Archive for July, 2003
July 30, 2003
bbci Advanced Search Tips
Martin Belam posted a pointer to a new advanced search “tips & tricks” page from BBCi Search developed by the team he is a member of. It is a succinct and easy to read list of tips on how to narrow down your search down on the bbci site. See CNN’s search help page for a comparison.
I still find it extraordinary that a media site has a full team of people dedicated to its search function.
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July 30, 2003
Klog ROI
John Robb: ROI calculations: K-Logs vs. traditional Intranet Portals.
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July 30, 2003
URL Construction
Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has layed out his best practices for URL construction.
- URLs should be human-readable.
- URLs should be short.
- URLs should be hierarchical.
- URLs should be permanent.
All good ideas. Here are some pointers to other discussions about URLs I posted a while back.
(Found via Simon Willison.)
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July 28, 2003
BitWorking, Inc.
Joe Gregorio has launched his own company, BitWorking, Inc., a custom system development firm specializing in .NET and Windows. I’ve been using Joe’s RSS aggregator, Aggie, for quite a while now. Good luck with the new venture!
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July 24, 2003
CMS Selection Info From David Crow
David Crow has posted the results of a content management system selection process he has completed for a client, including a full list of the systems they evaluated.
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July 24, 2003
New FCC Rules on Faxing Catch Associations By Surprise
ASAE conducted an online seminar yesterday about changes in the FCC regulations governing the sending of faxes. These changes come with the same batch of rules that established the Do Not Call Registry.
In a nutshell, associations will no longer be able to fax dues renewal, conference information or other marketing information to someone with whom they have an established business relationship (i.e. a member) unless they have express written permission to do so. This could be pretty disastrous for associations that rely on fax marketing to their members (a very common practice). ASAE has posted some resources about this, including the handouts from the session. Below is an excerpt from the handout:
The new rules, which will become effective 30 days after they are published in the Federal Register (which has not yet occurred, but is expected shortly), will require signed written consent in order to send faxes that contain unsolicited advertisements ? even to association members. The consent must include the fax number to which the faxes will be sent. The FCC noted that electronic and digital signatures will suffice (thus allowing online and possibly email consent), but noted that once the new rules take effect, sending faxes to seek consent will be forbidden (although the consent can be returned via fax under the new rules). Thus, the FCC not only eliminated the EBR exemption, it eliminated the ability to obtain consent without a signed written document as well. It also noted that an opt-out mechanism (e.g., ?call if you do not wish to receive more faxes?) is not permitted; a person must provide consent before being faxed. Finally, once a consent is provided, it can later be revoked. As under the prior rules, the fax ban applies not only to stand-alone fax machines, but also to computer fax boards or modems that can send a fax from a personal computer.
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July 21, 2003
Mozilla Firebird Extensions
Mozilla Firebird Extensions allow you to extend the functionality of the Firebird browser. Lots of good stuff in that list. Be sure to check out Search This!, an extension that lets you quicly search Google, IMDB or Amazon.com using selected text in the browser window as the search query.
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July 21, 2003
Unfortunate Domain Name
The Italian subsidiary of Powergen has a very unfortunate domain name. Yikes! Probably not the connotation they had in mind.
(Thanks to Betsy on The Well for the pointer.)
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July 18, 2003
CMS Interface Scalability
Jeff Freund has written an excellent article posted on CMSWatch that discusses the problems you may encounter in a content management system as the amount of content it stores grows. A quote:
The easiest way to understand interface scalability is to think through a simple question about your content management system: what happens to my job and the job of the editors and authors when the amount of content in the system increases two-fold? How about five-fold, or ten-fold, or fifty-fold? It?s a question not many think to ask before making a CMS purchase, but it?s a revealing one. Many interfaces work very well with small amounts of content, but begin to break down when the amount of content in the system increases.
The concept of interface scalability is especially critical in content management systems where web browser-based screens predominate.
…
Interface bottlenecks typically result in creeping inefficiencies in editorial processes. Maybe it takes too long to find content because, while the system response time is fine, there?s simply too much stuff to wade through. Perhaps some operations you would like to make in bulk can only be conducted one at a time. Or maybe there isn?t an easy way to see who is working on what, so sorting out the week?s responsibilities takes editors several rounds of the kind of off-system emails and face-to-face meetings that the CMS was meant to obviate in the first place.
Our team at work has encountered many of these problems in working with CMS’s. The biggest challenge I have encountered around scale is not being able to modify the properties of an arbitrarily selected group of pages and/or content. While it sounds like an obvious function it is easy to miss it unless you’ve had some experience and/or good advice.
When you are evaluating the functions of a CMS, ask yourself how easy it would be to do the same type of operation to 1000 pages. What looks like a great interface for a single page may be unworkable for a 1000.
Ultimately, I think that systems that take have a content repository model (content can be disassociated from a page but still exist in the repository) will scale better than those that use a page-centric model (where content is tied to the page in which it is created on the site). In my experiece, page-centric system have a built in bias of editing single pages which leads to rather anemic features for multi-page operations.
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July 16, 2003
JJG’s Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams
Jesse James Garrett has posted an article laying out what he views as the nine major competencies for a web team: The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams.
This seems like an accurate model to me and maps pretty well to my own experience building a web team. If you are deficient in any one of the areas your overall effort will suffer quite a bit.
(Article spotted via James Robertson.)
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