It's time to rebuild the blog. Because my server died, I haven't recovered a lot of old blog posts. I actually found some of them online. Even though I never blogged much, it was nice to find that stuff and feel good that I have a voice once. I've been so involved in the enabling of publishing, because I thrive on the problems on producing content. I really do enjoy trying to understand how one goes about getting themselves online. It was nice to chat with Brant together. I feel clear and coherent. I know what it means to separate oneself from the high end production and storyingboarding that we so often bring to building a website. We want it...
Dave Winer seems to think so. And it has been suggested before. I found one call for this the last time we had an election and I bet we will hear more again soon (if not already). The problem though is not as simple as it sounds. The tweet stream is not just about who you follow - it is also about who can direct message you. And for this reason, muting or temporarily unfollowing someone doesn't make sense. Sure, I suppose Twitter could make it so that a mute doesn't prevent a direct message, but I think there is a better way to do this. And it's already built. It's lists. In reality, we shouldn't be following our main stream. For many...
@aral asked on twitter whether there is any alternative to the hierarchical filesystem. It seems to be there is one clear path which we could take and I've never understood why we've not tried it within our modern operating systems. Documents (because they don't even need to be a file - they could be a resource/URI) simply need to be described. They don't need to be placed anywhere. The content, the metadata and anything else we (or our programs) can add to the document would give it context and would allow us to index it for retrieval. We could tag it, implicitly or explicitly, because after all indexes are just complex tags. Of course, for those stuck in the 'I need to...
Mark Boulton (@markboulton) wrote an important article over the recent groundswell of support for the 'content first' methodology in web design. In it, he argues that the idea that content is first, that we always can know what our content is before we begin to design for it, is wrong. He seems to be suggesting that it's really structure which must come first, because we can't truly know our content. He sites newspaper design using CMSes as the kind of environment in which you simply cannot know your content first. Although I agree with some of this, I think that he is making a philosophical argument about how you can't truly know your content. I think this is a dangerous idea, as...
I adore - I know, a funny word to use, but there really is some love there - the concept of a content management ecosystem, which Matt Thompson further outlines in this article. I had read a little about project Argo a while back and knew it was a great approach to large scale CMS issues. Being particularly interested in the problems of wysiwyg editors in CMSes, I know that finding ways to best store content which is used in multiple ways is the key. His main points are Capitalize, Synthesize and Harmonize. The concept of an ecosystem is important because it jumps beyond the CMS. Certainly we look for boxed solutions to help us build our environments quickly. But when you...
Mat Wall (@matwall), former Lead Software Architect for the Guardian in a presentation on mongoDB said something very important about moving technology forward within an organization. He was asked, how do they introduce new technology to their organization and get it approved by management. I am paraphrasing here, but essentially, he said that it comes down to getting your delivery process across all of your systems right, so that when you are asked to do something, you generally delivery it and it generally works. When you build up that trust, your bosses become less interested in how you do it. The question is ~ 1:00:35 - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Why-I-Chose-MongoDB-for-Guardian