John Newton, Alfresco, has written an interesting posts regarding "Web 2.0".  I find the article interesting because I think Newton does bring up some new ideas or at least something that hasn't been talked about in some time.  Newton has observed that the main audience for those of Web 2.0 appear to be users that tend to think on the right side of your brain.  Newton also takes it one step further by saying perhaps it is time we start taking into account the personality types of users when it comes to CMS development.

This was a real revelation for me. However, I don’t think that John and Caterina shared my excitement. Maybe it’s already bleeding obvious. The next day I did a Google search on “Web 2.0” and right brain and didn’t find a lot. However, for me it is profound and it is something I think that we can apply immediately to the development of Alfresco. I am going to explore the concept more and I believe that there are implications from Myers-Briggs personality types in how they interact with the Internet.

Taking this further, this might also mean why those who are "left brainers" are kind of annoyed with this whole Web 2.0 terminology.  It has been my experience that while the general public still craves Web 2.0 those involved in the project are exhausted of hearing the phrase be used so much these days.  If you know anything about Myers-Briggs personality types you know there may be some truth to why some of the strongest groups that dislike the Web 2.0 concept appear to be the hard core developers.

The Newbie Issue

I received an interesting e-mail the other day through the contact form at my site regarding the social bookmarking "features" I have for my posts.  The questions asked to me are quite common among new users of any Web content management system.  While the questions in this particular e-mail I received would be more appropriate to be asked and answered in the forums at Drupal.org, there were some things in the message I felt the need to address though my blog.

The first e-mail went like this:

Very interesting article from InformationWeek, How to Tell the Open Source Winners from the Losers.

On Planet Drupal, there have been a number of posts lately about the difficulty project leaders and developers have in  saying "no" while working on a project.  As much as Project leaders want to please both their client and their team members, real leaders understand the responsibilities they have in saying "no".  More specifically, I'm talking about Boris Mann's post, "Susan Mernit on the role of "no" in product development" as well as Laura Scott's own post You've got to know when to 'no' them .

This is all interesting to me because for some time I've wanted to talk about Aaron Mentele's post, Every once in a while you need to fire a client.  Aaron Mentele is a web designer and co-owns a web design company based in Sioux Falls, SD.

There comes a time when most project leaders have mastered the the ability to say "no" to certain requests.  But what happens if you find yourself not really saying "yes" to the client?  Do you have it in yourself to recognize that by having to answer "no" so often in a project you likely shouldn't have taken on the project in the first place?  What are you to do?

I know, I've been a little too quiet on this blog.  I've been busy with my latest project, CMS Report.  It's a site I designed to talk about content management systems and other information systems.  The site has really taken off with about 25 visitors reading my pages at one time.  Sometimes as many as 150 people are visiting at one time.  A lot of geeks out there!  Isn't that great.

This fork of Joomla to improve accessibility interested me

Accessible (a8e) Joomla! is a Joomla! fork that conforms to accessibility guidelines and web standards. A8e Joomla! will follow regular Joomla! releases. The project should implode when regular Joomla! finally conforms to the standards.

Accessibility of Internet sites is very huge within the federal government and addressed by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 1998.

I have never really worried whether I was certified or not. This Computerworld article gets right to the point:

Depending on whom you talk to, certification programs are either borderline rip-offs that provide little useful knowledge, or valuable hiring tools that make it easier for IT execs to pick the most promising new employees.

Available from vendors focusing on their own products, or outside organizations offering multi-vendor training, these certificate programs are expanding to fill the many specialized technology subsets that have multiplied along with the growth of data storage and other IT areas.

Now this isn't to say that I don't have a few IT certifications under the belt and didn't receive some benefit from them. One of the most intensive IT certifications of recent years was in IT security and another to "please" the crowd was a certification for migration to Microsoft's Server 2003. By the time I was done with those certifications though, I didn't know enough to get the job done.

For the most part, I usually say "no" to making New Year resolutions and IT predictions. I never really get things 100% completed to say I've resolved those things that I previously promised. I have yet to ever fully predict what is just around the corner for IT (actually it almost usually turns out better than even my most optimistic predictions). However, no matter the time of year, I always have goals that I strive to meet.

The following are some of my open source IT goals for 2007:

• Return of the Geek. Outside my "day job", the past year has been filled with freelance projects designing and hosting sites for various clients. As I wrote a few months ago, the whole experience of working outside of work for cash has led a bad taste to my mouth. When you really don't need the money, why do it? For 2007, I rather spend my time contributing to open source projects such as Drupal. I've been a wall flower for too long and I think the core developers would like to see wall flowers not be wall flowers.
• For sites that I own, I need to do a better job of installing the betas and release candidates. For example, when I started CMS Report it was with Drupal 4.7 Beta 1. I'm sad to report that this site is still using Drupal 4.7. It's very hard to contribute to open source if you're not willing to go on the edge with some of your production sites.