Category Archives: Articles

Quoted in MSNBC.com Your Career Column

Posted on by David
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Eve Tahmincioglu interviewed me for her career column on MSNBC about how to get experience in IT when just starting out from school or after a career switch: The chicken-or-egg issue that is ‘experience’.

The main points I covered with Eve are that working with open source projects while in school and/or on your own time will help you to gain experience, build your professional network and develop compelling material for your resume. Something that didn’t get into the piece is that even if you aren’t going on the programming track in IT, you can still get experience in working with open source systems by installing and configuring them for pro bono clients or personal projects.

There is really no excuse for not having some practical experience under your belt with the wide availability of free software and systems to work with.

Open Source for Your Career

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I was quoted last week in an article for Monster.com on how knowing open source technologies can benefit your career, even as a manager: Open Source Is Not Just for Coders Anymore.

How can a manager benefit from knowing about open source tech? If they are knowledgeable about a variety of open source systems and technologies, they can have their teams use them to rapidly prototype new services without requiring a significant investment up front. Successful prototypes can then either be further developed with OS tools or used to identify proprietary tools with which to build a production system. Either way, the manager has made a valuable contribution that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

New Article: Getting the Most from Your E-marketing Efforts

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Just added another article to the resources section of the site: Getting the Most from Your E-Marketing Efforts:

Do you need to improve your e-marketing results but don’t want to add to the torrential downpour of marketing messages that hit your members every day?

Then focus on improving your existing efforts rather than increasing the frequency of your messages.

This article was originally published in an ASAE newsletter.

Good Intro Article on Web Analytics

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Digital Web Magazine has published a nice intro article to web analytics: Dollars & Sense of Web Analytics:

Web analytics, whose origins date back to the invention of the Web, has worked its way from the domain of the technically minded to marketers, thanks in part to software with improved user interfaces and easy-to-understand reports. Despite these improvements, there is still a lack of understanding of the technical side of analytics. Web developers and marketing folks need to share the analytic tool, and each group has specific needs that can be fulfilled by the tool.

Check it out.

New Article: The Association Web Job Description

Posted on by David
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I have just posted an article I wrote that went out in ASAE’s Technoscope newsletter a while ago: The Association Web Job Description. The article identifies the major areas that should be considered when designing positions to support an association web site, including sample language.

You may also want to see the sample interview questions for content management positions that I posted a while ago.

The Knowledge Sharing Toolkit

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David Bartholomew has released a Knowledge Sharing Toolkit that he has developed over the past 2 years.

The ‘Knowledge Sharing Toolkit’ is the result of a two-year DTI-funded project carried out by innovation consultancy David Bartholomew Associates (DBA) and nine of the UK’s leading architectural and engineering practices – Aedas, Arup, Broadway Malyan, Buro Happold, Edward Cullinan Architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley, Penoyre & Prasad, Whitby Bird and WSP.

A concise 49 page how-to manual accompanied by nine detailed case studies, the Toolkit shows building design practices how to develop a knowledge strategy to support their business objectives, and explains the main tools and techniques for learning and sharing knowledge, and how to use them.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (just spotted it today) but thought I would go ahead and share the link for those of you interested in facilitating knowledge sharing.

(Via James Robertson.)

Keynote's APXL

Posted on by David

Just came across an Apple developer connection article on how Apple’s Keynote presentation software stores all presentation data in an xml document:

At the heart of the Keynote presentation file is the presentation.apxl file, which specifies every detail of the presentation’s appearance and behavior—from the appearance of the master slide and each individual slide to the transitions used between slides and the state of the presentation when the customer first opens it.

The article goes on to talk about some of the nifty possibilities of integrating your databases and applications with Keynote. My own idea is that with a little (ok, maybe a lot) of hacking, you could provide a Keynote presentation feed for your weblog.

I love XML.