Technical Content

I’ve written (or am writing) four books about CMS. The link above describes them all, but here are Amazon links for the three that have published:

• Web Content Management: Systems, Features, and Best Practices (2016)
• Real World Content Modeling: A Field Guide to CMS Features and Architecture (2019). You can read this entire book on this website (at the link).
• Things You Should Know: 25 Lessons I’ve Learned About Selecting Content Technology and Services (2020)

I’m listing this separately because a co-authored it, and it’s freely available on a website, in addition to being available in print.

I started writing this and never finished it. It’s about 13,000 words, and I have no idea what to do with it. I made a half-hearted attempt to convert it to Markdown, but the formatting might be poor. I might keep fiddling with it.

I wrote the foreword for a multi-author book on content operations.

I wrote a sidebar for Sara’s book.

I wrote the (short) chapter on content migrations for this book. The book was anthology-style – dozens of people each contributed a chapter to it.

This started as a simple list of all the phases of a website implementation project that we would do at Blend. I started the list for no particular reason, and eventually expanded it into a process-ish document. Corey Vilhauer then worked it over into the form here, as a marketing piece for Blend. It eventually became the basis for the Web Project Guide.

I was paid to write this as a marketing piece for DNN Software (makers of DotNetNuke and Evoq). However, I retained the copyright to it, and we re-formatted it as a Blend marketing piece, which is the version here. There’s a DNN-branded version floating around too.

Like many others in this list, this started out as something I wrote down to informally send to prospects. Corey expanded it, and we re-formatted it as a formal marketing piece. It covers all the stuff you need to think about before launching your website. A lot of this stuff made it into the Web Project Guide.

This is the second version of a paper I did with Corey about our experience implementing CMS for higher ed. I did the first version of this with Lynsey Struthers. Blend has historically done a lot of higher ed work, and the paper covers a lot of the problems we saw working in that space. We did a co-marketing campaign with Episerver using this paper that didn’t really go anywhere.

This discussed what we now know as simple rules-based personalization, which was new and interesting at the time. I can’t remember why I wrote this. The title page says “for Episerver,” but I don’t think I actually wrote it for Episerver. I think I did this independently as a marketing exercise for Blend.

I was paid to write this for the now-defunct (in the US) CMS company Movable Type, during their attempt to rebuild their brand. (There’s a conference presentation below from that same campaign.) The paper demonstrates how to use a decoupled CMS like Movable Type to manage content in a “transactional” application, like an online banking system.

I blogged about content management and other tech stuff for almost 20 years at Gadgetopia. I recently archived 7,000 or so low quality posts, leaving about 400 relevant posts. (If you’re interested, I wrote a long blog post about the methodology behind this archival process.)

In December 2020, I closed down the Gadgetopia domain name and moved all the posts to this site.

In late 2023, I started “blogging” on LinkedIn a bit. I archive all the interesting posts here.

Me and some friends tried to create a blog about CMS user interfaces. It didn’t go so well, but I’ve archived what we did.

Here are the 7,000 posts archived from Gadgetopia. If you try to access these on the main site, you’re re-directed here. This site is cloaked from search. (Note: there is purposefully nothing to browse here.)

For about 18 months, I collected links and wrote some posts about automation and its effect on life and work.

I created a blog about intranets for a few months in 2007. I’ve republished about 50 posts on this site.

I’ve written quite a bit in my role at Optimziely.

I wrote this about the early days of Blend, and how we needed to find someone to actually manage things.

I did a short interview with GatherContent about content and books.

This was a companion to my distributed CMS talk I was doing in 2019.

I wrote this is as a subscriber brief for an analyst, but it never got published for some reason.

I wrote this as a retrospective of content publishing models for the 20th anniversary of…something. I don’t quite remember, but it was some article series CMS Wire was pushing at the time.

An examination of the problems that result when you only translate part of a website, which happens often. I wrote this for the Lionbridge blog as a favor for my friend Seth who worked there at the time. (The date is a guess – that was the last modified date on the file I sent him.)

I was interviewed about CMS by DNN Software. I’m not sure where this ended up, but here’s the archived interview as I sent it to them.

I wrote this for O’Reilly to promote my first book.

I wrote an article on content migration to help promote the Content Strategy Workshops.

I’ve done a quite a few videos for Optimizely.

A brief conversation about content that I had with the CEO of Episerver overlooking Sydney Harbor. It’s foggy, but you can see the Harbor Bridge in the background, and the Opera House is just barely visible on the extreme left of the screen.

This was the keynote at Episerver’s conference in Miami in 2019. One of my better talks. When I gave this, I had been working at Episerver for about two months, so I was jumping right into the deep end.

A talk about a scripting language called Denina at CodeGarden in Odense, Denmark.

Probably the best version of this talk I ever gave, at CodeGarden in 2019.

From CodeGarden 2018 in Odense, Denmark.

One of my favorite talks, from CodeGarden 2017 in Odense, Denmark.

This was, I believe, the first of six times I delivered this talk in 2017. This is from Blend’s own conference in Sioux Falls.

A short video interview I did for Kentico at their partner event in Chicago.

A discussion about content migrations that I did for a migration services vendor (who I don’t think it still around).

This was a talk at the eZ Conference in 2015 in Brooklyn. It’s about multi-channel content distribution.

This was the conference into and a discussion of something called the “Blend Web Operations Management Framework” that actually was never formalized and released.

A talk about multi-channel publishing from Blend’s own conference in Sioux Falls.

An odd little video I made for the Typo3 community at the request of my friend Rasmus. It was just a minute-and-a-half about my impressions of the NEOS project (which was quite good). I understand this was shown at one of their conferences somewhere.

A talk I did for now-defunct-ish Movable Type in NYC in a virtually empty room. It was weird. This was a repeat-ish of my DrupalCon talk.

This is the first time I gave this talk. I summarized it in a blog post.

This is a document I used for a few conference workshops. It covers the entire scope of a CMS implementation, from planning through development, planning, support, and human factors.

I gave this at a breathtakingly small conference in Minneapolis for eZ Systems. It eventually became the basis for the “Why Content Projects Fail” talk.

This was for a session at Content Strategy Workshops in Portland.

This is a PDF of a deck I put together about an idea I called “Backbone” at the time, which was really a combination of a headless CMS and a DAM, I think.

One of two times I’ve been at J. Boye Philly. In retrospect, I was talking about a really obvious point, but it felt unique at the time. Jeff Cram did a write-up of this talk on the CMS Myth.

In retrospect, this was an odd presentation for what I believe was the very first Now What Conference. It was more content strategy than content management, and I think I was out of my depth on this one.

For Gilbane 2011. Rahel Bailie saw me present this, and asked me to do it again in Portland later that year.

I gave this at a conference in Vancouver for ThoughtFarmer. I then added to it a bit and got invited to Sydney for Intranets 2012.

This might be an early spark of my distributed CMS talk. I based it on a blog post I came up with earlier that year.

I discussion about the then-new idea of “conversational marketing.” This was more content strategy/marketing, but that’s what they asked me for. It was easy for them to get technical talks; harder for them to get business talks. This was on my first ever trip to Europe, at the Episerver Global Partner Summit in Malmo, Sweden. I was there to collect the North American Partner of the Year award.

A discussion about how to do content inventories. The only time I ever did Gilbane San Francisco. That was the last year before they ended that conference, I believe.

This was for an all-day client workshop while planning an intranet. I cover a lot of ground in here about what an intranet does – the role it plays, the scope of features it offers, with some thoughts on challenges and adoption.

I talked with Kim Davis in Miami during the Episerver Ascend conference.

A discussion about headless CMS for Ingeniux, a CMS vendor.

A lovely conversation with my friend Sarah Werner about the writing of my first book. (The page didn’t work the last time I was there, but you can get the audio player directly here. Also, the raw MP3 can be streamed from this site here.)

My second time on with Jeff.

A talk with my friend Jeff Eaton.

My board shut the program down. Here’s the ceasing operations notice, preserved for posterity. This was on the cmprofessionals.org domain for a period of time. (That domain has since expired and been acquired by someone else.)

Before we made the decision to shut the organization down, I wrote this document for the Board proposing how we might move CM Pros forward. We did not execute on anything in this document.

(I mention a glossary in here. I have another document about problems I need to solve for that project, and I did end up writing a glossary on my own a few years later.)

Just a brain dump of everything I know (knew?) about webhooks up to that point in time.

An idea I did with some friends that didn’t quite work out. But the content we did post was good, so I wanted to archive it.

This is technically code, but the documentation wiki for Denina is about 12,000 words and it has a lot of information about the theory of editorial scripting languages. In particular, look through the pages in the “About” subheading: Why Do This, Alternatives, and Use Cases.

I was involved in producing and managing a conference series while I was at Blend Interactive. This is a short personal history of that experience.

I wrote this as a web-only supplement to my first book. It defines 200+ terms around content management. (It’s also archived here since the book site no longer belongs to me.)

This is an email newsletter about CMS that I send every 2-3 weeks.

A list of feature and capability questions developed for a CMS Request for Information (RFI) document.

A document describing a proposed process to implement personalization in a WCM platform.

This was a vague idea I had for a distributed CMS I called “Spartacus.” I had no intention to build it, but I was using it to explore ideas about distribution and orchestration.

In 2001, I attended a conference as a precocious 20-something and wrote a breathless email back to my colleagues about the future of CMS. I’ve preserved and annotated that email here.

Some raw notes on the relationships between content entities, and how they are affected by naming and tense over time.

A list of issues I was trying to resolve when forming a team to write a content management glossary.

Some ideas I had around QA issue classification and process execution.