I’ve written several articles on weblogs for various publications over the past few years. Each and every one of them has changed ‘weblog’ into ‘Web log’ per some style guide rule during the editing process, over my objections. This always gets my goat for some reason. It’s weblog, people!
On a related note, I came across this page on how you can cite a weblog entry in MLA style.
Here is a tip that we used during a recent move of ASHA’s web site to a new hosting provider: a week or so before the switch, set the time-to-live for your domain name record to a very short interval. This will ensure that domain name servers around the web will be constantly updating your domain record so that when you map the domain to a new IP address (almost always required when moving your production servers to a new hosting provider) the change will quickly propagate across the Internet. If you don’t do this, some of your site visitors may have to wait several days for the change to make it out to their corner of the Net.
Keith Robinson makes the case for outlining your publishing process before determining what system you need (if any) to support it.
The formation of CMPros was just announced. It is a professional society for content management professionals. From the home page:
A group of thirty content management experts from around the world has announced the formation of CM Professionals, an international community of content management professionals whose purpose is to further best practices based on shared experiences of experts and peers.
A lot of organizing seems to be going on in the web professions, which is a stage of growth for any new field. If they follow the pattern in other industries, there will be a lot of new organizations over the next few years which will eventually consolidate into just a few dominant associations. It will be interesting to watch from an association management perspective.
Just learned a new acronym/concept today: COINs. Denham Grey posted a comparison of
Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) to Communities of Practice (CoPs): On COINs and CoPs.
As I now understand things, a COIN is a specialized form of CoP, an informal network that spans business boundaries and has a prime focus on innovation rather than individual participant identity, awareness and learning.
COINs follow examples of the open source ethos, participants are early adopters and they adhere to principles of collaborative knowledge networking. This seems to a fusion of social networks, enabled by web technology and knowledge sharing.
Denham provides several links to source material in his post. Check it out.
I spotted this definition on Doc Searls’ IT Garage (paraphrase):
DIY-IT is happening wherever you see shelves full of O’Reilly books.
So true! I’ve learned a lot and advanced my career by reading as many O’Reilly books as I can get my hands on and find the time to read.
Which reminds me of one-half of a cell phone conversation I overheard in the M Street Borders in DC one day. This young guy in dockers was kneeling in front of a shelf of operating system books and his phone rang. Here is the half of the conversation I heard:
Young Dockers Guy: Hello?
…
YDG: Yes.
…
YDG: Yes, I know the server is down.
…
YDG: I’m looking for a book on it right now!
Ouch.
I’m writing this entry using Ecto, a little OS X program for managing and posting to a weblog via a rich text interface that runs on your desktop (or laptop, in my case). Pretty slick so far. I’ve tried a few of these over the years but have never stuck with one very long. We’ll see how I do with this one.
One thing it has that I can definitely use is the ability to write an entry when I have no connectivity and then post it later when I can get online. That will be useful. And I just used the auto create a link using the url in the clip board buffer. Excellent.
Spotted via Deane’s review on Gadgetopia.
Gunnar Langemark has pointed out a new company that provides a hosted Drupal service: Bryght From the site:
Bryght is our Drupal hosted service that enables anyone from individuals to businesses and organizations to easily build and maintain a dynamic website with an online community.
I’ve used Drupal for a couple small project groups. It is a great collaborative tool if you can keep everything html based (document management tends to be a bit weak). This service should make it feasible for a much wider array of people to easily take advantage of Drupal.
Eric Sink is writing a series of articles on how to use source control. Definitely check this out if you manage development teams in-house or out.
I have started writing a series of articles explaining how to do source control and the best practices thereof. See below for links to the individual chapters in this series. The Introduction explains my motivations and goals for writing this series.
Peter van Dijck provides us with a view into the Belgian IA/UX community. He scores intercultural bonus points for a Fons Trompenaars reference!
C. David Gammel, CAE 