tfnico's blog

This is the fourth post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements Management Requirements End-user Requirements This is perhaps the most important factor for WCMS buyers. The total cost of an information system is easily displaced as buyers have a tendency to ignore the total lifecycle of the software. A CIO in a small company could explain that she spends zero on web content management since she does it all by herself, but the number of hours she spends updating the web content each week might amount to a significant expense relative to the size of the company. A WCMS has costs upon acquisition. The software is bought, and additional modules or plug-ins will likely add to the price. It must be tested, deployed and tweaked by developers to fit the company's environment. A web design must be applied to the templates. Users must be instructed on how to use the system. Older content must be imported. There are ...

I just saw via InfoQ that IBM maintains a list of Java EE best practices. Now I've never really been good with bile, but there is just so many things wrong with this list on so many levels. Just listen to the title: "IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: The top Java EE best practices". A bit of paradoxial, isn't it? Let's take a quick look through the list and comment on each point: 1. Always use MVC. Yeah, right. Always use MVC. Remember to design a rigid 3-tier architecture upfront no matter what sort of application you are going to build. Use Struts, right? Right. 2. Don't reinvent the wheel. Well, duh. Struts, right? Right. 3. Apply automated unit tests and test harnesses at every layer. I'd actually support this one if I could append "if possible". 4. Develop to the specifications, not the application server. Well that certainly was a good tooting from the wrong horn, coming from the deranged nit-wits that gave us WSAS and ...

This is the third post about digging deeper into content management requirements. See also Requirement Overview Technical Requirements Management Requirements Today I'm gonna run through two categories of requirements. They both have to do with how the CMS is portrayed towards the end-user, through translation and delivery. Globalization International companies need multilingual web-sites [Huang, 2001] with internationalization and localization features . Internationalization This is the concept of having country and language-specific content, essentially having the main content of the web-site translated to one or more languages [Iverson, 2002]. Translation of a WCMS can be divided into two parts. The most important one is how the content itself can be translated by the content managers. The other aspect is the language of the WCMS itself regarding internal interfaces for administration and management. Localization This refers to visual effects based on the visitor'...

Can't belive I didn't notice Yahoo! Pipes earlier. That site/concept could pretty quickly turn into one of the biggest things in our Web 2.0 craze.. Here, I made one that joins my InfoQ feed and the TSS feed: My first pipe . But do I think it's really useful for anything? Nah, don't think so. I'll settle for my bloglines for the time being.

This tuesday I'm going to do a workshop on wiki for some people in management/business development department. We've been smart enough to choose Confluence for our internal wiki, and its use has been growing steadily ever since last summer, bout the same time as I joined the company. Over this time I've managed to earn the rep of a wiki-evangelist within the company. This is probably I've taken the time to learn the in's and out's of Confluence content formatting, making pretty layouts with columns and tables, galleries, RSS-feeds, and intranet blogging. Some people think I spend too much time fiddling around with it (see for instance the screenshot of my personal space page), but I think it's fun and interesting to try out. I'm not doing it to evangelize the whole company into going crazy on wiki-usage, I just use the wiki to cover my own butt mostly. If I didn't write things down in the wiki, I'd very quickly fall into the state of corporate ...

For the last few weeks I've had the joy of working with a portal solution that also provides excellent CMS features. More often than not, portal meets CMS by being a Portal with some junky editor functionality inside , but there are also some CMS'es that feature bits'n'pieces of functionality like portlets, widgets and plugins. The portal I've been working seems to strike in the middle. It has the richest CMS interface I've come across in a portal product (content structure, versioning, editing all neatly packed into a comfy filthy fat applet client that actually works), and every bit of content is actually an instance of a portlet by its own right (how they've managed to keep the performance so high is quite impressive, and a mystery to me). This means that not only can I choose each piece of content from a large variety of portlet packages, but I can also transcend content between different states , which is a very handy portlet feature. However, there is...

I'm going to do a lightning talk on this topic at tomorrow's XP-meetup , so if any of you devoted readers are attending you might get away with reading this blog-post. Spend the five minutes going downstairs for a pint, and bring me one while you're at it, please. I was once in a meeting participated by a team of developers, requirement managers, test managers and project managers. The topic of discussion were how requirement changes should be handled. The original requirements were described mostly in the form of use-case documents. The problem, and the reason for the meeting, was that the implementation was failing to follow the stuff specified in the use-cases. The round went around the table with each and every member pledging to read the use-cases more carefully, and the requirement manager promised to clearly highlight changes and references in the documents. When the turn came around to me I said something along the lines of: I have read the use-cases already. I...

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...