New CMS thoughts
web technology, work September 21st, 2009
Currently looking at affordable (?) Java cms options. Two particular products have caught the eye:
Magnolia
OpenCMS
But hopes of finding a separate edit/publish model, with Tomcat only and the ability to support muliple domains may have been thwarted. So what gives?
The multiple domain model has served well, but good go with some carefully applied political expediancy. Else, the Tomcat only delivery which we’d hoped to keep to help maintain existing apps.
The next step is to go through existing services and fully detail what’s required and when, as well as looking at what can be dropped/replaced and with howe much work/time/pain!
Tags: cms
Despite a lull in the posts on my personal wordpress.com-hosted blog, I thought it time to download wordpress and host it on my personal webspace. Hence new site and a new theme.
Download, install, database set-up and export of existing content from wordpress.com – all a doddle. Very impressed by what I guess has been a much trodden path. A little bit of searching to find a theme I liked, quick search for widgets and job (almost) done. So now it’s down to me to write the posts.
Twitter activity continues, but now with the assistance of a client, or rather two. I use Twhirl if I want to access >1 account. I have a personal account, an account that I’m currently running as UniBirmingham (though soon to hand this over) and an account for webteam apps (more below). If I just want to keep an eye on 1 account during the session, I use Tweetdeck which has a more flexible display ‘deck’. I’m aware there are many more clients out there, but these seemed to be well used (according to those I follow on twitter) and at the moment fulfil my (possibly limited) requirements. When these requirements change or I see a wider change of client-usage in those submitting tweets, I’ll have another look.
I remain quite taken with Twitter – I love its simplicity and speed, and given I’m accessing this as much as my email account I’m interested in how I can use it as a notification device alongside email with our java/web applications. As a result, I has a quick check of the API and that’s as straightforward as the Twitter service itself and after setting up a twitter account to send the DM, it now forms part of a forms facility app I’m currently writing/testing. When it’s launched, we’ll see if there’s any take up.
Twitter Use
web technology December 3rd, 2008
As someone who can be far too cynical, particularly about technological fads I’ve been surprised at my conversion to twitter. I started using it to find out why it kept being mentioned as a marketing/community tool, pretty sure that I would ditch my account after a couple of hours. A couple of weeks later I’m still there and getting dangerously hooked – to some extent on the app but mainly on those I’m following. A few can be a little too self-publicising for my taste, but as a rule all are extremely interesting and well worth listening to. I’ve tried to keep the numbers of those I’ve followed down to a reasonable number ad restricted to areas I have a strong interest in (tech, politics, stephen fry).
So I’ve now see merit there – but why listen to me, here’s a reference tweeted recently: 5 ways I benefit from twitter
Creating a word cloud
web technology December 1st, 2008
As the bham website has an rss feed associated with it (produced by the UCMS news and events app) I was able to give this word cloud app a go (www.wordle.net). Silly perhaps, but quick and easy.
