Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

This is the second post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements I meant to write some more and original stuff that's floating around inside my head these days, but the weekend was spent in a winter resort with work (we tried kiting, snow rafting, ruled the after-ski and had a great time otherwise). I'm a bit worn out at the moment, so here's a quick paste from what I've written on CMS requirements earlier, detailing out the parts I've put in the category management requirements . Management Requirements The person or persons who will be spending the most time on the web-site are no doubt the ones responsible for managing the online content, be it a company clerk, a webmaster or a chief information/content/knowledge officer. If this user does not find the CMS practical and usable, the content will quickly stagnate, and site traffic drop. Creation For the authors, the most important functiona

I don't know much Finnish, but appearantly I'm being referred to from Finnish Wikipedia . I'm guessing it has something to do with Content Management Saunas (they're linking to this post ).

I had Commons Logging pretty far up my ass last year, giving us problems with classloading in WebSphere and Axis. And now I'm in another project where I have to deal with it. It hasn't given me much fuss in this project that I know of (yet), but I don't need more excuses before lending my support to Johannes' Commons Logging notice .

I recently posted about the fabled CMS requirements , providing my own categorization without any further elaboration on what the different req's imply. Today I'm gonna fill in the holes on the first category, Technical Requirements : Technical requirements are the obligatory basic needs of the environment, hardware and software hosting and maintaining the WCMS. The successful deployment of a WCMS depends on many information infrastructural circumstances and politics like management priority, user acceptance and technical feasibility. As will be declared in a later post, the main requirement of a WCMS is extensibility, and the one who has to make use of this requirement is indeed the developer responsible for deploying and running the WCMS in-house of the intended organization or corporation. The hardware requirements and costs have not been a main issue in my experiences with maintaining CMS. I therefore disregarded the still very crucial requirements of scalability , avai

I've managed to get involved with the local Oslo Interactive Ruby-community (IRB) ( citycita group here ). I've been to a good handful of Ruby-presentations the last year ( JavaZone , XP-meetup , as well as IRB and JavaBin ), and I still haven't gotten around to really fiddle with Ruby *shame*. Anyhow, yesterday I was at another Ruby meetup, and as these meetups are getting increasingly more popular, I told Marius I'd ask around to see if we could use our office for the next meetup . As you can see, the theme for the next meetup will be hacking on IRB's "CMS". It is currently running on a Wordpress-like engine called Mephisto , which is written in Ruby of course. I've always been a big proponent of using blog-engines as your CMS since you probably don't need much else than what today's blog can deliver, so this will be an interesting opportunity to prove that point. It will also be interesting to see whether I'll have any idea about wha

As I wrote in my previous post I've been through my yearly evaluation at work. In short it was a 4-hour talk with my team-leader where we went through different aspects of my performance, such as development abilities, people skills, and so on. Now such an evaluation might sound like a bit of a harsh Americanized performance indicator that decides my pay-check, but I appreciated getting honest feedback and ideas on areas where I can improve. Note that one important prerequisite for doing this sort of evaluation is having a team-leader you trust, not being the same person as the one who finally decides your pay-check ;) After the evaluation of last year's achievements, we set out to decide this year's goals. We arrived at me reading quite a few books, doing some internal as well as external presentations, delivering some projects and participating on a couple of courses. All these goals were formalized with concrete objectives, and will be easy to measure throughout the year

Many months ago I enjoyed reading Matt Raible's Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work . I re-stumbled over it now reading his 2006 review . Tomorrow I'm doing my first yearly evaluation (even though I've only worked there for 6 months). Sorta wish I had been better at noting/blogging what I've been doing for the last year, but it can quickly be summed up in finishing thesis enjoying the summer started new job Doesn't look to impressive, but I can't be bothered with the details right now. Now what I wanna do is a cross-checking of how I do on Matt's tips: Write stuff down Roger that! Writing as much on the internal wiki as ever! Quit reading e-mail and blogs . Ermm.. I quit reading blogs, so I'm halfway there. I don't too much mail anyway. Work on open source late at night, with a beer on your desk . Errhhmm.. Have really been falling behind on my open-source efforts.. Work disconnected . Nope. Listen to music while you work . I always do . Work