Evolutionary SharePoint. A nice article on the evolution of the SharePoint suite of technologies from MS. (Via Hugh Pyle.)
Author Archives: David
The Psychology of Blogging
Simon Willison is making a change to his weblog format which de-emphasizes the date posted and instead gives the title of the post prominence.
Simon Willison: Small design tweak, big difference:
By removing the day headers entirely, I hope to shift the focus of this blog from religious daily updates to entries with a little more substance. I think the psychology of a blog’s design is easily under-rated; I’ve already noticed that my blog entries have been getting longer since I started adding entry titles. At any rate, with this latest design tweak I certainly won’t be rushing out poor quality entries before midnight any more.
I believe that some staff at our office are hesitant to blog because it appears to require a rather large time committment to post every day, which the format does encourage. So, ultimately, this might limit adoption rather than encourage those who do write to post every day. Something to think about.
Another thought: if you get rid of the date emphasis, is it still blogging? It always seems that the reverse chronological order of posts has been a big element and removing the dates de-emphasizes this quite a bit. Simon is obviously still blogging but it’s interesting to see if the form is beginning to evolve a bit.
I’m sure this is nothing new and was debated ad nauseam back in ’99. 🙂 Feel free to post pointers to previous discussion if you know of it.
Good questions about IE for Mac, AOL, MS
Jeffrey Zeldman asks some very good questions about the impact of no new IE for the Mac OS and how that relates to the recent AOL deal with MS.
My hope is that eventually the open source efforts at browser development will benefit from this but, as Jeffrey points out, the AOL/MS deal is a powerful jujitsu move on support for Mozilla (which is funded via AOL currently).
Web designers have to track this kind of stuff so they are aware of what browsers they will need to code for in the future. Anything that looks like it won’t lead to greater standards adoption is a bad thing.
XSL Tool
I have been using a demo of Stylevision 5 at work to create an XSL template that will transform our scholarly journal content from xml to html on our web site.
The tool is pretty easy to use, just drag-and-drop elements from the DTD onto a page for layout. More complex XML documents will require some knowledge of XPath queries and a basic understanding of XSL but even with that it is a huge productivity booster.
LinkedIn Update
So far I have initiated two contacts via LinkedIn. One was to contact someone at a company where I had had a hard time getting a response to inquiries sent to their public e-mail address. Another was to find an expert on an issue I am currently researching for work.
The first request got me directly to the person I wanted to talk to and was what I would consider a successful contact. The second request eventually referred me to someone outside the LinkedIn network who is probably one of the top people in the world on the topic I am looking into. Pretty damn amazing.
In both cases, I think that the personal referral to the ultimate contact by someone they know and trust made the difference in getting an immediate response rather than sitting in a pile of unsolicited correspondence.
Based on those two experiences, I would definitely allocate some of my budget to pay an annual fee in the low hundreds for this service. I hope they don’t go higher than that for the fee. Even though I work at a large non-profit, I would find it difficult to justify an expense much higher than that for a networking tool.
Here are some features I would like to see added to the LinkedIn interface:
- Browse network by job title, company name.
- Show a bullseye diagram of my connections and their connections, etc. that doesn’t show who links to who but does indicate how far out in the chain the members of my network are.
There is also a wiki for comments on the LinkedIn service that is frequented by the founders of the company.
ASAE Names New CEO
John Graham Named ASAE President and CEO. My best wishes to everyone at ASAE on turning around the organization. As a member I really hope they can get out of their current financial hole quickly and begin improving services.
PNH Developer Toolbar v0.51
This is an awesome plugin tool for web designers and programmers who are running mozilla or firebird browsers:
Currently Active Features
* Links to most W3C Specifications
* Automated submission to many validation tools
* Hide & show style sheets
* Apply your own external style sheet
* Highlight many HTML elements
* Resize Window to specific dimensions for testing
* Highlight form information
* View page cookies
Article on Basic Definition of CMS
James Robertson has published an article that provides a concise and basic introduction to content management systems. This is a great piece to refer to management and others who you need to get up to speed on what exactly a CMS is and the general business problems to which it can be applied.
A content management system (CMS) is critical to the success of almost every website and intranet, and yet many organisations are not familiar with this technology.
So, while we have written many articles on a range of specific CMS issues and strategies, we now take a step back to answer the question: what is a content management system?
In this article we will focus on web content management, and will only touch upon broader content issues at the end of the document.
Open Source CMS Analysis
Tony Byrne’s CMSWatch: Featured Opinion: Open-Source CMS: Prohibitively Fractured? provides an excellent analysis of the state of open-source content management systems. Tony feels that the efforts are currently so fractured between competing projects that no one open-source CMS can compete with the commercial products. An excerpt:
I would like to see development and support resources coalesce around winning projects. Open-source CMS efforts would benefit from a selective merger of efforts, especially among packages using the same language. We could celebrate that a thousand flowers have bloomed, but let’s also acknowledge that too few of them give off a sufficiently pleasant fragrance today.
CSS Rockets
This is worth checking out if you work with cascading style sheets: Simon Willison: CSS ain’t Rocket Science. Lots of good tips and ideas.
C. David Gammel, CAE 