I’ve been fighting off a link spammer in my wiki this weekend, up to and including banning IP addresses, all of which has been circumvented. So, I’ve decided I have invested enough time in that activity and have taken down the wiki. I still have all the data and will work on republishing it here in some form that won’t get hijacked.
S5 Presents provides a web-based interface to create and share presentations using the standards-based S5 presentation template. Really a great idea. The owner of the site also shares the full source code for the service if you want to set up your own site for S5 presentations.
Here is my good idea for the week: web traffic analysis reports in RSS. I’d love to have a package that can report daily and weekly stats for a site in RSS so I can add it to my subscription list. That sounds like a much easier way to keep tabs on a site than remembering to go view an HTML report daily.
Some cursory searching in google didn’t turn up anything yet. Hopefully some enterprising scripter will get on this and extend one of the existing packages out there.
IEEE has a portion of their web site dedicated to their volunteer leadership, providing links to training and reference material they need to fulfill their duties in the governance of the association. Nice example of how to provide simple self-service support to the big kahunas.
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.
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.
In our session yesterday I had the opportunity to ask Loretta DeLuca of DelCor Technology Solutions what she thought about deploying an AMS and a CMS simultaneously. (Loretta is one of the more experienced AMS selection consultants out there.) She said she wouldn’t recommend it either but for slightly different reasons than I have been yammering on about here. Her main concern was that trying to develop your ‘front-office’ systems (the CMS) while still developing, deploying and configuring your ‘back-office’ system (the AMS) is inviting lots of backtracking and crises you need not have to deal with if you wait for the AMS deployment to be complete before ramping up on the CMS project. Waiting lets the AMS settle down so that it isn’t a moving integration target for the CMS. Makes sense to me.
OK, I think that dead horse is well and truly beaten. I’ll move on to something else soon. 🙂
C. David Gammel, CAE 