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Type Pad (dis)Connect – All UR comments are belong to US

Posted on by John

In some ways it is exciting to see the launch of Type Pad Connect but in others it seems a Faustian bargain.

You get some spiffy features, including the ability of other bloggers to leave comments (which appear to be) on your site using OpenID, with threading, and with avatars; but in the process you put all your comments (and your relationship with your blog readers) in someone else’s hands.

It also seems like the real benefits of using TypePad Connect come from network effects – once everyone has a TypePad Profile and every blog uses it for comments, the benefits will be great. But what about when only some of your users have TypePad profiles, or want TypePad profiles? What about letting people comment with identities they already have rather than creating yet another profile / lifestream?

Ok, so maybe the title’s a bit strongly worded, and if you’re already using a hosted blog, or using TypePad for blogging, maybe it doesn’t where your comments actually live. But I don’t think it will work for me.

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Open Source Content Management Panel at Gilbane Boston

Posted on by John

Next week, I’ll be moderating a panel on Open Source Content Management at the fifth annual Gilbane Boston Conference – “Where Content Management Meets Social Media.”

It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

Here’s the description from the official program:

There are many open source content management solutions available today, reflecting a wide variety of capabilities and costs, and organizations of all types are more willing than ever to consider them in place of, or along side commercial CMSs. This session will look at some of the pros and cons of deploying open source content management systems in terms of licensing, costs, maintenance, and functionality to help you determine if they are an appropriate option for your organization.

In addition to all of that, I also hope we’ll talk about how the adoption landscape is or isn’t changing for open source in the CMS space, innovation and standards compliance in open source CMS, and how open source projects can make user adoption easier or more effective.

What questions would you like to ask this group of speakers? How do you see the landscape changing for open source projects in the content management space?

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It’s about time

Posted on by John

Why isn’t this a feature of every modern email system?

Forgotten Attachment Detector
Forgotten Attachment Detector

(This is a feature on Gmail Labs, which you’ll find under the settings label in Gmail)

The use case is so simple. The user writes “Attached you’ll find” or “in the attached” or something like that – basically anywhere they use the word “attached” – if there is no attachment, ask the user if that’s ok.

The number of times you say “attached” and don’t mean to attach a file is presumably outweighed by the number of times you mean to attach a file but hit send before you attach it.

How can I get this in Apple Mail or (sigh of the reluctant user) Entourage to do this?

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Are Flash and Flex Web Technologies?

Posted on by John

Throughout this week and part of last, I’ve been working (in between meetings) on getting Alfresco Labs 3.0 set up on my laptop to be able to demo (and experiment with) their new Share application. The challenge has been in getting the flash-based preview of uploaded multi-page PDF documents working (see this thread in the Alfresco forums for some of the details).

The way the feature should work is that the Alfresco Share application takes the PDF a user uploads into the document library, converts it to an SWF using swftools (one frame of the SWF per each page of the PDF), and then uses the YUI framework to “play” the resulting SWF.

The problem is that for me, depending on the version of Flash installed, the preview SWF cannot be displayed. (Short version: Flash 9.0.45-47 works fine, later Flash versions just result in a spinning cursor which never resolves. The problem is Flash 9.0.45 breaks file upload, which works in later Flash versions).

Good Flash
Good Flash
  
Bad Flash
Bad Flash

Just finding this out required a lengthy exercise including full uninstalls of Flash (using Flash uninstaller for Mac OS X, which takes forever since it is a PowerPC binary running on an Intel machine) along with installs of various versions of Flash from the 9.x archive.

It was in this context that I was so happy to see the dialogue Dion Almaer and Brad Neuberg posted at Ajaxian today: How Flash Can Join The Open Web.
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