Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

Righto, April month is closing in fast, and the weight of the current thesis is that most of the stuff which is gonna be delivered is still inside my head, while a minority of it is written into thesis.odt. So for the next month I'm gonna pretty much lock myself inside the closet with a laptop and get the page count up. So there will be very little IM-chatting, programming, partying, social life, and least of all, blogging. The next post will appear soon after I have delivered the thesis, 2nd of May. After that I can officially declare this blog complete :)

I'm not really happy with the outline of the requirements I've put up so far, but as it goes when you're trying to improve your own writing, I've gone blind as to how I can improve it. I've divided the requirements into 4 parts: Content life cycle (how the content goes from draft to published, archived and deleted) Management (administration, workflow) Globalization (internationalization and localization) Content delivery (templating, syndication, search, feedback from content consumers (as in comments)) Not extendability, but extensibility (modification, customization) Don't really know how I ended up with those parts, but I think I started off with a long list of 10-15 smaller requirements, then tried to knot them together like that. The last one is the most important one in my eyes. Regular readers might have noted some connection here in how the OS-compliance will pay off in higher extensibility. How? W

Now this is a real WCMS! A system developed totally in-house to put together hundreds of thousands of pages, one hundred content managers (personell). Really interesting to see how it works. Java-based of course (at least the client). Interesting server architecture, semi-technical. Focus on information architecture. Lotsa meta-data and XML talk-and-do. Still, the client looks no fancier than the one we developed for Primetime Portal. Funny how the IBM website has. in spite of efforts such as this, always been quite crappy. Probably due to the overload of content that has to be dragged around with everything. Still alotta useful stuff in that article I can use.

Introduces some light technical factors. First some nice social requirements. Cultural stuff, discusses the language/country challenge. Content is enabled further through translation, but I think this paper is a bit too.. ideal. In a small- or medium sized business, you have a local audience, or you have an international (and thereby English) audience. Internationalization is a hassle to develop and even worse to maintain. Do no bother if you do not really have to.

Interesting article doing an early review of open source projects in the library system (ILS) world. Uses a framework called Development Arena (DA) for comparing projects. A DA seems to be a context description using ANT'y terms. Very flash, but I'll try to restrain myself from using ANT in the thesis. Some good points in the article anyway. Conclusion is that "the presence of mature commercial softwatre results in limited interest and support for F/OSS options". Would be interesting to hear if this has changed since... uh.. 17th of May, 2005.

This piece by Steve Goodwin and Richard Vidgen is written in 2002 and proves to be a quite nice and quick introduction to the processes of WCM. It seems the term WCM was hyped a bit more than today those years ago, but still these guys have a view of WCM pretty similar to mine. After the very good intro, they produce a framework (more like the typical aspects of WCM, and which problems they sought to solve, like workflow and meta-data) , then procede to elaborate a bit on a real WCMS-effort which failed to some extent (like all greate software projects do). Some nice focus on XML or RDF, interestingly enough with a focus on using UML to model the markup. The article merely scraps the surface of WCM, but does it well in 8 pages.

So I finally applied for a conference . My first (or actually my second - the first one was accepted last year for Dubai, but we bailed out :) ) will be IKE'06 in Las Vegas ! It's an 8 page paper about The Advantages of Using Open Source WCMS Utilizing Open Standards. Now there are still a lot of thing that have to be settled before I can get there: The draft has to be accepted A has to "bless" the conference (didn't get any feedback from her before I sent the draft) I have to get funding from the institute (which I've heard they don't do anymore) I have to get funding from the research group Write the final paper that can be published in the conference Have to get tickets and lodging I will of course be funding part of the trip myself (might throw in a week-long road trip before and after the conference), but come to that I'll demand that the flight and hotel-cost be covered by the university. We have a pr

Sorry for the recent drought in posts. There is a problem between Blogger and Writely which stops me from publishing onto this blog . The Writely crew are on the job, and the recent acquisition by Google (told ye so) shouldn't make it any trickier for them to get it working again (Google also owns Blogger). I've written a handful posts on Writely waiting to get out. Will release them gradually after the issue has been fixed.