Deane Barker’s Technical Blog

An inquiry into whether we can use our CMS repositories as context for AI agents, and how and why we might accomplish it

There are lots of things I see on the web that are “upcoming,” and I think, “How can I find out when this happens?” Of course, I just could keep checking back to the URL I’m looking at, but I’ll no-doubt eventually stop doing that. And let’s face facts: no one really wants to give their email to a…

We’re gonna need to get back to the boring basics if we’re going to survive the next decade.

Custom Elements are basically Markdown for HTML

I want a new protocol, tentatively called “Let Me Know” (LMK). The purpose is to provide someone an anonymous way to get notified when a singular, specific event occurs. Here’s a basic use case: Some random blog author has published Parts 1 and 2 of a series. You enjoyed it, and you want to know…

Lately, I’ve been introduced to some fascinating words: Diegesis: this is the concept that audible noises in a narrative are sometimes “in” the story, meaning the characters can hear them, and sometimes they’re on the soundtrack, meaning only the viewers can hear them. (I wrote about this a bit…

We don’t talk enough about fear. In business – and in marketing especially – no one is “afraid” of anything. We’re “frustrated in our ability to execute” or we’re “concerned for changing market conditions.” We speak in the detached patois of the insider; but we’re not “afraid” of anything. That’s a…

Managing a large digital estate over time requires a lot of platform, processes, and forethought.

AI has made content strategy so much more important

Everyone wants to blame software. No one wants to blame themselves.

This industry would benefit greatly if only we could agree on how content is modeled.

We’ve gradually moved from content to campaigns. The current wave of CDPs might indicate we’re taking another step.

Editors sometimes want to change content models on the fly. This is rarely a good idea.

What do you do when you have too much content to review?

Generally speaking, a CMS is a system to manage content that doesn’t exist yet and that it can’t know anything about at the time the CMS is designed and built.

What do we believe about the origins of the content we consume?

Some stats and background information on the first year of my CMS newsletter.

At what point does a content repository evolve into a “CMS” in the traditional sense?

Why do customers pick one headless CMS over another? How do they differentiate themselves?

Templating often isn’t single-step. Progressive refinement has a necessary place in content delivery.

A look at the Big Three service frameworks, and all the complications and shades of gray which orbit around them.

A look at the current players – intentional or otherwise – in the headless CMS market.

Some decisions factors, their interplay, and outside perspective on software selection.

There are a lot of different ways to lose money on a project, and that calculation is not simple.

Some consultants spend a lot of energy trying to never, ever flinch. I’ve stopped doing this.

CMS users consistently over-estimate (1) how much they need form builders, and (2) how much the tools can do.

We often try to force-fit content into physical metaphors, where it doesn’t always fit.

Two examples of updating SQL databases from a CMS.

Content management is a bundle of skills which come together to form a larger, meta-skill.

There are some interesting reasons to use a headless CMS that go beyond the “single website” model.

Reflections on what it means to really understand a CMS, down to its bones.

The book itself matters. Beyond the practicalities it offers over ebooks, the printed book carries with it intangible characteristics that we take for granted and wouldn’t miss until long after their absence.

Pushing more content than can be absorbed actually causes feelings of loss and pain.

CMS personalization tools have failed. Here’s why, and how the next wave might be different.

What you want from a contractor is investment. Ironically, the biggest impediment to that is often the parameters of the relationship itself. Some relationships are simply designed to fail.

The first step on any implementation is to figure out what you need done. The range of services is vast.

The concept of how a “page” relates to content is a critical aspect of how a CMS works. The web has influenced this relationship.

A necessary part of any content migration is redirect the URLs from old content to new. There are a number of strong patterns to this task.

People lie in proposals all the time. This is a story about how we didn’t.

A simple request for a standard term to describe the humans that consume your content.

We spend a lot of time planning and building sites with CMSs. We spend less time actually using them. I think there’s a place for a service offering that does exactly this.

I’m writing a book about web content management.

We spend a lot of time making content that doesn’t exist in our CMS look like it does. This is an attempt to put a definition around that discipline.

Does all code need to be code? Or can some of it be managed as content? Is there a place for a separate level of code managed by editors?

If you’re a web developer, then you owe your job to HTTP. You should probably know more about it than you do.

Often you need to import AND update content, rather that just simply importing it. This makes tasks of content integration so much easier.

We make the lives of webs crawlers much more difficult and much less effective, unnecessarily.

In 1945, an American scientist theorized about an information management system that, in retrospect, sounds suspiciously like the web.

When you add a hyperlink to text, you might accidentally change the emphasis and implication of it.

There’s a lazy myth of UX that needs to be busted.

When people say they want workflow, they probably don’t.

There is NO benefit to you in being talked into using a custom CMS which is hosted and controlled by a web development shop.

In 2014, I wrote down some notes about how to give a good conference presentation. I’ve been expanded them ever since.

Lots of vendors claim to do “archiving,” but they can’t agree on what this means. It turns out that not many users do either.

The title is accurate.

Information architecture has existed since we had information, despite the occasionally belief that it’s a digital invention.

Sometimes, waiting for an answer is the correct and productive way to communicate with someone, despite claims that “facetime” is the most important interpersonal method.

I wrote a white paper for Movable Type about how to use a decoupled CMS to manage content in a non-content-based website.

If you don’t state your budget upfront, then the recipient needs to make some assumptions, and they might not assume what you expect. Your responses might be limited as a result.

A developer ostensibly visited me for a job interview once, which didn’t go the way either of us expected. I wrote him a letter afterwards to explain the problem to him.

Reasons why content geography – meaning the spatial relationship of content to other content – is a proportionately more powerful way to model content then a simple, discrete content property.

Sometimes we don’t document for valid reasons, not just because we’re lazy.

Content is a subset of information, and – consequently – content management professionals comprise a subset of information professionals. Here’s why I count myself among them.

The content management strategist slots in neatly between content strategy and a CMS implementation.

Good content management developers constantly work to increase their empathy and perspective. Here are five ways to do that.

CMS gets re-written from scratch more than any other genre of software. Here are three reasons why.

Separating content from presentation is harder and more murky than you think. Here are some thoughts from a white paper about the topic.

A small, silly rant about about what we call things.

The development of a CMS tends to get bogged down in the wrong issues. We need to extend CMS along marketing lines, not technical lines. The lack of this painfully evident in the open-source CMS space.

Reusing content across multiple channels is the Holy Grail of content management. But it’s not that simple. For certain types of content, it’s very hard to do without alienating your audience.

Comparing different systems in the CMS space is far more complicated than it seems at first glance. Here’s some reasons why.

Does organizing content in some larger geography have value? Do users want it organized this way? Does it have any inherent value over “standard” metadata?

You’re not just buying a CMS, you’re buying into the community around it. Buyers (and vendors) need to pay attention to the state of their community a lot more than they usually do.

For years, I’ve used a small feature of Gmail as the key tool in my productivity stack.

Decoupled CMS might be making a comeback.

Django and Rails are notably absent from the boxed CMS space. There are specific reasons why, and – in a larger sense – why platforms with strong frameworks tend to limit this growth.

We tend to associate librarians with books, but this is slowly changing. We should really associate librarians with information.

I was a early adopter of the Kindle. I bought one of the original first generation devices back in early 2008 (when they were fully $400). I was convinced that ebooks were the answer to the prayers of a devoted reader, and equally convinced I’d be in love with my Kindle forever. A few months later,…

Making your content strategy work with your CMS is tricky. Often it comes down to issues of content assembly. Capabilities in this space vary greatly.

I enjoyed this post from Martin White about the single thing that would make enterprise/intranet search better. Date – the ‘silver bullet’ of enterprise search He says it’s the ability to specify a date range. In the enterprise there is a constant need to define a specific date ('the 2011 corporate…

I’m wondering at what point does “time-shifted” web content constitute an entirely different distribution channel? By “time-shifted,” I mean services like Instapaper , Readabilty , and Pocket (formerly ReadItLater, and my personal favorite). These services allow you to save web content to read it…

Having a comprehensive index of content is a base requirement of a CMS. This limits what can really be considered a “CMS” and what can’t.

If you have an app of some kind in which people store data, then everyone probably wants an API. Developers somewhere are clamoring for you to open a web service (SOAP, REST, protocol du jour, whatever) for it so they can do their own stuff. I hope you have one which you planned from the start and…

The label of “page-based” is normally used as a pejorative in the world of CMS. Here’s why it matters less than you might think it does.

I love the news. I’m a news junkie. I’m constantly attached to CNN in some form or another, and have been since I started college. Lately, I’ve become very interested in news from a content strategy perspective. I’ve been talking about rivers and trees , and The Indoctrinated Audience , but I want…

When you send out an RFP, you are asking something of the people who respond. It’s good manners to fulfill your end of the bargain.

Hourly rates for integrators are largely a pointless metric on which to evaluate them.

The support required of a CMS varies greatly, and there’s a blurry line between “support” and “consulting.”

In any web project, the glamour audience that gets all the attention is the new audience – the previously unknown visitors that know little about you, and need to learn from scratch. We spend so much time on these people, making sure their information needs are handled. The “other” audience often…

Here’s why firms that strike up partnerships with every vendor are probably not the firms you want to work on your project.

Bidding CMS projects is hard. Doing it honestly is even harder.

Some CMS try to remove or limit the use of files in their development. This is corrupting one of the basic tenets of web development, and it will make developers hate you.

I really enjoyed this article from RSG and can so relate to it. It’s about “UX overreach” in site overhauls – when IAs and UX people get too active and try to do too much, adding layers and layers of superficially great functionality on a wireframe without any thought to how it’s supposed to be…

Gawker is experimenting with new comment systems, as should everyone really. Pay attention to what Nick Denton is doing with comments It only takes one look at the comments on your average Big News article to fear for the future of the human race. The new design dispenses with the tyranny of time…

A month or so ago, I posted about the NISO document for building digital collections . Buried in that document was a great quote about the different kinds of metadata. Essentially, NISO claims, it breaks down to three types: Descriptive Metadata is what we normally think of as content modeling….

You shouldn’t always sell stuff on the Internet. This might seem odd coming from a guy who gets paid to help you sell stuff on the Net, but it’s true. If you are in the physical retail business, expanding to the Net is sometimes a Very Bad Thing, and you may find out the hard way that showrooming…

Seth Gottlieb has put together a brilliant post that really calls into question the basic foundation of knowledge management: The Employee and the Professional The thing is that advanced skill and knowledge are wrapped up in the professional side of the person and that side wants to interact with…

When someone says “migration” in the context of a CMS project, stop everything and make them define exactly what they’re talking about.

A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections : I really enjoyed this white paper, published by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). It’s a tour de force around the work of managing digital collections. The term “collections” is sort of open for interpretation….

Organizational communication is about dynamic rivers of content, not static trees.

The idea of SaaS CMS is largely obsolete. Whether a CMS is SaaS or not is largely a question of business model.

After our discussion yesterday on products vs. platforms, Tony Byrne sent me a report from Real Story Group that really lays bare the entire argument. Some quotes (all with Tony’s gracious permission): “Platforms vs. Products” has replaced “Suites vs. Best of Breed” as the primary architectural…

CMS falls into a spectrum of what is a “product” and what is a “platform.” This debate has been going on for a decade now, and will likely never be resolved.

URLs are not absolute. There are a million shades of gray, and canonicals were invented to resolve this. Use them.

There’s a very interesting discussion going on over at Reddit that’s very similar to something a line of thought I’ve had for quite a while. “Self-published” is not in any way analogous to “published” The Internet has made it very easy to “publish” writing, in some form. Pre-Internet, to get…

I’ve always maintained the commenting on major websites – especially news sites – is just a complete disaster these days. Comment threads on sites like CNN and USAToday (especially USAToday, for some reason…) make me not want to live on this planet anymore . Nick Denton , of Gawker fame, agrees….

Recently, I sent someone a link to a long Gadgetopia post, and I wanted them to read one particular paragraph. So, I had to tell them, scroll down about halfway to the paragraph that starts… It was annoying. What I needed was automatic, stable bookmarks applied to every paragraph in that long block…

I really like Jeff Atwood’s post about the Rubber Duck method of problem solving . Apparently, the name comes from a manager who would have people ask their questions out loud to a rubber duck he kept on this shelf. Usually, in the middle of explaining the problem, they would stumble on the answer….

I really enjoy the Times Topics pages, and I think the New York Times does this exactly right. We’ve talked several times in the past about posts vs. pages and how they’re fundamentally different. To wit: With Wikipedia, you’re not seeing a series of posted items. You’re seeing a single body of…

Linking pages in a CMS to each other can be more complicated than you think. You have to ensure you’re link to content, not URLs, and you have to maintain a record of these links, for a variety of reasons.

Having a separate index of CMS content, structured for optimal querying, can help you solve a lot of sticky problems.

Seth Gottlieb writes about how he’s come full circle back to static publishing of websites. Fun with Static Publishing The sites are content-managed (-ish) in the background, but written to files then uploaded to Amazon S3 to be served. And this brings me to my little obsession with static…

Working in web content management, we tend to place an inordinate amount of emphasis on a single channel: the web, and naturally the website that pushes information into it. But, more and more, I’ve been beating the drum of multi-channel content delivery, as it relates to content management. The…

Content Choreography – The Art of Dynamic Web Content : I like this new name – “content choreography” – for a summation of all the skills and governance required to make content work, along with the coordination to make them all work together. It’s relatively straightforward to distill content…

I’m making a very concerted attempt lately to cut down on the RSS feeds I consume. Earlier this year, it had reached neurotic levels – Google Reader was like a heroin addiction. Because of this, longer-form media was getting squeezed out – I was reading less books, which bothered me. My life had…

The classic “feature matrix” of RFPs is a terrible way to measure a capabilities of a CMS. The support of a particular feature in a CMS is rarely a yes/no question.

I just watched Page One , which is a great documentary on the New York Times and its place in the post-print world. One recurring theme – hinted at a lot, and outright stated a couple times – is that the public often needs news that it doesn’t want to read. They had an interview with Nick Denton of…

I spoke today at the Social Intranet Summit in Vancouver, which was put on by the good folks at Thought Farmer . Great conference, all-around, but I was especially struck by how well it worked for conference speakers. I speak at 3-4 conferences a year, and there were just so many little things they…

Here’s an article about how companies fail to put “big data” – the reams and reams of information he accumulate – to good use. It starts off with a really good story about a failure of the airline industry and one of their frequent fliers. There’s No Such Thing As Big Data Go read that, then come…

Content structure is achieved at a variety of levels – structure within a property, structure withing a content object, structure between different content objects, etc.

Vendors support of content management is hard because each boxed CMS is coupled with a custom integration, and it’s difficult to assign blame when something goes wrong.

I feel like I’ve been saying this for a while now. The future of content management is not in management, but in delivery . Forrester report: Customer experience management defines WCM today According to a new report by Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Web Content Management For Online…

The common patterns of writing RFPs is especially poor when it comes to content management. There are several specific things you can do to get better responses.

I’m going to propose a radical thing to anyone shopping for Web development services: just tell us how much money you have to spend . Gosh, that sounds crass, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it to, but I’m serious – things will be so much easier for both your side and mine if you’re just upfront about how…

One of the highest manifestations of content structure is the overhead “geography” that content gets organized into.

I’m wondering if there’s a really strong purpose to contextual URLs on intranets? I’ve been a strong proponent of good URLs in the past , but I’ve just converted an intranet from a URL pattern like this: /page.aspx?id=34237 To a URL pattern like this: /en/departments/customer-service/my-page Now,…

Once considered a competitive advantage, content management has largely become the normal. The idea of not using a CMS is almost archaic, so discussion of “the benefits of content management” are increasingly irrelevant.

I’ve often wondered, what does the post-library era look like? Let’s face it, though there will be a long tail, the era of the bound wood pulp is coming to an end ( Amazon certainly thinks so ). Without books, what do librarians do? I’ve long-thought that the post-library librarian is really an…

So, Twitter is buying TweetDeck today, and it’s got me thinking about how the tweet just might be getting marginalized, and what that means. TweetDeck is a good piece of software, but, despite the name, it does more than just post to Twitter. I just checked my copy, and it turns out you can use it…

Once considered a norm, the concept of a separate “content staging environment” has slipped into disuse. It still has some advantages, but the alternative – a live, “virtual” staging environment – probably has more.

What is a (news) CMS? : Interesting comments about how news organizations need a CMS specifically wired for news. This involves, among other things, abstracting your repository from the presentation layer. News organizations should instead be “content-first,” and use tools that promote content…

Content “management” and content “delivery” have diverged into two separate concepts. The disciplines used are different, and I argue that it won’t be long before vendors start splitting off their delivery suites from their management suites.

Every CMS tries, in some extent, to duplicate the classic model of the relational database. Some come closer than others to this “ideal.”

Originally, content management repositories were separated from the publishing layer. This line has blurred over the years, and there are numerous models that combine aspects of both decoupled and “active” delivery tiers.

Drag-and-drop page composition has become a key selling feature of content management in recent years. It’s impressive, certainly, but useful is it, in reality?

One of the biggest problems in implement content management inside an organization is getting employees to accept that this is the “one true solution” in which they should put their faith.

I love Google Docs , and we use it constantly at Blend – there’s never a day when a half-dozen new Docs aren’t created, edited, shared, etc. The ability for more than one person to be in a document and see each other’s changes is really amazing. So why do I still do a lot of writing in Microsoft…

Knowledge management requires you to ask some very basic question about how you plan to turn knowledge into content in which to be managed.

Content management systems thrive on consistency, which gives you a very roundabout benefit – you can use it as a “bad cop” to force people in your organization to be more consistent about their content.

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated : This has been making the rounds for a while, but I just got around to reading it. Don Norman – principle of The Nielsen-Norman Group and author of Emotional Design and The Design of Everyday Things – pulls back the curtain on feature bloat. His point is best summed…

Over the last decade, content management has become increasingly focused on the web. However, in this world of true multi-channel publishing, the web is just one of many channels, and its time CMS vendors made their repositories less web-specific.

“Web Experiement/Engagement Management” is the latest trend in content management, but I have a fear that vendors will focus on it to the detriment of another, equally important parts of their systems.

With all the channel options available for content publishers, the “web developer” may be giving way to a more general “content developer.”

Content is not isolated in its presentation – it’s often presented with other information that is somehow related to it. Modeling and managing these relationships can be harder than you think.

Short rant here – authors, can we please start writing shorter books? We’ve talked about this before , but now I have a specific example. I’m trying to learn more about encodings – you know, character sets, Unicode, stuff like that. I read Spolsky’s article , which was great, but I want to go…

We tend to develop templates with a “hole” for where “the content will go.” However, we ignore what happens in that hole – what specific tools editors will be given to manage what happens in their “hole.”

Web content delivery is becoming so complex and important that it’s deserving of a system all its own that aggregates, harmonizes, and enhances content for delivery.

Episerver Commerce Arrives! : I’ve been waiting for this for a while. I am proud to announce the official launch of Episerver Commerce. Episerver Commerce is a powerful commerce platform targeted at professional organizations who need to be smart about their online sales investment and also want to…

Incorporating applications and other non-content functionality in your website in easier when you use a proxy content object to represent it.

A graphical look at all the different ways the Episerver admin interface can be customized. A good example of customization options you might want or need for your installation

When you have a “pure” crumbtrail – one that is based on a page’s position in the larger content geography and nothing – problems can result. It’s easier if you abstract this, and other navigation, away from the content structure.

There are a few things that CMS vendors do that make some systems very hard to develop with, including the confusion of content files with code files.

I am not a fan of stored procedures. I really dislike them, in fact. I know they have a place, but, in general, they’re insanely over-used. Specifically, I do not believe in using stored procs to wrap simple SQL . If you have a simple INSERT or DELETE , you don’t need a stored proc for this….

The term “metadata” is abused when it comes to web content management. In most cases, metadata does not actually exist apart from “first order” data, and thus the term has lost all relevancy.

Concepts of “the best CMS” are only valid in the face of actual requirements.

I’m warning you in advance that this might sound ridiculous, but I think I’ve figured out the psychology of a bullet point. Face it, bullet points are attractive. People usually like to see them in text. They’re…relaxing. We associate them with good feelings, information-wise. Bulleted lists make…

I really loved this post from Rajesh Setty about why smart people don’t share their knowledge. He examined why some of the smartest people are so less likely to share their knowledge than other people. His conclusion: Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they…

When learning a new CMS, there are a set of core questions I ask of it. Vendors should concentrate on those questions and being able to provide quick wins for new adopters.

Introducing The Dynamic Data Store : Episerver is shipping a handy new feature in CMS 6 which provides for data storage of…whatever. […] storing data in a database using Entity Framework or NHibernate requires you to design and compile a class when developing your application. This works really…

Why do WYSIWYG editors suck at invisible, surrounding elements? I’m evaluating a design right now to quote a content management implementation. One of the elements involves arbitrarily shading an area of the page. The HTML jockey in me says, “Just wrap that section in a DIV …” But the CMS…

Intranet in the cloud : A nice rant about how more companies should host their intranets externally, rather than inside their own infrastructure. I was recently pressed on the subject of a “hosted intranet” and why an organization shouldn’t outsource their intranet to “the cloud.” God forbid we let…

Tony Byrne succumbs to use of the word “metator.” Let us now praise metators Metators are not just found among corporate web teams. Records managers have been dealing with metadata for decades. Now, you might think of your enterprise records manager as some corporate ninny who makes you clean up…

Content Management Systems just don’t work. : This is an excellent post about something we’ve discussed before – is a “boxed” CMS really worth it? For instance, in this excerpt, the author is struggling with the decisions that the vendor or platform makes for you: See, the problem with a full scale…

I love my Kindle, but there’s one thing that’s…icky, about it. One thing that confirms all the background fear and dread I had about transitioning from actual paper to ebooks. The Kindle strips out all the tangible character of a book. In doing this, it eliminates the mental “markers” I retain…

With structured content, concepts of “metadata” can be confusing and irrelevant.

I’m just back from Web Content 2009 , which I really enjoyed. It got me thinking a bit about conferences, and the value of going to them, especially in light of Scott Abel’s discussion of the trouble the conference world is having right now. I think conferences have benefit on five levels: Actual…

If you work with a development platform enough, you develop some weird, imagined relationship with the platform’s development team, even if you never meet them. In working with the fruits of their labor day-in and day-out, you develop some mental picture of them, their general competence, and their…

Just a quick rant here to say that companies need to be cognizant of source control and integration services when they design their software. When they ship their software – especially server-based software that serves a dev platform for something else – they need to ask themselves, is our software…

The other day, I got to talking with an old colleague. We worked together in the IT department of a bank about eight years ago. Since then, we’ve both stayed in IT, and our conversation eventually turned to what we knew back then, compared to what we know now. The result prompted me to come up with…

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write : this entire article is an interesting look into how e-books and Google’s digitization efforts will change how we read. But this section stuck out at me – in the digital world, the concept of “pages” breaks down. One geeky side note here: Before…

As content moves “beyond the web page,” we need to start handling it in such a way that it lends itself better to multi-channel publishing.

In the platform vs. product debate, different people see different things. In order to successfully sell CMS, you have to understand how the prospect is looking at it.

Content management vendors like having partnerships with integrators. Here’s why it works (or doesn’t work) for either side.

Last week, we discussed coding for tomorrow – the concept of writing code not for the current moment, but instead for the moment six months down the road when you have to crack that code back open and figure out it works. Ward Cunningham has come up with the perfect metaphor: “ technical debt .”…

Discussion of an example of content aggregation, or the ability to raw in content from disparate sources and present it as part of a unified system.

Getting content out of a system is just as important as putting it in – a truth that gets sadly neglected by a lot of CMS vendors.

The more I program, the more I believe this statement: you’re not just programming for today, you’re programming for today and for six months from now when you crack the code open again to make a change and think, “Now, how does this code work again?” The fact is, things that make sense today, may…

A discussion of how an obsession with a certain form of CMS architecture can make us blind to alternative forms.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey – Drupal ninja that he is – is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help. Why Drupal? Because I didn’t know it, and…

There’s a common saying in business that “it takes three times more effort to get business from a new customer than from an existing customer.” I believe that to be true, regardless of your industry. Yet, we’re all consumed with pursuing the next deal. Why is this? If your Web development company…

I maintain that there are several different levels of “knowledge” when it comes to being a developer and working with technology. Consider. Knowing that something can be done, and knowing exactly how to do it: If only we could always be this way. I discussed this in the past in a post about…

We’re researching search options for a client this week, and I stumbled across this blog post which spoke volumes to me: Search is Easy, But Good Search is Hard So true. Search, in it’s most basic form, is easy. But there’s a lot of subtleties that you find yourself longing for that are harder to…

Content management systems should include an API for filtering a bucket of content, obtained through any means

I was having an email exchange with my friend Kevin Shoesmith . He knew I had been with the guys at silverorange , and he pointed out a blog post from Dan James earlier this summer, about how to grow a Web development company. One of the pieces of advice he gives might be shocking to a lot of…

In Sioux Falls this summer, we had something of a scooter revolution. Scooters were everywhere. And I noticed something – some of the scooters were so big they rivaled the size of motorcycles. So, I got wondering, what’s the real difference between a scooter and a motorcycle? Where is the dividing…

So, I’ve been on Twitter for two weeks now, and I really enjoy it. I treat it as a smaller blogging platform really – I post things to Twitter that wouldn’t really be entitled to a full-blown blog post, but that I want to talk about. Example: I’m sorry, but OpenOffice Writer is NOT as “just good as…

LinkedIn: Answers: What’s the most important feature that you look for in a CMS? : A simple question posed on the LinkedIn. Some good answers, and worth reading for a CMS junkie. Excerpts: Community size and support, ease of use, expandability of the CMS, the amount of available “add ons”,…

Content Management as a Practice : Seth has posted a follow-up to my blog post which expanded on a conversation he and I had in Chicago. Our conversation was about teaching content management as an abstract practice rather than as a specific platform integration. In the course of that, we talked…

Content management should be treated as a practice, transcendent of any particular language or platform.

Some content management situations don’t require a full-blown CMS. Rather, they required “content-oriented” management of data, which integrates into a larger system.

One of the things I struggled with in the redesign – and still haven’t completely figured out – is when it’s okay for some content to no longer be browsable. By “browsable,” I mean “non-orphaned” – a page that has an inbound link from some index page. Consider the New York Times. They put their…

Is comprehensive-ness a point for, or a point against, a technical book? I used it think it was an advantage – the bigger, the better – but as I get busier and my company accelerates, it’s increasingly a liability. I’ve started to be greatly attracted to smaller books – or thinner books, more…

When you look at the usability of an entire Web site, I want to propose that there are five levels of it. From widest to narrowest, here is what I dub “The Five Rings of Usability” (man, I love making up important sounding names for stuff…) Site Existence: At the risk of being absurdly basic, this…

I built an intranet for a client. One of the functional items is a viewer into an Exchange calendar. We use a handy third-party component to display the contents of an Exchange public folder on a page. The month and year to be viewed is driven off the querystring. Something like:…

In any CMS implementation, you invariably end up with a generic “text page” other, more structured, pages. What is the dividing line between these pages, and how could it be more effectively handled?

We have a client building a large, static site. The files in the site right now – in the middle of development – are named for their page ID on the content manifest: A657.aspx J864.aspx etc. We’re going through now and assigning them more usable, “plain English” URLs: /products/industrial/portable…

Menuing and navigation in content management can be handled explicitly, where navigation is its own subsystem, or implicitly, where navigation is built based on the content structure. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Here’s a fact: intranets don’t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together…

Handling structured, one-off pages in a CMS can be complicated. This is a discussion of two of the common patterns – composite pages and embeddable content – and the pros and cons of each.

A few months ago, Google released Google Custom Search Business Edition , which is a way to use Google as the search engine on your own site, while having more control over the search results page. When we posted on it a couple months ago, I said this: This will cannibalize sales of their Google…

The decision of when to structure content or not can be subjective. This is an example of one such situation, and the pros and cons of the various methods.

All of the disciplines put under the “content management” moniker can actually be split into four distinct groups.

At what point does a usability flaw become unethical? If a usability flaw continues to cause people to do something undesirable to them but very desirable to you – and you know this and don’t change your interface – at what point do you become a massive tool? I’m left wondering if Shelfari has…

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, dropped a bombshell on fans this morning when she announced that Albus Dumbledore had been gay all along. This was also a bombshell to Wikipedia, for different reasons, and the result is fascinating to follow. Some people apparently ran right to…

My loathing for ASP.Net has been well - known in these pages , but part of me has made peace with it. There are some things about ASP.Net that I very much like, and I promise I’ll post about them one day. Today ain’t that day. I will never accept the stupidity of the server-side FORM tag and the…

Here’s something content management vendors need to understand about “scheduling” and “expiring” Web content. This is a common feature request, but users don’t always want to use it in the manner vendors expect. Sure, often users want content to appear at a certain time, then disappear at another…

A good CMS is built from the API out, not the interface in.

I own the “big six” Gadgetopia domains – com, net, org, info, biz, and us. Beyond that, I never bothered to get all the country domains, because how could you, really? There are so many of them. So, I guess it was just a matter of time before I stumbled across something like this: gadgetopia.co.uk…

One of the things we constantly struggle with at Blend is capacity. I’m very blessed to be able to say we have more work that we know what to do with. Every day, new deals just seem to fall from the sky. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant, but it’s true. David, our sales guy, constantly builds new…

Intranets: what staff really want : This is a really good survey from Gerry McGovern’s company that answers a pretty important question that I see a lot of confusion about: what should we put on our intranet? They asked a bunch of people to pick what they wanted their intranet to do. The top picks…

I believe in presentation logic, I really do. Call me a hack, but formatting logic mixed into your presentation code isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I started Web development in traditional ASP. And I sucked at it, believe me. I wrote some of the most ridiculously convoluted apps that were…

Pay To Play: Fair Price for Good Community : Josh Clark nails another good post today as he discusses a new “communal bike rental” program in Paris. For 29 euros a year, you can “check out” a bike for 30 minutes whenever you need one. He discusses why the city of Paris specifically decided not to…

Comprehensive post discussing the most common features found in content management systems today.

Often, a binary file needs to be bound to a specific content item, and needs to “live” in the context of that item.

I’ve been doing some reading lately on Design Patterns . I find myself trying to relate the examples to Web applications. One of the interesting ones is the State Pattern . This says that an application is really just a collection of states, or situations the application might find itself in. Some…

The ability to organize content into trees consistent of parent-child relationshps is a core feature of content modeling, and resolves so many modeling patterns

Here’s something that WYSIWYG editors don’t do well: paragraphs within list items. Like this (ironically, Markdown does it just fine): This is a paragraph. This is another one. This is another list item. The problem is that one you’re in a list item and you press Enter, you get a new list item, not…

The other day, I was reading the Wikipedia page on McMansions (via Kottke ). It was extremely interesting, and it made a good point: The movement of the “atrium concept” home layout from popularity to ubiquity in modern American architecture stems largely from the “Ten Minute House” theory […] Most…

Why does “reading” get confused with “surfing the Net” so much? I’m struggling lately with the concept of a hobby, and why I don’t have one. It seems that everything I do is in some way connected with my company . I have no balance. I got to wondering the other day if I had ever had a hobby. Then I…

There’s an accepted theory in SEO: put keywords in your URLs. This is so accepted, that no one questions it and content management systems routinely have modules, extensions, and allowances for users to create keyword-rich URLs. But, does this work? Does anyone know for sure? I’ve been casually…

Aaron Mentele is asking about posting practices for people who blog a lot. But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can’t say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception of an occasional chapter on cms…

I’m wondering if there’s any training to help users navigate text. The more I watch people work on a computer, the more I see that navigating text from the keyboard is a big time waster. I read a big book ten years ago on Microsoft Word that taught me the basics of navigating the cursor through a…

Some content management features are “out of the box,” while some are developed during integration. Which pattern is better than the other, and why?

I’ve Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like : SitePoint has a brutally accurate post about CMSs and making them run actual Web sites. The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and fails at doing most things…

Are there RSS feeds you can’t keep up with? I have a few that I just can’t stay on top of due to posting volume. A friend of mine called it “drinking from a fire hose.” They are: DZone (yes, I know I love it , but I just can’t keep up) Slashdot Lifehacker (yes, I’ve professed my love for that one…

Here’s something I believe to be true: intranet adoption is more a function of personal and corporate psychology than of technology. Put another way, the greatest technology in the world won’t help if your employees aren’t interested in using your intranet for whatever reason. I’m involved, to some…

I used a term with a colleague the other day – “masturbatory Web design” – and he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. I use the term a lot, so I don’t think about it, but he thought it was hysterical and completely appropriate for the situation we were discussing. I’d like to…

Content management can do a lot, but there’s a lot that it won’t do, and you need to understand this before you implement. This is a reality check on the problems content management is not going to solve for you.

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, and I articulated something I’ve felt for a long time, but have never really written down. There are three types of intranets. They’re very different, and when someone thinks “intranet,” they’re no doubt thinking of one of the three types….

I built a shopping cart system the other day. It seemed at the time to be a ridiculous waste of resources – I mean, how many shopping carts are out there already? There are probably 500 open-source versions alone. But, I built my own, and for good reasons. Here are those reasons, plus some random…

I want a masters in content management. Sadly, none exists. I have a bachelors in Government and International Affairs. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got into I.T. during my senior year in college, and I’ve never really looked back. Content management is where I’ve settled – I live, eat, and…

Here’s something not that shocking: the same amount of time spent on different Web development activities can yield vastly different productive results. Put another way: you can spend two hours on Activity A or the same amount of time on Activity B. Does this mean they will both contribute equally…

My church is building a huge new addition , and part of it is going to be a computer lab. This means that I’ll finally have a nice spot to teach some free computer classes, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I got to thinking the other day what I’d teach, and I think there’s…

When was your a-ha! moment about the Internet? Think back to the early days: can you remember a moment when you thought: Whoa, this thing may really take off? I was pondering this the other day, and I can remember three moments from the mid-nineties that made me sit up and take notice. I was…

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I’ve seen books on those systems in my local store. I tried Mambo once, but didn’t care for it….

Different content management systems publish content in different ways. This is a discussion of the three major patterns.

Not every CMS editor needs access to all CMS functionality, and often this access can be confusing. In many cases, to pays to “channel” the interface down to just the functionality a particular role needs to see.

By concentrating on the different “views” a content object may have, you can simplify your content templating considerably.

Last year, I built a nice little Web site for my church pre-school. Go take a look – it’s really well-done, and has served the school well. (Look hard enough, and you might find my wife in there somewhere…) However, one of the problems with the site is that new visitors site don’t quite know where…

I love plugin architectures. Having a well-done method for people to extend your system is a huge, huge benefit that we’ve discussed and lauded in relation to Firefox and Movable Type . But, there’s a dark side. When you update software to a new version, you normally do a regression test , which…

Content modeling “inside” a single content object is generally quite simple. What’s trickier is content modeling between multiple content objects.

Content management is a process. It starts when someone gets an idea in their head that they want to publish (or change) some content somewhere. It ends when that content is actually published. This is the entire length of the process. At what point does the content management system come into the…

The interface you interact with when using your CMS is only part of the picture. You need to be concerned with the API that lies under that interface as well.

Theoretical functionality is all the things a CMS can do. Actual functionality is the stuff you’re actually going to use. There’s a big difference.

Here’s something I’ve learned: when faced with a programming project, the worst thing you can do is start coding right away. Programming is not like building a house. When you build a house, a wall goes together a standard way. Match up Tab A with Slot B and you’re good to go. (A gross…

In any content management (or information management) system of sufficient complexity, you will have to interlink records. You will always get to the point where, in the process of editing a record, you will have to specify another record. (Let me note here that the title to this entry is insanely…

Lately, I’ve struck upon a new benchmark for usability: the extent to which the interface disappears. Let me explain – My wife drives a Honda Odyssey minivan. This is the Swiss Army Knife of minivans. It’s set-up perfectly, to the point where I’ve often said, “If you need to find something, close…

Most content creators have a lack of basic formatting skills, making it difficult to have them create well-rendered content.

Here’s another argument for CSS-based, table-less design that I haven’t heard before: by not using tables for layout, then you know that a table is, in fact, a table intended for the display of tabular data. Yesterday, a client of mine wanted to insert a table into the description of one of their…

This weekend, I was struggling with a .Net / XML / XSLT problem. I’m not a big .Net guy, but I’ve been working with it for the last few months on a big project for Blend . Brian, from MyHomepoint has been a huge help as I’ve gotten my feet wet in the ASP.Net world. But when I asked him for help, I…

There’s a class of product that fits into a crappy pricing slot. It’s a slot where a purchaser isn’t going to make a purchase right away, because they’re going to have a lot of questions. But at the same time, individual sales of the product aren’t expensive enough for the vendor to court the…

I read a great white paper on open-source content management last night called “ Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions .” In it, the author examines several different scenarios and profiles over a dozen different open-source content management systems, explaining the key features of…

Image handling in content management can be complicated, but the first step is abstracting the image that appears in your finished content from the file that it’s based on.

Content management system often deride static HTML. However, static files are necessary in some cases, and we discuss some patterns for integrating them into an otherwise content-managed site.

I often give thought to the really unfortunate sales process involved with Web development. There’s so many variables involved with building a Web site, and so much of it is buried in the creative process, that it’s hard to really paint a picture in a prospect’s mind as to what you plan to do….

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know – the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain ( especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn’t going to happen? How many people know someone that is…

I really hate email forms, from a developer perspective. Meaning, I hate forms that just email something somewhere and then forget about it. The fact is that email is a horrifically dodgy medium to do anything with. Two-and-a-half years ago, I complained about Barnes and Noble doing this. A…

I was browsing through Google Video last night (that’s where the Duron post came from), and I got to thinking that there’s so much good stuff in there, but there’s a bunch of crap too. And none of it is really organized beyond the general search that comes with it. There are a lot of sites like…

When you migrate content into your new CMS, you go through an awkward period much like building a house with no furniture in it. It pays to minimize this period by testing some furniture out as soon as possible.

One of our clients has started working with some software that uses the MSDE – the Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine. This is a stripped down, black-box version of SQL Server for people that need a database server but don’t want to pay for SQL Server nor need all its super-powers. MSDE is stripped down…

Here’s a plugin for Movable Type that may address some (all?) of my “ open vs closed content management ” ranting. CustomFields CustomFields is a plugin that allows you to define custom fields that will appear on the entry editing screen and author profile screens. This allows you to store far more…

Many smaller projects need a single table of managed data in an otherwise static website. What’s the best way to handle these situations?

I’ve participated in a lot of online forums. The value of the information you get from them varies. Some of it is good, but you get a lot of cruft, especially from hit-and-runners – people who are there to ask a single question based on an acute need, who will then disappear without ever having…

We tend to think of content management as being used to manage content that will be consumed by people outside our organization. However, it can be used for purely internal content as well.

This is an explanation of why just adding “custom fields” to a blogging platform doesn’t necessarily turn it into a CMS.

Making A Better Open Source CMS, by Jeffrey Veen : This is a great article – a rant, really – about how much the author thinks the open-source CMS offerings just plain suck. He laments about a lot of things I agree with. The real goldmine, however, are the comments. There are 104 of them, and…

I’m going to kill the individual entry comment RSS feeds. They’re not getting used much, and they mean double the files when we rebuild. With 4,600 entries, this becomes a problem. (Additionally, something has gone weird somewhere because the fourth most requested page on this site is the comments…

Someone (I don’t know who), said “Half of intelligence is knowing the answer. The other half is knowing where to find the answer.” In today’s world, we all know how to find the answer. But has that made us less inclined to know the answer from memory? Google has just exacerbated this, really. There…

A CMS should be able to solve content-related problems without me having to write code to support it.

There needs to be a way to reconcile content management and static HTML.

The big limitation of Web apps is that you’re at the mercy of the user’s browser. It may behave like you want it to, or it may not, but there’s no doubt that it limits how complicated and functional a Web app can get. In a browser, remember, your page is only in the viewable area because the user…

I don’t want to talk about personal productivity too much, because there are other sites who do it better . However, I’ve found a simple thing that helps keeps me from getting distracted – Your computer is full of distractions. Windows for your RSS feeds, your email, the news, etc. are just a click…

Scripting languages don’t suck. I’ve programmed quite a bit in Ruby w/Rails lately (probably more than you, Deane) and I love it. PHP does suck however for two reasons. #1 because you’re in love with it and #2 because I have to give you crap for crying about how much .NET sucks all the time. If you…

I’ve been monitoring the 404s on this site. I changed our URL pattern a while back, so I have a page that catches all the 404 and resolves the old pattern against the new one, then redirects. Anything that doesn’t resolve gets logged and I have an RSS feed where I can watch them all. Which brings…

Do you put more value on information you pay for? Do you pay more attention to something you paid, say $5 for, than something you read for free on the Net? A friend and I were having this conversation the other day, partly related to my post from a couple of days ago about the little PDF articles…

Disparate content ideas need to be drawn together into a cohesive whole through topic pages.

A friend and I were talking tonight about the perils of setting up a Web community to compliment a real-world community. For instance, a community Web site for your church, or for your neighborhood – so a group people that would interact with each other both online and off. (And by “community,” I…

I’ve spent some time today playing with Squarespace , since their ads kept appearing my AdSense. While I try not to get too excited about new things (lest my head explode), I’m going to venture a pretty bold statement – Squarespace is the best content management system I have ever seen within its…

Blogging systems have always confused “posts” and “pages.” We’ve talked about this before: what is the difference between a time-sensitive “post” and an “eternal” page? At what point does a “post” get re-visited and revised enough that it should become a page? We wrote about this at length almost…

One thing that continues to amaze me is how poorly people use Microsoft Word, considering its dominance in business word processing. The “barrier to entry” for a Word user is extremely low – just open it and start typing – so very few people bother to learn how to really use it well. I spent three…

The legendary Fabian Pascal showed up yesterday to tell us all that we were stupid over in the relational data model post . Specifically, his comment was: None of you know the relational model, which is why you think current products are relational, which they are not. This whole thread is…

Is the relational model of data storage the best, most efficient way to store data? I’m talking about the traditional database model of tables, fields, row, foreign keys, etc. What are the other ways? There’s object oriented, where you have a table of classes and attributes, object instances and…

This is going to seem obvious, but I hit on something today about Ajax . I knew this in the back of my head, but it jumped to the front today – Ajax can do a lot, but the most simple and powerful thing it can do in certain, specific instances is eliminate the page scroll . Page scrolling may seem…

At one point or another, all content management systems (CMS) come down to some kind of datatype. You have to be able to set a field to a string, or an integer, or whatever, and then enforce and manage that piece of data. The idea is that you take these datatypes and glue them together to form…

A case study example on the seperation of content and presentation channels.

A while back , I mentioned the concept of a “content tree” in regards to content management. I cited this as a “functional pattern” and promised to talk about it more, but I never did. So, here goes – With every content management system (CMS) I’ve written, I always get back to the concept of a…

CMS don’t need to have an intimate knowledge of the content they’re managing. Rather, they just need to know that they’re managing content in general, and leave the specifics to the implementation.

I’ve been working with Rails for a few weeks now and it’s making “install” vs. “build” decisions much harder – (We interrupt this post to get two things out of the way: Yes, Rails is as good as everyone is saying. And yes, that pisses me off too. I worked so hard at becoming a PHP ninja that I’m…

Tagging is simply categorization under a different name with a simpler interface.

I played with the Movable Type Tags plugin tonight. It was… almost a great thing. I can see where it would work well for a lot of things, but ultimately, I uninstalled it. The tag concept is actually very simple: it replaces “keywords” with a field called “tags.” Then, whenever you save an entry it…

What do you do with category archives when you get too many posts? That’s what I can’t quite figure out what to do with this site. We have over 4,000 posts. This means that I have categories with 500 entries or more. This is way too many entries to list on a page, both for server overhead issues…

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself…) To make everything backwards compatible, I built a simple…

Applications have patterns – ways of doing things that have stood the test of time. These aren’t object modeling patterns , about which books and books have been written, these are…best practices for how to solve a particular type of functional problem. Around my city, you see a certain style of…

An intelligent URL scheme has usability and technical benefits.

Tagging invariably leads to problems with standardization and hierarchical classification. A tagging structure can slowly morph into a taxonomy, with the same inherent problems.

Is it just me, or does RSS suck all the mystery and joy out of the Web? Does it make the whole concept of “surfing the Web” just a little more disappointing than it used to be? Once or twice during the course of an evening, I’ll tell my wife I’m going to “check my email” and head downstairs to the…

I’m reading David Allen’s book “ Getting Things Done .” I’m not a total convert yet, but I am planning to read it a second time. It’s got a lot of good information. One of the things the book has forced me to realize is how stuff has a tendency to “collect” in places. Email inboxes are bad, as are…

When you’re building a big Web app, oftentimes you get to a point when you need to run some asynchronous batch process. You need to do something at, say, 2 a.m. that doesn’t involve a request from a browser. I ran into this problem the other day, and I tossed around some of the more obvious ideas…

Here’s something I’ve learned over the years: when modeling data to build a database, be very careful what fields you decide to include. Don’t throw in extraneous fields just because “someone might want to store that piece of information someday, and it’s no big deal to include it…” It is a big…

The idea of “tagging” content is suddenly everywhere. With Flickr and del.icio.us and Technorati embracing the concept of tags, suddenly it’s getting some broad acceptance. But what are “tags”? At the most basic level, they’re just “instant categories” – categorization without a master list or tree…

I was reading today about how Wikipedia is going to release a CD or DVD of all its content. Very cool idea. This got me reminiscing about “The Golden Age of CD-ROMs.” Remember when CD-ROMs were the big thing? From, say, 1996 to 1999 or 2000. Remember when Encarta and Cinemania amazed you with the…

I’m curious what effect Ajax will have on usability. With this technique, the unspoken nature of Web apps is changing, and apps using Ajax will likely do things that users don’t expect. When I first starting using client-side HTTP requests back in 1999 (long before the snazzy name), I did it really…

I’ve been spending some time working with Smarty lately. This is ostensibly a “templating language” for PHP. But I think it goes beyond that. I assert that Smarty has become a sub-language all by itself.

I get irrationally stressed out about querystring arguments. Here’s why.

Here are two things that cut so many good ideas off at the knees. These two factors are the two biggest things that stop good ideas from getting implemented and make programmers pause when they should forge ahead. 1. The Urge to Generalize Say you come up with an idea for a little transaction…

Here’s something that plagues organizations and their Web sites: knowing what information should be published to their readers and having the willingness to publish that information. I don’t think a lot of organizations get it. I just did some work for a group with which I’m involved. Part of the…

I’m interested in finding a nice, lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML editor for use by non-developers. In this scenario, as I’m sure you know, is not having too little functionality, but having too much. I haven’t found one yet that I’m comfortable unleashing on non-developer content editors. How about…

Joe and I have been working with eZ publish for the last few months. It is, without a doubt, the best content management system I’ve ever used. I got more done in one week with eZ publish than I did in nine months with Documentum . I like it so much, that I’d like to use it here, on Gadgetopia. But…

Structured gaming and development probably have a high correlation. Do they involve the same thought processes?

A trend I’ve been seeing lately is distribution of print publications in “reader” software thats presents them just as they were printed. This goes beyond just PDF – entire magazines and newspapers are being pushed to readers with their own software for viewing them. I tried two such solutions, and…

I have a new rule of thumb for Web development: the 90-50 rule. This rule comes into effect when you get 90% done with a project…and only have 50% left to do. The details are what kill you, and they trail on forever, it seems. So, when you’re 90% done, remember the 90-50 rule, and know that you’re…

My company just bought Small Business Server 2003 , and a copy of FrontPage 2003 was included, so I’ve been playing around with it for the last week. Overall, a huge improvement over previous versions of FrontPage (it no longer messes with your stuff…). It includes something that DreamWeaver has…

Today in the sky : Here’s another interesting example of a USA Today blog. It’s about air travel, of all things. Ben Mutzabaugh posts at least a dozen things a day about airlines. He seems awfully well informed. Now, I’m not interested in the subject, but I’m curious about the evolution of the…

Here’s a handy feature for a database… Tables can have primary keys, but what about a database-wide primary key? When a row is inserted, the “id” field would be populated with a numeric key that’s unique to the entire database, not just that table. Additionally, a two-column system table would…

It struck me last night that there are two models of RSS aggregation: “real-time” and “stored” (yes, I just made those two terms up…). Real-time are aggregators like Mozilla’s Sage extension. This model goes and gets the feed real time and displays it on-demand. In a lot of ways, they’re not even…

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There’s a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language – we’ll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. What’s the biggest danger to your site? The…

Hurricane Ivan – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : Wikipedia coverage of Hurricane Ivan is just phenomenal. They have hotlinked satellite images, all the latest announcement and statistics, links to about everything you need to know, etc. The thing about this coverage is that its different than…

You ever get sentimental over an old computer? One that you just can’t throw away? Back in 1998, I worked part-time at Best Buy so Annie and I could pay cash for our wedding the next summer. That Christmas season was the year a complete PC system (computer, monitor, printer) broke the $1,000…

Is there a point to “catchall” email addresses anymore? You know, those addresses where mis-addressed email to your domain gets routed? Let me explain – I was having some email trouble this morning. POP3 response from the server was sporadic, and when I got a command line on the box, things were…

When content can be assigned to more than one taxonomy node presents a logical crumbtrail issue.

Over the years, I’ve learned a big secret about building information-focused Web sites. This big secret is the single most important thing you can do for your Web site. It is the absolute make-or-break characteristic of successful Web sites. Without this, you really don’t have much. With it, it…

In a non-versioning system (CMS or otherwise), user interface bugs can lead to data loss more easily than you think.

You don’t have to display content in the same architecture in which you manage it.

Will the preponderance of blogs these days wreak havoc with Google’s PageRank model? It used to be that you couldn’t get a link from a big name site without having something they they wanted to link to. And if they linked to it, then they liked it, so others might as well, thus a higher PageRank….

As I become a more experienced developer, I’m learning when you should and shouldn’t break the rules. While following every rule of programming and data modeling is wonderful, sometimes you need to bend the rules for the sake of simplicity and expediency. Always remember, an app in the hand is…

I worked on improving the search on this site today. Search has been through a number of iterations. First, I used the basic Movable Type search. But it was slow and I wanted to do some interesting things with search. So last year, I switched to using a SQL “LIKE” query to return two-tiered…

Web apps are great, but they have interface problems. A Web-based interface is just never going to be as rich as a traditional client-server app. Spolsky alluded to this in a post I made yesterday. HTML can really go just so far before you run into limitations. Here’s a big one: That’s a pretty…

Yesterday, I wanted to buy a stock image from Corbis to use in a Web site I’m developing. It was a standard hi-res image of a man standing in front of a building reading a newspaper. This should have been simple… For those that don’t know, Corbis is the largest repository of digital images in the…

Some time ago, my company was maintaining information in an Access database that we also wanted to use as Web content. We were on a Windows host at the time, so we just FTPed the database up to the server every day. A little kludgy, but it worked well. Then we switched to a Linux host behind a…

I hate it when people call me on the phone. I’d much rather they use email. I got to wondering why this was so the other day, and here goes: Email is quicker. I’m at my computer anyway, so I don’t have to turn away and pick up the phone, look up a number, dial, etc. Ctrl-M gives me a new message in…

A CMS that interferes too much with the display and rendering of content can drive you nuts.

The taxonomy was always supposed to be the be-all and end-all of information architecture. A good, solid category structure was how all the information in an enterprise was supposed to fit together. But they’re harder to build than you think. There are shades of gray and complications. You need…

When something breaks, does it leave a door open or closed?

Thoughts on Content Management : This guy and I think alike. In the beginning of the article he touches on the same things I talked about when I compared open and closed content management systems . Then, he runs into the same problem: there are too many types of content, each storing their own…

As I work with content management more and more, I believe more and more in what this guy has written: Perls of wisdom in a sea of site mismanagement […] site management system vendors are creating generic solutions that actually increase the cost of running a site […] the vendors’ ideal of a…

This article tries to make the point that content management is for everyone. It’s a comparison of using a CMS against using simple HTML. Content Management vs. Unstructured, Flat HTML Pages So how do you convince a company that no matter how small its Web presence it should consider some sort of…

I find myself in a constant struggle between accepting Movable Type for what it is, and working to extend it. There are a few cases where I want to do interesting things with entries, but I don’t want to hack into Ben ‘s Perl code. I solved this problem by inserting just enough code to ping a…

Rob left a comment on a previous entry about the site Pocket PC Thoughts . This site is doing something I’ve been thinking about for a while: running a blog-type site off of discussion board software. (Postscript: Comments no longer exist on this site, so Rob’s comment is not on the linked page.) I…

Content can be temporal or permanent. Which type it is has impact on how it’s handled.

We have enough platforms and enough technology. Let’s use what we have to build things.

As you get more and more entries in a blog, how to you ensure people can find what they’re looking for? Blogs are very front page-centric – unless you’re watching the front page everyday, browsing the site is terribly inefficient. The category pages are all but worthless on Gadgetopia because…

An order from BarnesAndNoble.com wasn’t delivered after 10 days, so yesterday I went to their site to find out why. I found a customer service form, and submitted it with my name, email, order number, etc. I got a confirmation page saying that the issue had been logged. Then, today, I get this:…

A couple of years ago, I was trolling for Web design clients and I found a site that looked a little dated and that could use some help. So I sent the owner an email which was unintentionally a little condescending. I told him that his site was “a little behind the times” and that my company could…

When it comes to RSS, many people think that content usability just doesn’t matter anymore.

That post I made about attribution got me thinking about the format and content of blog postings. The way I see it, there are basically three types of postings. Original Content, No Target: This is where you actually write something yourself, and there’s no “target” of the post – no thing that…

Here’s a thought: there’s big money in collaboration apps. Not building new ones, but instead training and motivating people to use the ones they have . Is this a problem in your office? You get Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes or Groove or a packaged Intranet …then no one uses it. You train them…

Here’s a request for all software developers building software that does batch processing: PDFMoto , Movable Type – any program that “re-publishes” as a single event. Include functionality to allow me to call an arbitrary script before and after the batch process. There are a lot of things I may…

I’ve started reading e-books, and I think I’m addicted. I read a book last year called “ The Social Life of Information ” which put forth all sorts of reasons why e-books weren’t going to work. I agreed with it then, but after actually trying it, I’m hooked. I started out with Bill Bryson’s “ A…

An absurd analogy: content management is like a marriage in so many ways.

I was doing something for my church last night when I came face-to-face with ADO’s great support for extracting data from Excel files . So I got to thinking…how about Excel as a content storage system? Let’s face facts, offices love Excel. Go to any office, and I promise you they’re storing…

On Managing Content and Content Management Systems (CMS) : This guy makes a great point here: I have yet to see one [CMS] that is anywhere worth the amount of money and time needed to get it into place and often times, for many reasons, a CMS can actually make a site worse. Most times, unless you…

Gadgetopia struggled for years with IA and content organization. This post is a good representation of how I was trying to think through the problem.

How about Microsoft Access as a client-side content management tool? After playing around with Radio UserLand and CityDesk , I’m finding more and more utility in a client-side apps. They’re responsive, they don’t need to be connected (great for laptops or dial-up), and you can do a lot more with a…

Different CMS allow you to define your content in different ways.

Managing content is hard. Templating it is not. Which side of the equation is delivering the value?

I got to thinking today that the four major news Web sites offer four graduated levels of content access: CNN , Anonymous access: Just about everything at CNN.com is free (with the exception of some streaming video). You don’t have to register or answer any questions. No restrictions. USA Today ,…

This whole Aestiva thing has got me thinking about development platforms. Every week, there’s a new one that claims to be simpler and faster than the last one. ASP is simpler than JSP, PHP is more capable than ColdFusion, HTML/OS makes developing apps faster than the others, etc. You know what I…

One of the continuing quandaries I’ve had with XML is the management of multiple XML documents. If I have one, big XML document, then it’s easy to work with – to parse with an API, to transform with XSLT, to query with XPath. But what if I have many documents? For instance, what if I have all my…

Web design and development isn’t a perfect science – there are no absolutes. You can take a stand on how something should be done, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to work that way. I wrote this article about a year ago, and in it, I drew several lines in the sand about the way things…

My buddy Rob and I were talking the other day about top-down vs. bottom-up enterprise architectures. My last company attempted to implement a top-down architecture, where every system was planned out as to where it fit in the grand scheme and everything was on one big server under one language,…

HTML provides formatting tags for headings, so why don’t we use them? H1 , H2 , H3 …you wouldn’t believe how often designers re-invent the wheel by enclosing headings in DIV tags with stylesheets classes attached. I used to do it, then I learned a few things: Search engines will weight terms in Hx…

I’ve always been a big believer in legible URLs. There’s nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters – ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I’ve written before about the need to support URL hacking. When I wrote…

One of the upcoming goals I have for DeaneBarker.net is an RSS channel. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (or “Rich Site Summary,” depending on who you ask) and is a way for other programs and sites to display things from this site without actually coming here. (I know, I know – no one…

Does a good looking Web site get used more than a plain one? If so, why? Consider two Web sites: Site A is written in plain HTML / CSS / JavaScript, etc. It’s a “traditional” Web app, well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing, but no attempt has been made to engineer a slick interface just for the…

Web developers want one thing: control. HTML is such an imprecise language that building Web pages has continually been a struggle between what we want to do and what the language is capable of. As a result, the short history of the Web has been an exercise in perverting HTML as far beyond its…

The Gutenberg Project : Gutenberg has been around since the Internet was very, very young – the Web wasn’t even born yet. It’s an effort to catalog as many free books and texts as possible. Gutenberg has thousands of books from hundreds of authors; all in the public domain, all free. Download,…