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...

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...