Thoughts

Computerworld and the National Policy Research Council (NPRC) recently completed a study ranking the Websites of state, county, and local governments on usability and other criteria. In the study, Michigan's site earned top marks.

According to the article, the "the e-government report card is based on an extensive examination of 11,227 official government Web sites." Sites were judged on 25 criteria, including "whether people could use them to pay taxes, bid for contracts, find government jobs and complain to local officials about concerns such as potholes." Also included in the article was a report card summarizing other top e-government performers among city, state, and local sites.

What separated the winners from the losers?

Wyatt Barnett in his Sitepoint article, "I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like" makes some very valid points about content management systems straight out of the box. Take note that he isn't just talking about commercial products but also open source systems. His first complaint about "boxed" CMS:

The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and fails at doing most things particularly well. The tasks required for content management are generic, but every organization has a far different focus when it comes to how that content should be managed and how it thinks about that content. I have lost days of meetings trying to help subject matter experts understand that an article, according to this system, is really a page. Trying to make a generic application to handle this for all comers is a very, very tricky prospect.

Sadly, his post doesn't really offer a solution. I assume building your own CMS is the only alternative to the boxed version. But I have to ask, who really has the time? I think there are some obvious reasons you see so many capable software developers are using open source software such as Wordpress, TYPO3, e107, Alfresco, and Drupal for their Web presence.

I know giving Microsoft a hard time is everyone's best pastime sport, but perhaps IE7 is an improvement over IE6. While there have been some complaints about IE7 "breaking" sites...the uproar is a lot quieter than I expected. I had anticipated a little bit more from the general public. Also, it is also nice to note that IE7 isn't included in many of the "critical"updates that the rest of the IE suite are.

From the IEBlog:

Google Buys CMSReport.com. That's at least what I would have liked this week's headlines to read. Instead, everyone in the business world is still scratching their head and wondering what to make of the Google and YouTube deal. Are we about to enter real growth and value in tech or are we about to face a Dot-Net Bubble 2.0? I don't have all the answers, but it looks like everyone is watching. BusinessWeek has this to say in their article, Smart Move or Silly Money 2.0?

WHO'S NEXT? Now, the question is whether YouTube's valuation will extend to up-and-coming buyout contenders. So far, it looks like only a few sites have demonstrated growth and engagement with users that might command similar prices. Exhibit A: Facebook, whose value as determined by its venture investors has jumped from $100 million in its first round in September, 2005, to $500 million in a second round last April. And that's just the start. Sources say bidders such as Yahoo are willing to pay up to $1 billion today.

So was Google's buy of YouTube smart or silly? Just as the BusinessWeek article discusses in their own article, the answer to that question is anybody's guess. I think if Google bought YouTube only for its young fickle audience and the level of synergy currently present at the site...it was a silly move. However, Google may have also bought YouTube before anybody else could which is likely a very smart move.

At the turn of the century it was estimated that there were over 7 million Websites in the world. In October of this year, Netcraft estimates that there are now nearly 50 million active sites on the Internet. However, I can't help but wonder how many of those 50 million sites are actually unique sites?

Sure, from time to time we are all guilty of recycling a post with the same content from one site to another. Increasingly though, I have come across sites that share not just a little bit of content but are almost exact duplicates of each other. On some cases, the only difference between the sites I'm comparing are their domain name. Let me give you an example of the déjà vu we are now seeing.

As I have mentioned in the past, besides this site I also run a site called "WebCMS Forum" [now defunct]. The forum is a place I started in hopes of bringing users of various content management systems (CMS) together for exciting discussion. While the number of users participating in actual dicussion have always been low, those people that are posting often write something that makes hosting this underused forum well worth my time.

This week I had a user, Anti, talk about frustrations with rapid changes currently happening with the content management system, Drupal. Don't get her wrong, she likes Drupal. However, for the first time in a long while, she is in need of taking a deep breath before absorbing all the new changes into her routine. At the forum she writes:

I just got done reading an interesting and important post by David Baron of Mozilla. Although his initial focus is on the Firefox 2 browser, he makes some valid points that easily carry over to lessons learned involving software development and general project management.

The post in focus from Mr. Baron is "New Theme, Old Problem" and as titled centers to some problems with the new Firefox theme. Mr. Baron states that he doesn't "really care one way or the other about most of the changes". But what does care about are the changes done to the tabs in the new theme. Mainly that the new tabs no longer blend well from the operating system it is running on. He likes the "old way" better where:

Last night, I was up late doing some administrative work for my sites as well as writing some posts. This was my attempt to procrastinate working on an osCommerce site that I promised someone would be done by the start of October.

One of those posts I made was Drupal related and available via an RSS feed for Planet Drupal to ingest. Unfortunately, I found that TinyMCE (a WYSIWYG editor) had changed my absolute links to relative links in the post. This caused references to links and images back to my site to not display properly for anyone aggregating from the RSS feed I provide. This particular issue with TinyMCE and associated Drupal module is not so much of a bug as it is a configuration issue that can easily be corrected.

I have two Ping-O-Matic related questions that I cannot find answers too. Maybe someone can help me find the answer to these two burning questions:

1. Why is Ping-O-Matic so popular for pinging the blog search engines?
2. Is anyone else bothered when they see that the blog at Ping-O-Matic has not been updated since April of 2006?

By no means am I saying anything bad about Ping-O-Matic. I just find it curious that Web applications such as Wordpress and Drupal by default point to Ping-O-Matic. Why not point your CMS to alternative ping services such as Pingoat or Blog Flux?

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.