B. Mann Consulting

Whew! What an intense couple of days. Today was my speaking day for Web Directions North. I was very pleased to be selected as a speaker by Dave Shea and the rest of the WDN08 team, and I was a bit nervous up until the last minute. At the same time, I was really glad that I had the first day to attend and absorb and talk to other participants and tailor my presentation to what I was hearing.

I originally started with a "traditional" presentation. It ended up morphing into a pseudo Dick Hardt / Lessig style, with lots of slides with just a few words on each one. It may not make much sense without the audio, but Phil Djwa and the Agentic team recorded the audio for everything, so I'm hoping to combine the two.

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I wish I had had a little more time to practice the timing a little more, and I definitely need to invest in a non line of sight presentation clicker: right when I was on a roll I would have to more carefully aim the remote control at my machine.

I'm happy to announce that I'll be speaking at Dave Shea and co's Web Directions North conference this coming January, taking place January 29th through 31st here in Vancouver (with apres conference Whistler trip, of course).

I'll be talking about the 3 Stages of Content Management. I'm tagging stuff in delicious with WDN08 -- please send me your links if you have something relevant to add. Yes, I'll be mentioning Drupal, but I'll mainly go through why/when/how you'll be diving into an actual content management "system" vs. straight up HTML pages (people still do that?!?) and some of the different tools and techniques, as well as the reason why you might want to go to a dynamic system.

WDN is still looking for sponsorship, and of course you should definitely attend if building websites is at all in your future. Dave's presence here in Vancouver is finally starting to be felt (which Dave? oh, you mean the CSS Zen Garden guy? He lives in Vancouver?!?) and the conference last year was excellent.

Last night saw the first Launch Party event here in Vancouver (background write up by Rob Lewis of TechVibes here). Maura Rodgers, Danny Robinson, and Dimitri Sirota joined forces to put on what I can best summarize as being a social gathering for Vancouver's tech community, from entrepreneurs to marketers to interested potential investors.

I've come to know Maura and Danny quite well. They've come back up from the Valley and have now settled back here in Vancouver, with a commitment to make Vancouver's tech community -- including a healthy ecosystem of investment -- really shine. Conveniently, that's completely in line with what I want to accomplish as well. I quizzed Maura ahead of time to compare/contrast Launch Party with DemoCampVancouver. Here's what she had to say:

Moving here from the Valley, where there is no shortage of fun events for people to attend, I thought an event like LP for entrepreneurs, techies, marketers was missing here. There are lots of great events like democamp, barcamp, VEF, and they fill a need too. After work, I am just looking for good mingling and want to bring the people together in and around this city, who are sitting on great ideas but not everyone knows about them. Every month, we hope to showcase about 4-5 cool, early stage companies in the city. It will be very informal and fun and give the people, who are not competing in the decibel competition ;), a chance to warm up and be involved.

We have connections to Silicon Valley. We know investors, marketers, companys there and want to make them aware of the Vancouver scene. Our next LP will most likely be in November. I will be collaborating with the people of the very popular event Twiistup of CA, who are interested in the scene up here to put on a bigger, more involved event than our first called Launch Party with a Twiist. We hope to get more people from South of the Border up for that one.

So, there you have it. Launch Party fills a more casual, social role to meet and catch up with what folks are doing. I think the attendees had a good time networking with each other as well as sitting in on demos/pitches on the startups that attended. It was great to see everyone out, meet some new faces, and get to learn more about some of the great companies and products that folks are working on. I wanted to especially send some congrats to Sun, who stepped up as one of the main sponsors. I just got back from DrupalCon Barcelona, where I met Scott Matoon from Sun -- I'm impressed to see Sun stepping up to different communities, from local ones like Launch Party, to global communities like Drupal. Other than that...go Maura Go!

And now that you're all partied out, head on over to WorkSpace next Thursday, October 4th, for DemoCampVancouver03.

(Photo by Roland Tanglao, of Victoria Revay and Dave Olson)

Marc Canter has gotten quite the storm of controversy about paying bloggers to...blog. Of course, Marc won't get any respect until, say, Microsoft does it.

Roland and I met with Marc Tuesday night to go over some Bryght business (this, this, and this, if you must know). Marc also gave us a preview of the new Marqui (nee MaestroCMS) demo. Marqui has some great workflow features, they output to multiple formats, and they even have RSS feeds in their newsroom now.

Would reviewing a CMS make sense for my blog? Absolutely.

Saddest Music

Jeffrey on the new Glassdog and the web. Happy ninth birthday. HTML wasn’t easy enough, and it isn’t getting any easier. Blogs aren’t anything special, they’re just a function of software that makes it easy to maintain content. Compare the usability of the top 3 blog packages with the top 3 “content management systems.” Blogging software is the simplest mechanism for “In-depth explorations of every imaginable topic.” That’s the revolution.

It's not the first time I see this, so here is just one advice you may consider to avoid losing those of your readers who will not care following your moving feeds: Cool URIs don't change! Changing the URL of a news feed is strictly equivalent to changing the URL of your home page, since the feed URL is actually the site entry point for its subscribers. Would you break your home page like this just because you've changed your content management system? No one in their sane mind would accept that a CMS breaks a home page like this, so why accept it for a news feed? OsOpinion could have changed their backend without changing the feed URL.
padawan.info: How to lose readers (1)

They could have also just re-directed their newsfeed to the new address.

Little known Drupal feature #1: if you use the built in aggregator, when it goes out to check a feed and finds it has been re-directed, the new feed link will automatically be copied into the database.

This said, the claim that EE can manage multiple weblogs holds true. Simply it must be clear that templates have to be created manually for each weblog and managed centrally by the administrators, without an easy way to delegate this task.

For the technically inclined, here is, IMHO, the main difference between MT and EE when it comes to handling multiple weblogs

padawan.info: Update on MT vs. EE

Follow up to MT vs. EE. Are multiple weblogs a killer feature? It seems that many MT sites use multiple "blogs" for other effects (different sections, link blogs, etc.).

At the fundamental level, EditThisPagePHP basically just let you remotely edit a single page. There are many situations where existing Wiki or Blog software is too complicated, or imposes too much structure. EditThisPagePHP lets you have total control over the HTML -- you can use sophisticated CSS layouts, or very simple HTML -- the software does not get in the way.
Life With Alacrity: Simple Yet Sophisticated Group Page Editing

I'm trying to figure out what's so different about ETP. This plus WebDAV might be interesting.

My call last week for ideas on document management solutions for small business yielded two suggestions, both from people I know and both saying, in essence, "Zope." I'm not surprised that Zope was suggested since it was one of my first thoughts when my friend asked me for advice, but I'm a little surprised that nothing else was suggested. Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog: Document Management

Document management is a huge need for small businesses, even if they don't know it themselves yet. It includes aspects of content management, knowledge management, and personal publishing.

It seems like there still isn't an easy open-source or low-cost off the shelf solution. Zope (since it supports WebDAV/FTP) can function as a good tool for this, but this usually means having a (local) Zope consultant, and I don't think this meets the criteria for low-cost nor off the shelf.

Jay Allen points, in his post The CMS and inline HTML, to an issue which I have been recently giving some thought as I consider switching between Textile to Markdown.
ollicle: text 2 HTML without the lock down

I've actually gotten in the habit of typing in (X)HTML directly. It's certainly not ideal, and absolutely no good for end users, but something like the HTML Tidy module to check/correct your syntax would be good. There is also HTMLArea, a WYSIWYG component for Mozilla browsers.