tfnico'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...

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,...

Seeing as this blog still picks up some traffic, I'm putting a bit of effort in to get some of my pre-historic thoughts into the open. They sounded like a good idea enough to write down (in the thesis), so they're probably interesting to post here. The last thing I posted about was about the evolution of web content management . Funny, when I wrote that the original title was actually The Levels of WCM, but when I looked over it later it was like I'd written a journey through the 90'ies online publishing; from httpd to lamp. Now here's the next section I wrote. It's about the alternative forms of WCM, some of which have grown/shrunk into/away from eachother the last few years: Alternatives to Web Content Management Systems To further explain web content management, one can consider what other web content tools and management systems are used today , and what separates these from full WCM systems [Byrne, 2001], [Junco, 2004]. The definitions in use...