Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

Now I had to do some more fixing on this blog. Turns out the width of the column in the blog really didn't suit my content. I know people like reading narrow columns, but I like stuffing large images and tables into my posts, and given that my posts can be somewhat long, I think thin columns make single posts look too.. long. So I started fiddling around with the template, and pretty soon managed to mess it up pretty bad. I ended up removing all background images, the blogspot-navbar, left-aligning the whole thing while making the header 100% wide, which is nice, but I still don't like the left-aligned content. So my CSS-knowledge is as crappy as ever, but hey, I'm a programmer, not a designer (which reminds me of another post I have to do soon: " The programming designer; a rare breed of which we are in dire need" . Now I'm adding some feedburner stuff. Took a wee while to find their JS snippets, they've got something called FeedFlare , which I can imag

I have already converted it, but I chose to stick with my old template design because I like it. Still, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of nice new widgety functionality, and no better time than my birthday to figure out how it goes. Logged in Template settings Customize Design Upgrade your template! Chose one of the booring ugly templates Saved Quickly added some javascript components to the template (blogroll and linkroll) Saved And done. Wow, that was easy.. Still having problems publishing posts from Google docs/Writely with titles, but maybe this one will work? Edit: Still doesn't work. What a pain in the arse. Manually setting title for the 100th time. But also trying out the tags.

I just had to look up how to spell 'ex(c)ercise'. This, among a wide range of other daily examples tell me that I need to mentally exercise more often: Every week there is a math riddle in Teknisk Ukeblad which I have no chance to solve at all. I recently saw a presentation of how the fibonacci formula was solved, and I understood just about quack, even if I used to assistant-teach linear algebra at Oslo's university college some years ago (I used to be great at maths, but never had any use for it in professional life). I'm having trouble with improvisation, both musically and conversationally. You could consider this blog a mental excersise, but it does little else than keep my English writing skills in order. It could have something to do with the all the festivities (and subsequent hangovers), but I feel my short-term memory is detoriating as well. Already now I have forgot lots of ideas I wanted to put into this post.. perhaps just as well :) Anyhow, I noticed th

When I wrote the thesis about implications of using open source and open standards in Content Management Systems, I needed a set of requirements that would fit the structure of the rest of the thesis. Now I probably started off with a typical list of Bob Boiko's, but over the months of writing it sort of morphed and evolved into its present state. I divided CMS requirements into 6 categories: Technical (the requirements from this point of view, typically formed by the people who have to install and maintain the CMS) Management (the users, the content managers' needs) Globalization Content Delivery (the needs of the audience, the content readers) Costs Extensibility Not sure this table will come out right in the blog, but I attempt to paste it in: Requirement Keywords Technical Deployment Installation, migrat

The previous post finally mentioned open source CMS'es. To supply readers with some update on the discussions of open source and open standards, here are a couple o' paragraphs from my thesis on these subjects. Note that Sun has since the time of writing decided to open source Java . Open Source Having given some indicators to open source WCM systems, the concept should be properly explained. Open sou rce software refers to programs whose source code is made available for use or modification. This means that open source software is in fact free to acquire [Walli, 2005] and change. A lot of people find this hard to believe, and many presume that such software is produced on a volunteer basis, and therefore lacks quality, security and consistency [Economist, 2006]. This is true for a lot of smaller open source projects, but many projects show signs of the opposite [Raymond, 2000], the most famous of these being the operating system GNU/Linux. There is a prominent cas

A lot of people of around me tend to ask me where they can find a good CMS solution. The most typical question is how they can get started with their own website (where my typical answer is 'Don't. Register a blog instead'). More ambitous entrepeneurs ask where can they buy a total CMS solution solving business requirement X, Y and Z. To these I often end up answering that such a solution does not exist yet, and it will be darn expensive to develop. However, if they still want to see what's out there, I recommend reading the rest of this blog-post and continue the research on their own. Communities The WCMS market is so large that it is nearly impossible to get a complete overview of solutions. Attempts to explore this market have already been made by some online communities, and in my opinion the best way to experience the market is by following the lead of these communities. There are also a number of annual conferences specifically intended for cont

Stand-Alone Web Content Management System Many organizations have intranets on which they perform their content management duties. It is natural to propose that the WCMS integrates with the CMS. Parts of the content which should be exposed on the Web already exists somewhere in the CMS, perhaps on the intranet or on a central file server. It is natural to believe that the best solution is to invest in a total solution where a CMS includes the WCMS by displaying the content with a Web interface. The case for choosing an isolated or singular standalone WCMS is explained below. When selecting a system to control their web-site, decision makers are tempted to invest in enterprise solutions. These solutions promise to solve many of the corporate IT-problems with a single centralized silver bullet system. However, the projects where these solutions are selected, implemented and deployed often fail miserably, taking too long to complete. If they ever achieve nominal use,