tfnico's blog

I usually don't like meta-blogging (blogging about the concept of blogs), because a lot of other people do it . But today John Udell raised an interesting example of interaction between (in lack of a better general term) enthusiasts as a result of the openness of the web (all the web2.0 thingies like blogs and podcasts, their links, comments and trackbacks). This reminded me of that I dared to write "I've experimented with the use of a blog as an online research tool" in the Method-chapter in my thesis, and continued: While it lacks structure and rigorousness of this thesis, the blog is still chronological through time, and in a way, it represents the research in a more honest way. It also performs the role of a dynamic research tool, as updated resources are available through my blogroll and linkroll. Kristin Helen was the fellow-CMS enthusiast that opened my eyes for getting away with this (by pointing me to this document (1), and now she has in fact publishe...

jmettraux noted that Alex Popescu is the technological architect of the new InfoQ developer community site and suggests that it is running on Magnolia . If this is the case, it is one excellent reference site for the Magnolia project. Alex commented that he will be writing about the architecture in some coming articles, but I can't wait with taking a few guesses. I think it's a mash-up of different systems (seeing they're gonna use Jive for forums). There's not a uniform url-pattern on the links. One .jsp, one .html, some .action (although this need not mean anything ) The .action urls are very WebWork'ish, but could of course be JSF (event oriented). The use of DWR points towards no web framework in particular. Alex has also made a comment supporting the notion of WebWork/Struts Ti. On the other hand, the Magnolia developers are moving towards JSF/Facelets/Freemarker. The infoq.com/.magnolia is forbidden , so there is definetly some Magnolia stuff going on h...

Seth Gottlieb wrote a good post on Email and Content Management I never miss the opportunity to evangelize the use of our KM-tools instead of e-mail (and sometimes even verbal contact). Some effective techniques I used at work: * Refuse to do any task colleagues sent me by email, insisting that they issue a ticket in our task-tracker instead. * Never reply with informative emails. Rather write a wiki-page on the subject and send the link to the correspondents. * Each time a colleague seeks to explain how something works, or teach me something, I insist that they write a wiki-page instead, and send me the link. We shouldn't abandon email. It's a quick and responsive tool that creates alot of dialog and content productivity. KM-people know that face-to-face meetings is the best way to convey knowledge. Phone, instant messaging and even email are closer to face-to-face than a CMS. Any company should have set conventions of how different collaboration tools are used. Here are some ...

(Stupid blogger/writeley. Blog publish still not working .) Apoorv's post reminded me of the extensibility requirements of a WCMS. While his approach seems to be a more pragmatic find-requirements-and-select-best-solution, I prefer the generic but extensible solutions (probably because I'm a developer/programmer at heart). Apoorv also differentiates between customization and extension, but I find it hard to draw a clear line between these two. Here's some lines on extensibility from my thesis: The final and most important requirement of the WCMS stems from a single principle. It is impossible to predefine all requirements for a WCMS. Each year new concepts, ideas and methods are introduced to the World Wide Web, and web-sites must change the way they deliver content, content managers must change the way they produce content, and developers must change the WCMS to allow the requisite changes. We propose that extensibility is the most important requirement of WCMS, beca...

Interesting application. http://www.google.com/trends?q=cms%2C+content+management&ctab=2&geo=all&date=all It seems that most searches are done on google.dk, which is a bit surprising (lotsa Danes on the CMS-scene, but they're still a small country). Also somewhat worrying that the graph for content management is steadily sinking. We need more hype :)

Having delivered the thesis, I've figured out how I'm going to use this blog. I'm going to continue posting here, writing about web content management, but also about software development in general and other stuff. But the first thing I want to note down are my thoughts on how it was to write the thesis, sharing some writing tips with you. Writing English My first advice is: Don't . Unless its your native language, of course. I have had the pleasure of a bi-lingual upbringing, and seeing the English of many other Norwegians, I'm sorry to that generally, Norwegians write lousy English. Its not that we make grammatical or syntactical errors, but the feeling of the sentence is just.. wrong. And don't be fooled: Word or any other another spell-checker is not good enough. I've gone over another thesis which was already "fixed" by Word, and I still managed to empty a red-ink pen in the process. Another point is that you don't *think* in En...