Archive for July, 2004
July 13, 2004
Butterfly XML Editor and IDE
I’ll probably try this XML editor soon: Butterfly XML Editor and IDE. It is also an open source project. It provides XSLT debuging, which would have been very helpful to me, oh, about a year ago.
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July 13, 2004
FreeMind - free mind mapping software
FreeMind is a very nice application for creating mind maps. It is written in Java (so it will run on many operating systems) and is open source, so there is no cost to use the software. I highly recommend it if you find mind mapping a useful exercise.
I learned about this software in the book Coder to Developer (which I also recommend!).
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July 12, 2004
What is our strategic direction? And we need more chairs in Salon A!
The anonymous association CEO who writes View from a Corner Office has posted a brain dump from their annual meeting.
I think the post shows very well how association execs are expected to lead/facilitate the big picture strategy thing for the organization while also making sure there are enough chairs in the proper configuration in the meeting room. To me, that descirbes the art of association management in a nutshell.
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July 11, 2004
Effective Executives
Spotted this via Seb’s site a while back:
“Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations.”
I think I’ll use that in a presenation soon. I also like the paragraph that immediately follows:
Then again, there are the innovators who will always drive the rest of us nuts because they want to break stuff all the time, and we need them as well, and there are the leaders, people who, dammit, break all the rules, do nothing that Drucker thinks they should, and succeed anyway. And any business that knows how to tap the last two will be out of sight before the starting pistol’s echo has died.
My recent posting activity is from going through all the clippings I have stored up in Bloglines over the past couple of months and porting choice bits here. Installing Wordpress seems to have gotten me back in the mood to post.
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July 11, 2004
Selling Web Standards
Last month Simon Willison wrote a post about how web developers need to move beyond advocating web standards for the sake of being compliant to advocating for best practices in general (which leads to standards adoption anyway).
There are plenty of benefits of re-framing web standards in the larger context of best practice. Firstly, discussions get a lot more interesting - as I’ve just demonstrated, there are enough facets to creating effective sites to keep us talking for years to come. Secondly, wrapping web standards in the larger context of industry best practices makes them a much easier pill to swallow. “Our site doesn’t validate” is a turn-off. “Let’s follow industry best practice” is far more appealing.
The best way I have phrased this in my work is to have “code we can be proud of” on our site. If someone goes to view source on our web pages we should feel proud of the techniques we use and that we are indeed using best practices. During our last redesign that phrase seemed to stick and provides focus to our work.
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July 11, 2004
Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor
Here is a free plug-in for IE and Mozilla/Firefox that allows you put a rcih text editor into a web form: Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor. This should be great for lots of content management applications. It is also free in that there is no license whatsoever.
If you want a commercial rich text editor, I recommend Ektron’s tools.
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July 11, 2004
Grassroots KM
Jim McGee posted a summary of some current arguments in favor of a grassroots approach to knowledge management.
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July 11, 2004
Article on an Association Weblog
Just noticed this article in my referral links (they kindly link to my site at the end of the piece): Case Study: Why the Air Conditioning Contractors of America’s (ACCA) blog is not cool by Debbie Weil in WordBiz Report.
It’s tempting to say the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) has a cool blog. But it wouldn’t be true.
What ACCA, the trade association for 4,000 heating, ventilating and air conditioning companies, has created is a highly efficient way of communicating with its members.
It’s a nice piece that goes through why the ACCA blog was created and how they run it. I liked the message to their members that Kevin Holland launched it with:
ACCAbuzz is a new way we will be communicating with our members and the entire HVACR industry. It gives us an easy way to post quick news items, commentary, and links to articles of interest. As time goes on, ACCAbuzz will become the real nerve center of our website, because it’s here that our staff and members can keep everyone in the loop, ask questions, and get real-time feedback. In announcing this new site to our members, we called it a “daily newsletter on steroids,” because it just keeps growing, all day long!
Also see the page of association blog links on my wiki.
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July 10, 2004
I’m not dead yet!
Webmonkey: The Web Developer’s Resource is back! Looks like they will keep it alive with a lower frequency of updates to the site. I had reported their shut down a while ago. Glad to see them back in the Monkey saddle.
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July 10, 2004
Successfully deploying a content management system
James Robertson has posted another great article on content management systems: Successfully deploying a content management system. This quote sums up what the piece covers:
Our experience has shown that there are five key elements that must be addressed in a content management project:
- strategy
- change & communications
- content
- design
- technology
The following sections discuss each of these five key elements, and give some examples of activities that should be considered.
Recommended reading.
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