.com

Were they missing? No, not really. They just weren't linked. Added section on the search engine to the Hazel documentation.

The SunOS version of Hazel will crash on SunOS version 4.1.4 when attempting to send order confirmation e-mail. This is due to that particular version of SunOS (mis)interpreting an fflush(NULL) as meaning "crash this mutha".

A patched version of the SunOS hazel.cgi is available from the Netsville ftp site at ftp://ftp.netsville.com/pub/hazel/request/hazel-sunos-2084p1.cgi.gz.

If your version is not crashing, don't bother with the download.

Added a new section to the Hazel School of Design on using comment boxes to specify order options. Of course, you'd know this if you were on the hazel-talk mailing list.

Added some yadda-yadda to each of the three main knife pages in the demo catalog, particularly some explanation of why quiet add isn't going to work as expected when you're using a browser that doesn't give a rat's ass about standards. Like Microsoft's Internet Exploder.

Placed a new Solaris-X86 version of Hazel into the distribution which fixes a problem with files being erroneously reported as "unreadable". You'll notice Solaris-X86 isn't on our supported platforms list. This is why. If you choose to use this Solaris-X86 version, your user files probably won't be automatically expired. Otherwise, it should be fine.

We're working on fixing the problem, which we believe lies in the system on which we compile the Solaris-X86 Hazel. Stay tuned for further developments, citizens.

Consequently, this Solaris-X86 version is 2.055. The "release" version of Hazel 2.0 is 2.051. We'll be releasing a new version with some enhancements and squashed "nuisance bugs" within the next few weeks. Probably when we get around to cleaning up the FTP server to allow direct downloading of platform-specific CGI.

Oh-- "Goodbye, Arial font!" BLAM BLAM BLAM

Removed the ill-supported and non-standard <XMP> tags from the documentation; the examples in the tag documentation should now make sense to those of you with browsers other than Netscape.

Added the news section today. Yet, strangely, there are items before this point. How chicken-and-egg weird.

There's a new sample catalog included in the distribution which better demonstrates all that can be done with Hazel. It now reads information on the sample products directly from the products file via a products loop.

There's no way to get the sample catalog except to download the entire distribution and extract the hazel-doc directory. We'll have an FTP site with all these different pieces sometime in the future. (How's that for indefinite?)

The Hazel docs have been spruced up, including a new table of contents rather than the walkthrough-cum-index of days past. If you have any comments or criticism regarding the documentation, please contact us. It's a lot easier to improve something when someone on the outside tells you what's wrong.

At long last, Hazel 2.0 has been released. Sorry for being two weeks overdue. Maybe a month and a half overdue. All information on Hazel's new website now refers to Hazel version 2.0, though legacy documentation for 1.5 is temporarily available at http://hazel.netsville.com/docs-1.5/. Why didn't we link that address? You'd be surprised how many people would click it, then call us and yell, "These docs don't make any sense!"

Hazel now has her very own website at http://hazel.netsville.com/. We'd link that site, but you're already there.