tfnico's blog

I went through my intro and have started to rewrite the whole thing. Posting it here to show A. The difference is that this intro takes a more top-down, basical approach. Background The last ten years have seen revolution after revolution within information technology and telecommunications. The rise of the Internet, the success of the World Wide Web, the availability of personal computers and server performance, more recently the circulation of mobile devices and the distribution of broadband Internet are all trends of the new technological infrastructure which supports the world of modern assets which is electronical or digital data and information. As to illustrate the increase in digital capability in containing data, one might consider the fact that the information estimated lost in the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria would fit on one single DVD. As storage space has grown, and network bandwidth has widened, the mass of digital inform...

Hero of the Week Award : " It is pathetic and sad that the scientists are perpetrating an act, not of mere hubris, and larceny, but seriously, murder." Just noting that many of the articles I review are from journals available only to subscribers (that includes my university, so as long as I'm on a UiO-IP, I'm free to browse for example the ACM portal online, same goes for the IEEE periodical). Why is this? My education is paid for by the government (the people). My professors are paid by the government, and so is their research. Why should the knowledge they produce only be available to subscribers? Annual membership to the ACM Portal is $100. IEEE charges 13$ for one article (subscription prices are insane).

The system described in this article takes it several steps further, using Java to dynamically generate web pages based on fragments of content. There is a focus on performance, utilizing cache and and graph algorithms (ODG) for conditionally rendering/re-building/publishing pages when fragments are changed. The templates are made with the ESI language (looks a bit like SSI). The major part of the article undertakes a series of benchmarks and statistics to evaluate performance, but also displays functionality for searching, evaluating incoming and outing hyperlinks, as well as other handy ODG analysis stuff. This article is a bit too technical for me. There is of course a crucial need to research performance under GRUPA, and this article does a fine job of pressing the issue, but still it's not particularly within my scope. Will still reference it under the levels .

[title continued:] .. as the Solution to a Web Site Redesign How long can these titles get? Anyhow, the article is from the ACM journal, only a couple of pages long. It describes how they (programmers at University at Buffalo) in a two month period implemented a WCM tool with Perl/CGI to perform what I would call the templating of their webpages. They also created some style guides (part of CM strategy). Will put a reference to this one in somewhere under the levels of CM .

What is the difference between a portal and a WCMS? I've been asking myself that question since the beginning of this thesis. Others have asked as well. Indeed, the WCMS I've been working on for Primetime used to be called Primetime Portal . Now it seems the question is bubbling around in the CMS blogosphere these days. John Quirk suggests "..if they are dealing with content a CMS solution is where they should be focused. If they are planning on allowing access to back end applications or information stored in those applications, a portal solution is a better fit.". Toby Ward claims the gap will shrink (or blur, perhaps making it easier to fall down the gap?) as both product families grow and mature. Bob Boiko suggests Knowledge Portals are the last trick from the KM camp. James Robertson has written a white-paper on business portals, explains the concept of portals rather well. When I present my thesis to more-or-less technology aware people, they sometimes ...

First post in a long time now. Managed to catch quite a nasty cold the other day, and the week before was pretty cramped with turning one open source CMS into a webshop (will post about it later). One of the main issues with my thesis as now is that it lacks a red thread through it. The thesis is an answer to a question; a research question. Am I ready to specify a context of the question? See writing about open source and open standards in wcms is still too general. I need some sort of approach or specialty, an aspect I can attack. In my experience, you have to be careful when reading through your own papers. Do it too often, and you grow tired of your own content. My technique will now be to first look quickly through the thesis (7500 words) and the blog (11000 words, bloglines is a great tool for viewing your whole blog on one page), and see if I can select an aspect based on the content I've already collected. Afterwards, I will go through it again, more slowly this time, ad...