Too many times, we disregard the hole.  We know there’s a hole where we “Enter Content Here” (i.e. – the header graphic on Seth’s blog), but as developers, we’re not really too concerned with it.  Designers can even be guilty of it too.  “What’s this big white area on the design here?”  “Oh, that’s where all the content goes.”

When you get too wrapped up in your template, you lose site of the fact that the CMS editor “lives in the hole.”   That magic, neatly-defined hole in the middle of the template where they drop their stuff?  That’s 90% of what matters for them, and they care very much about what it looks like.

But, no problem, you say, we have CSS rules that make it all pretty!  Well, there’s more to it than that, which is where you have to leave your anti-septic little server-side world and think like a user:

• Have you considered typography at all?
• Is their WYSIWYG editor configured?
• Have you shut off all the buttons they’re not going to need?
• Do you have the styles they need?  Is there a dropdown box or something full of styles?  Do they know where each style goes?
• Can they insert and style images well?
• They’re going to want to caption a photo at some point.  How can they do that?
• Does the WYSIWYG editor accurately reflect the styles of the site while the editor is creating content?
• Do they have a style guide? Do they know what headings they should be using?

These things are important because the editor takes a very micro view of their experience.  They are concerned with this piece of content right now.  Developers, on the other hand, take a very macro view – we look at the entire landscape of the project and the content domain.  We can’t be bothered with this little, single piece of content you’re struggling with.

(In fact, let’s be honest – how many times have you turned a CMS over to the client without having actually created much of any content with it?  Sure, you stubbed out a few pages, but not enough to even get past the Empty House Syndrome.)

This is, of course, the exact wrong view of it, and here’s why: an editor’s first experience with a CMS will have a huge impact on their overall feeling about the CMS in general.  If they can’t make a nice page of content easily right out of the gate, they’re going to be soured on the whole thing.

A few years ago, we did a Web site for a tile and home surfaces company out in California.  I remember being all concerned about the templates and the CMS and such, but I never did bother with worrying about what the editors were actually going to do inside the WYSIWYG editor.  I spent no time configuring it – just handed it to them raw, at the defaults.

The result was a disaster.  The marketing director called me up very upset saying everyone hated the CMS and they couldn’t get it to do anything right.  They had been wrestling with it for days trying to migrate their content, and she was beginning to think the whole project was a big mistake.  (Wherever you are Wendy, I’m sorry…)

This was all my fault.  I hadn’t paid one minute of concern to things are banal and provincial as an editor actually trying to make a decent page of content.  After the fateful phone call, I spent an hour configuring CSS and their WYSIWYG editor and it was a revelation.  Their entire tone and feeling about the project changed.  But it was never as good as it could have been because of their first experience.

The first experience matters.  And the editor doesn’t see your magnificent API or database model or the conceptual elegance of your code.  They have a WYSIWYG editor and a page they want to create.  How’s that gonna go for them?

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• Go
• Thyrd
• Frink
• Newspeak
• Coffeescript
• Trylon
• ooc

Want to invent a new language?  Just string some letters together, apparently.

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To me, if you get rid of dramas and put a celebrity talk show in its place, you’re beginning a death spiral where there are a hundred talk shows with nobody to talk to. Leno at 10pm replaced the very shows that would have created the stars he wanted to interview. It was like tearing down a Victorian mansion to build a Center for Victorian Mansion Preservation.

Yeah, I know that’s too lofty a pedestal for most television dramas, but the point stands. It reminds me a little of our current digital lives - so many places to connect, so many Facebook messages, so many tweets, so many platforms - yet little original content, causing social media to spend a lot of time talking about itself. It’s not a bad thing from the get-go, but it is unsustainable.

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New Zealand is passing a law which makes most software unpatentable. The only exception, added yesterday in an amendment, is to allow patents on inventions that contain embedded software.

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The “Engine Build Experience” is a $5,800 option on Corvette Z06 and ZR1 cars. Both are ultra-high-performance versions of the Corvette with engines that are hand-assembled at a plant in Wixom, Mich., near GM’s Detroit headquarters.

Customers who pay for the privilege will be invited to come to Wixom to assemble the engine for their car under the guidance of GM

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Finland became the world leader in Internet access by making broadband every Finnish citizen’s legal right and ensuring that every citizen will have access to a 1Mbps broadband connection.

I’m sure that the idea isn’t that you should have a inalienable right to broadband, but you should have an inalienable right to free information.  Broadband is just the medium.

But, in the end, I think this insults the idea of human rights a bit.  Does inhibiting someone’s broadband fall into the same category as other crimes against humanity now?  Surely we don’t put broadband up there with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, do we?

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Facebook is gathering masses of data through its recently launched “Likes” feature, which lets Web visitors express interest in a piece of content.

More than 50,000 websites implemented this “Like button” in the week after it launched, providing Facebook with a treasure trove of data about the preferences of Web users. This data could form the basis of a powerful search engine, ranking Web pages by “Likes” rather than the links that Google relies upon.

What’s more, Facebook could serve up different search results to each user based on the preferences of his or her friends.

It gets worse for Google. Facebook’s mountain of personal data could also provide the backbone of an ad network many times more targeted than Google’s keyword-based advertising. If Facebook were to launch both a search engine and ad network, it could put a significant dent in Google’s more than $23 billion in annual revenue.

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The test participant in the top gaze plot fixated a few times within the big empty color block before the content downloaded, then spent the remaining time looking at the rest of the page. This user never looked at the big promotional space after it had rendered.

[…] Although 8 seconds might not seem like a big delay, it’s enough to kill this big promo that the company’s Web team probably spent weeks designing.

When there wasn’t a delay, eye-tracking analysis showed that  the user spent quite a bit of time looking at the promotional area.  So the delay alone completely negated all the design work that went into the promo area.

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Facebook still uses PHP, but it has built a compiler for it so it can be turned into native code on its web servers, thus boosting performance.

[…] Facebook uses Linux, but has optimized it for its own purposes (especially in terms of network throughput).

[…] Facebook uses MySQL, but primarily as a key-value persistent storage, moving joins and logic onto the web servers since optimizations are easier to perform there (on the “other side” of the Memcached layer).

I thought this was interesting too:

Gatekeeper also lets Facebook do something called “dark launches”, which is to activate elements of a certain feature behind the scenes before it goes live (without users noticing since there will be no corresponding UI elements). This acts as a real-world stress test and helps expose bottlenecks and other problem areas before a feature is officially launched. Dark launches are usually done two weeks before the actual launch.

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It’s time to admit that there’s a big difference between content production and content delivery.  With a WCMS, both are often rolled into the same system.  But more and more, this is changing.  WCMS are being called on to deliver content that they didn’t produce.

Take a leap with me for a minute, and envision your WCMS of choice.  Imagine using that system solely to deliver Web content, none of which was actually produced in the system.

I’ll give you an example —

Bob’s company produces a massive knowledge base of documentation via DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) with some client-side rich editor.  These procedures are developed by a group of technical writers, and the the end result of their production is 7,000 HTML files.  Bob’s company wants these on the Web.

Easy, Bob says, just give me an FTP account.  And, sure, this is one way to do it.  But this is very primitive delivery.

At the same time, Bob’s boss is looking over the competitor’s Web site, managed in something like EPiServer, and he calls Bob up and says: “They have comments on their stuff.  And people can rate their procedures.  Why don’t we have that?”

“It’s not my fault,” Bob retorts, “You’re the one who wanted all this stuff done outside of a WCMS.  I can’t do much with flat HTML.”

What’s the error here? Simple: Bob confused content production with content delivery.  He thought that the usage of DITA limited his options for both production and delivery.  But, in the end, DITA is just a method of production.  It dictates no particular method of delivery, and the services Bob’s boss wants are a function of the delivery layer.

Put another way – just because some content was produced outside a WCMS, doesn’t mean it can’t be delivered by a WCMS.  Rather than pushing the content directly to the Web server, which provides no services other than serving up request content, Bob should have pushed the content into a WCMS, which can provide a level of enhancement in the delivery layer.

As an industry, it’s time we start looking beyond the production and repository services a WCMS provides and start looking at it as a content enricher.  Done correctly, a WCMS manages a delivery layer that provides services to content that add value by powering all sort of functionality.  And if you pick the right system, it will provide these services whether or not the content was developed inside the CMS or outside.

Take EPiServer, for instance.  Let’s imagine for a minute that EPiServer didn’t allow content editing.  So, there’s no way to add a new page or edit an existing page inside of EPiServer, and the only way to get content into it would by import, or API-level linking.

Well, what would be the point of this?  What would EPiServer exist to do?

A lot, it turns out.  There are scads of value-add services that EPiServer provides to your content in “the last mile.”  Here’s a partial list —

• Search
• Permissions
• Templating (you can further customize template by content location, relative to other content)
• Navigation management
• Content rating
• Commenting
• Conversation (A/B) testing
• Integrated analytics
• Reporting
• Language management
• Integrated SEO tool

The system provides this suite of services to make all your content better, whether or not the content originated inside of EPiServer.

So, I’m officially coining a new term : Web Content Delivery System, or WCDS.  A WCDS is a system that embraces content from a variety of sources, and does two things.

1. Homogenizes it – unifies it in appearance, permissions, navigation, etc.
2. Enhances it – provides services to that content to enrich it, and make it better.

I’ve been nurturing this idea for years.  My original name for it was “content incubation system.”  I liked the term “incubate” because this is what I felt the system was doing – it was embracing disparate content and giving it a place to thrive and grow.  (In fact, we built such a system for a client once, and called it “Incubate.”)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve really started to sharpen my focus on this concept, and, in the process, have found I’m certainly not the only one to think this way.

In San Francisco, during a CMS GeekUp after the Gilbane conference this year, I sat down wth Peter Monks from Alfresco.   We had a lively discussion about this same concept, which he had named a “presentation management system” (awkward acronyms be damned…).

Peter has blogged about this concept on a couple of occasions:

• Web CMS’s Dissected
• The Case for Killing WCM

(Interestingly, Alfresco provides perhaps another example: they have had integration with Joomla for some time.  One could fairly easily imagine large amounts of content produced, stored, and managed in Alfresco, but delivered via a “slave” Joomla install that existed for no other reason than to put a pretty, Web-friendly face on content in Alfresco.)

I also got to talking to Seth Gottlieb about this.  He mentioned a system called ATG Dynamo, from the late 90s which sought to do this same thing.  Dynamo no longer exists, but it was one of the first “application servers” which really looked at the delivery layer as a location or unification and enhancement, no matter where the content might have come from.

Seth also turned me on to Jahia (evidently pronounced “ja-ya”) which is a Java-based CMS that really champions the WCDS concept.  They call “Web content integration” (a phrase which is a bit too abstract for my taste).

Differences in nomenclature aside, Jahia’s Web site has a bang-up definition of the concept I’m trying to explain here:

[Jahia’s goal is to] act as a federated integrated hub by making it easy to connect with all of your heterogeneous content sources and helping you best leverage and reuse your existing content assets over the web.

Jahia makes another good point on their Web site.

Web projects requirements […] juggle increasingly confusing definitions of what “content” actually is. The convergence of web, document and portal capabilities creates overlaps in the users’ minds.

Too often, we think of “content” as “whatever our WCMS manages.”  This is far too restrictive.  Really, anything under your domain name or branded by your organization is content, and it needs to managed and delivery with exactly the same level of commitment and services as some page we created directly in the WCMS.

But, in the end, what is a WCDS, in software terms?  I don’t think it exists in isolation.  You can’t go out and buy a pure WCDS.  Even Jahia is a WCMS first, but provides and promotes some WCDS capabilities in addition.

WCDS is really a capability of a WCMS.  It’s measured in the ability and willingness for a WCMS to deliver and enhance content it didn’t produce.  In more specific terms, it’s measured in degree of capability in areas like import/export, CMIS, API usability, repository abstraction, etc.  WCM systems vary widely in their ability to do these things, so some will make a better WCDS than others.

I don’t think they’ll ever be a day when you go out and buy a WCDS.  You’ll buy a WCMS and use it as a WCDS, most likely in addition to its core content management functionality.  But the day has absolutely come to define some WCDS core competencies and include these in any content management evaluation process.

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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 take into consideration plans for expansion.

The product is extremely well architected.  Like everything else EPiServer does, it’s built from the API out, which means you can wrap it around your requirements, not the other way around, which is what usually happens with ecommerce stuff.

Four years ago, I wrote this:

A store system is a phenomenally specific thing. I can’t think of many apps that could have a wider set of requirements than a shopping system.

Take content management. It exists online only, really. It’s used to build Web sites that didn’t exist 10 years ago, and that norms have built up around over the years. It’s a known quantity.

But shopping carts have to collide with their real-world equivalent. There are stores and sales and guidelines and offline businesses that need to run on these shopping cart systems, and all of them have their own quirks and idiosyncracies. Precious few online stores are the same, and it’s in the little details where you have a tendency to blow apart requirements and run smack dab into functionality walls.

It’s still true.  An online store has to collide with the real world in a way that other parts of your site do not. If you don’t have a strong API, you’re going to go nuts trying to get it to work the way your business needs it to.

Combine EPiServer’s amazing handling of content management in general with a strong API on an ecommerce platform, and you really have something amazing.

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Design rule for Camera File system (DCF) is a JEITA specification (number CP-3461) which defines a file format and file system for digital cameras, including the directory structure, file naming method, character set, file format, and metadata format. It is currently the de facto industry standard for digital still cameras. The file format of DCF is based on the Exif 2.2 specification.

[…] The root directory in a digital camera contains a DCIM (Digital Camera Images) directory which contains possibly multiple subdirectories with names such as “123ABCDE”, which consist of a unique directory number (in the range 100…999) and five alphanumeric characters, which may be freely chosen and often refer to a camera maker.

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Extensions for Google Chrome can now send out desktop notifications. Google just announced the availability of a notifications API for Chrome extension developers. […] Now, extension developers will be able to make use of the desktop notifications API to deliver notifications that appear outside of the browser window as well.

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[…when pasting, you get] three blank lines followed by “Read more:”, then the URL from which the text was copied, then an identifying hash code used for tracking purposes.

[…] the behavior changes between different sites. On the New Yorker web site, copying up to seven words from an article works normally — no attribution URL is appended. Copy eight or more words, however, and you get the attribution appendage. On TechCrunch, the attribution appendage again only kicks in for selections of eight or more words. However, on TechCrunch, if the selection consists of only one to three words, when you invoke the Copy command (either by keyboard shortcut or the menu item), you get a popover with search results for the selected text that appears over the contents of the article itself. Madness.

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The opt-out option comes in the form of a beta plugin for IE 7 or 8, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. After installation, the tool essentially tells Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js) not to collect user data such as IP information.

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