tfnico'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.

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...

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...