vanderwal.net

Writers and information structure with markup

Understanding content, structure, writers, and working with content management in CMS Watch. Those of you like me that can not understand how people can not structure their documents that they want Web-endabled or reused in other way, this article helps make sense of the situation.

James found

I finally found James site and I am much better off for it. Two guesses what James professional leaning is from the header?

Macromedia back to the CMS again

Word on the street is Macromedia is to release a new CMS the week of November 11, 2002. This article states the Content Management System will only be available for Windows XP first and then for OS X in the Spring. Odd that it is not supporting Win 2000 servers as XP servers are not fully baked yet and ready for consumption. This is only rumor until the launch.

Happy anniversary OtT Tool

Yesterday, October 31st was the one year anniversary of this weblog's home rolled CMS (Content management system). In the past year I have posted 722 entries, set 142 keywords to classify and cross-classify these posts, had 122 comments posted, and had 2,055 category entries in the database to help find related information posted.

This was a wonderful step as the tool did exactly what I wanted it to do. Mostly stay functional and usable from where ever I am. I had started rolling it about six months before it went live and used it as my "travelblog". I had been hand coding every entry for six months to a year, which was getting to be a drag. To post hand coded posts I needed FTP capability, which was not available everywhere. I could find a web browser much more easily. This was functionality I found I had with Blogger, which I started playing with out of curiosity with the interface and desktop application like functionality.

I have been asked why I do not use one of the other all ready rolled tools. I like what I built and it works for me. I can also add functionality to it that I want to play with. Some of the lack of functionality is my own lack of time or motivation on with this tool, but it because of me. I also like the quick responsiveness when posting comments and the general posts themselves.

Here is to another year and more, with time to add everything I want to add.

Tweaking begins again

I have been tweeking the code in the weblog and modifying the CSS too. I have the whole of my CMS running on my Mac, which gives me the ability to tweek and update the code. Having Jaguar behind the scenes made adding the MySQL component much easier than in previous builds. In the past it was similar to a Linux or Solaris compile and build. The Mac build was much easier and worked seemlessly with PHP and Apache. The downside was the Data Load element is not available so I used cat to import just the each table's data.

The CSS I started tweaking tonight as the pages were rendering very small on Mac IE 5.2 and oddly in Mozilla 1.1. Last night's updates to the weblog code have it a little closer to validating 4.01 transitional, and fixed a few font oddities of class clashing. I am using a body with 12 points and using percentages in to size the elements in the pages. This is giving me an adjustable font size in IE on Mac, which I will test tomorrow at work on a PC

One of the next steps on the tool side is building a RSS feed and making a few needed changes to the administration tools to ease editing submitted entries.

Down in the bits

Thanks to all who e-mailed yesterday and called to say the site was having problems (barfing MySQL connection errors). The site hosts corrected the problem relatively quickly and we are back in business again. This did get me thinking that maybe the front page of "Off the Top" should be baked (static and not dynamically generated with each hit, which is fried). This would require an XML processing for the page to keep the number of comments (those things you are not using) accurate below each link. This would be some recoding on my part and that will be a little bit off in the furture as my development time and non-work brain time is allocated elsewhere for the next short little bit.

Hierarchy of Information Needs

Lou discusses the relationship between information architecture and technology, which sparked the following brain dump on my part:

This subject of information and technology has been of interest with me for quite sometime. The term "IT" has been vastly dominated by the technology portion of the term. Oddly, in organizations that have Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and with out Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) the CIOs role is largely focused on technology to serve the information (this is fine), but the stress has been technological solutions. As nearly all of us in the IT field know, the technical solutions are far from perfect (I know nothing is life is perfect) and many times require reworking business processes to take advantage of the technologies best traits. This is much akin to Keith's point about technology companies selling products and not whole solutions.

In my work I came to it from the information and communication side many years ago and along with it I married the technology side, as it was a wonderful pairing with great promise. Over the years I have heard more than anybody's fair share of, "we don't have to worry about knowing the information, we can code around it". This is the point, I learned when you pull in the reins on the technical team. This is what drew me deeper into the realm of the technical side.

If we look at information from the communication viewpoint and what role the information will play as it transfers information to humans and to other machines for use and also reuse. We have to understand the information as its basic levels, similar to Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs". What are the human elements thatare intended, i.e. what purpose does the information serve? What properties does the information need in order to transmit this information for best use? If the information is corporate sales trends and assessing and tacking variables that impact these trends, then we have to identify the human audiences that will be using this information. The basic level of "Information Need" is do we have the proper data or information to be able to create this type of report. Do we have the information types to provide usable information for the various audiences and do we understand the vocabulary of these audiences (vocabulary in this sense can be textual and visual as some audiences may best understand the information in charts and graphs, while others will best understand textual quantitative indicators). Do we have the basics to begin building this content, which will be tied to a technological question as to how the data and information is captured and stored? Once we can answer yes to these information, human, and technical questions we can move up the "Information Needs” hierarchy. It is also at this point that we know we can publish some information to have some folks make use of it, but we know the use of the information at this point will be far from optimal and the information may not be used in its proper method.

The next level would be questions of information use. We have established we have the data and content to build the information, but how will the information be used and who/what will be using the information. These questions will help shape the information structures and the medium(s) used to convey the information. The information may require different vocabularies that need to be established or used so the different audiences can best understand and make use of the information. What is the environment that the information will be used in and in what context? When these answers are established, only then can the technology to be used for the varying mediums be established. This level gives a great level certainty that the information and its use will be effective.

Far too often the technology is chosen with out asking these questions and the medium is used is driven by the technologies limitations, which limits the information's use and efficiency. Many organizations found that their reliance on storing all information in Adobe Acrobat did not fit their efficient information needs. Acrobat works best for replicating print versions of information and has other properties that work passably, like searching the text, providing information that is accessible to those that are handicapped, quickly accessing sections of that information over a network connection, etc. Many corporations found it was best or even desired to not store their information in Acrobat, but to offer the information in Acrobat as an output of another information storage methods that provided far greater information use and reuse (this does not apply to every organization as their are some organizations that make proper and efficient use of Acrobat and it serves that organization perfectly). These organizations came to the conclusion that the information was the primary importance and the information and its use should drive the technology.

The next step is to determine how the information can be optimized to take advantage of the mediums being used. This will allow the information to have the most impact. As the medium and technologies have been chosen to best present the information, at this point there are steps that can be taken to improve the marriage between the medium and the information. For example, we know that one of the mediums for the information will be Web pages; the information will need to be structured in a manner that takes advantage of the possibilities with that medium. The Web browser gives us the ability to present textual information and charts together, while providing relatively easy access to more detailed information and/or an interactive media presentation that permits the user to see the charts change over time based on the selection of these different variables (done with Flash, DHTML, etc.). Similar information could be offered in a PDF of the printed report that would print on 8.5 by 11 inch paper and one for A4 paper (the international standard paper size).

The last phase it validating and testing the information dissemination. We continually need to test to ensure we have identified all the audiences that are using the information, we are capturing all the data and information is required and makes sense to have for the information's use, we are capturing and storing the information in a means that is efficient for our needs to use the information, we are providing the audiences the information in a means that is most usable and efficient for them, and the information is being found and used.

This Information Needs hierarchy allows the marriage of technology to information where and when it makes sense. This Information Needs seems to be the basis for the user centered design, information architecture, knowledge management, experience design, etc. There is an understanding of the balance that is required between the creators of the information; the information itself; the technology to capture, store, process, and present the information; and the users of the information.

In the past few years the technology and not the information nor the user of the information were the focal points. Money has been spent on technologies that have failed the purchasers and the technology and the whole of the information technology industry gets blamed. There is a great need for people that are willing to use their minds to create the foundation for information, its use, and the technologies that can help make this more efficient. The balance and the steps in the proper order must be there to give information and technology a chance.

IA misconceptions explained

Information architecture concepts: Misconceptions explained from the IBM developerWorks offers a good overview of IA. The is a very good overview for those unfamiliar with IA. The article also includes some good references.

CM and KM Blog

A new (to me) blog on content and knowledge management can be found at Column Two compiled by James Robertson.

Baking versus frying CMS

Aaron discusses baking versus frying with content management and updates bake and fry CMS ideas. The idea is to bake content, which is using your content management system to produce static pages. The alternative is to fry from the CMS by providing truely dynamic content. There are a few reasons why one should choose the frying method:

• Frequent (hourly or semi-daily) updates of informaiton
• Multiple dependancies (information linking to and from many points)
• Unlimited resources
• Many variation of presentation of the data
• Providing user slicing and dicing of informaiton capabilities
• Many external content providers

This list does not capture everything, but also provides maleable guidelines. There are many advantages to baking (publishing static content pages) from a CMS:

• Speed of delivery
• Archievable version
• Ease of troubleshooting and maintenance
• Editable output pages
• Use templates to generate valid mark-up and perfect 508 compliant pages
• Using reusable content pieces that provide consistancy and accuracy of information on all presentation layers
• Keeping various application elements well maintained

Aaron provides good links for further discovery of your own.

ASIS&T content management cancelled

I am much bothered by the ASIS&T content management conference being cancelled. I was looking forward to attending. The cancellation explains why I could not find the information to sign-up this past weekend.

Findability explained

Peter Morville finally puts his findability explanation in writing for all to see (in the wonderful site called Boxes and Arrows). The idea of the term and meaning of findability is growing on me. Findability is a solid lead into the problems of information structure. The explanation of how to start fixing the problems and actions needed to help eradicate the problem can reside in the method/model of attraction (an update to the MOA should be available in two or three weeks, extenuating circumstances have slowed the updates and progress).

ABCs of CMS

Jay Blanchard presents The ABCs of CMS. I liked this as it focussed on the importance of workflow, among other things.

WYSIWYG in browser part two

The second part to theWYSIWYG editor in a Web browser is available. This section gets into implementing the HTML portion from the first section into the storage components of this article.

USC Annenberg School offers a light personal review of the WSJ redesign. Those of us that use the online version of the Journal on a daily basis have noticed a great jump since the redesign began implementation over a month ago. The site is much quicker and the interface is cleaner. The queries now are very quick again and there is a deep pile of data/information to search through.

Snippets: I have noted the redesign more than once... Nihal ElRayess has shared part of the IA perspective on the main WSJ redesign and the WSJ Company Research redesign parts of the project... The Guardian provided its insight in February (a good piece of researched journalism)... It looks like the WSJ redesign began in at least March 2000... The $28 million spent on the Web reworking (hardware, software, visual, and information architecture) is much less than the $232 million spent on a new printer for the WSJ print version or the $21 million for an advertising campaign to tout the new WSJ... The previous version of the WSJ site was a hand rolled CMS and now have been moved into Vignette... Those interested in the overal WSJ plan will like what is inside the presentation of Richard Zannino, Executive Vice President and CFO of Dow Jones & Company.