Nancy White recently launched the Full Circle Associates Online Interaction & Community Blog. Nancy is an excellent resource on online community and its intersection with knowledge management. Her blog is definitely worth checking out.
Author Archives: David
phpMyAdmin Book
Gadgetopia has posted a a review of Mastering phpMyAdmin, a book on how to use the excellent MySQL administration tool, phpMyAdmin. I used an early incarnation of it back in ’99 for my first PHP project. It has been a regular part of my LAMP toolkit ever since. Definitely check it out if you need to manage MySQL databases and have a PHP box on the same network (which you probably do if you are using MySQL).
And winner of the goofiest web traffic analysis tool goes to….
This thing will monitor your site traffic in real-time by embedding a code into your pages that pings their database when page is delivered. It then renders the data as a SimCity-style town, with visitors from search engines getting off buses to visit your pages. The pages are viewed as houses, for low traffic, or skyscrappers for high traffic.
I dunno if this would actually help analyze your traffic better than other tools out there but it certainly looks more entertaining.
MT 3 Released.
Six Apart, the makers of MovableType (used right here) have released their next version which has dramatically altered licensing terms. You can see the furor at the launch annoucement trackbacks. Props to them for leaving TB enabled on that post!
I haven’t gone through the new terms in detail yet but I think that none of the licenses exactly fit the level of activity we see eventually having at work by not allowing enough authors and blogs under the top-end license. I’m sure they would be willing to give us a custom quote and the pricing in general seems reasonable for us at work but we are a rather large non-profit with budget for that kind of thing.
A lot of the outrage is coming from the small shops and independent bloggers. From what I can tell they are definitely not served well by the new licenses.
The Process of Web Management
Web content management a process, not a project is a nice post by Gerry McGovern.
The gist is that if you treat your site as a project it will begin to age and get out of date the minute the “project” is completed. Treating your site as an ongoing management process helps to avoid some of those problems. However, it does take more time, resources and dedication than a one-off project, which is why many organizations don’t go that route.
(Spotted via Column Two.)
Comments Disabled
I’ve disabled the comments on the site for the time being due to continued comment spamming. I had tried the spam plugin for comments a while back but that broke KMpings so I had to back it out. Please use trackback to add comments to an entry or e-mail me and I’ll update the post.
I have left existing comments in place so they can still be viewed.
I’ll investigate the plugin again when I have time and will hopefully provide the comment feature again in the future.
Gmail
Tim O’Reilly has deconstructed all the hoohaw over the new Gmail service from Google: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.
I’ve been trying out the beta for a few days and I’m pretty impressed with the features it has and with the quality of the links (sponsored and otherwise) that they discretely display when you view a message. Check out what O’Reilly has to say if you are still concerned about it.
Map and Territories
I’ve been a bit of a map geek since getting a minor in geography as part of my BA, so I was pleased to come across this blog the other day: Maps and Territories by Chris Corrigan. His posting style is to add an image of a map with a link to the original and add some text from literature or biographies that tells a bit of a story associated with the place represented by the map. I think it works.
The Honorable Blog
Spotted via David Weinberger: the governor of Wisconsin is writing his own weblog.
Mail on the Google Box?
a klog apart raised an interesting idea recently related to Google launching their own e-mail service: a combined blogger, gmail and google search appliance.
Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.
That sounds like a powerful combination for a corporate intranet.
C. David Gammel, CAE 