I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love
- MAKE YOU FEEL MY LOVE

In order to understand the social media douchebaggery that happens on our interwebs, you need to hold your nose and dive in some times. I try most things, but get bored of them pretty quickly. So I figured I had to try Empire Avenue (EAv), the stock trading game in which the stocks are people, and the bigger the douchebag the higher the value. Fortunately you don’t need to piss off invite your friends to get started.

First thing to say about this is, unlike most others, it is actually quite fun and quite addictive. By this I mean in the same way a stock market simulation game is fun and addictive. So I can recommend giving it a try by wasting an evening. Your value is based on the usual supply/demand/market forces, but also on your “score” on various social networks – currently Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, Flickr and YouTube. I spent longer on it than I did on SecondLife (in which I spent all my money on poker and whoring and was destitude in about two hours) and it’s more fun than Quora ever got (which was probably when it was down due to the recent EC2 fiasco).

For me the best thing about the 4 hours of my life I’ve so far wasted was randomly bumping into and having a chat with Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang / (e)JOWYANG). At the time I was broke so could only buy 1 share in what is likely to become one of the biggest stocks on EAv. And he unwisely invested in (e)BOOF. It was interesting talking with all these big cheeses discussing the potential impact of EAv. There are theories that this’ll be the next big thing and that the social currency may even have some real world value in the long run. I’m rather skeptical on that. Although if you’re a moron you can by Eaves (the game currency) with your hard earned real cash.

If Jowyang thinks I'm a good investment ... Click to Enlarge

I made some pretty dumb-ass investments in (e)IANT, (e)BLOEM, (e)PIEW, (e)BIGBLUEMOOSE and (e)SLWR who were all overvalued already and, seeing as they’re not douches, probably aren’t going to rise much. I bought some (e)IRI seeing she’s responsible for me trying this thing. And in a fit of madness I bought me a piece of (e)PMONKS, which is surely going to be worthless pretty soon. I’ll dump that after this post I think.

I wasn’t very surprised to see quite a few of my Twitter followers on EAv already, but only two of my FaceBook friends were on. Good thing too, ’cause my real friends are a worthless bunch that wouldn’t be worth shit to a shrewd Empire Avenue investor like me.

I have no idea about the strategy of this thing. A good way to make a bit of cash seems to be to monitor the “Recent Arrivals” section, and speculatively buy shares in most of them. If you’re quick, maybe a Google search, in particular to see if they’re rich in Twitter followers. People with a lot of followers seem to double in value as soon as they link their Twitter account to their profile, so you have to be fast. Price hikes from activity on the other network take much longer as, because they’re not public like Twitter, EAv has to run off and index them only once they’ve got your details. I’m told the algorithms value LinkedIn recommendations. Which I, for one, don’t.

Finally, a few strategy tips from me, which I sure to be excellent seeing as I’ve got about 4 hours experience:
- Unlocking achievements gets you cash. So link everything like your blog, FaceBook, LinkedIn and join a few communities
- People seem to search the Recent Arrivals section and buy people cheap if they look cool, before they manage to link their Twitter profiles and share prices rise
- Buy (e)BOOF

Have fun out there.

Call me any name you like
I will never deny it
Farewell Angelina
The sky is erupting
I must go where it’s quiet
- FAREWELL ANGELINA

Come gather ’round friends let me tell you a tale. I’ve been rather quiet these last twelve months. My poor blog has been lacking the frequent wisdom you all grew to depend on. And when the posts did come, they were often inane lacking in substance. You see, friends, I was involved in some top secret shiftyness and I signed a lot of pieces of paper which meant I couldn’t really talk about a lot of interesting things.

But I’m free from that now. So while it isn’t clear that my noble attempt to save the publishing industry from itself has been a success, I’ve emerged from the other side even wiser (gasp!) than before. I’m once again allowed to talk about things, and I’ve got a whole lot of shit I’d like to talk about. So, loyal readers, watch this space for more exciting news about Content Management Systems. And the Publishing Industry. And Paywalls. And Tablets and other Mobile Shit. And Adobe and Woodwing and HTML and iOS and Core Text. And lots lots more.

On the down side, I might not have much time to share all this wisdom with all of you. You see, I’ve started a new company with a few other brilliant people and we’re going to try to save the Publishing Industry from itself yet again. This promises to be time consuming, but I promise I’ll spend more time on this blog as my readers are worth saving too.

So that’s the news. Back with a Bang.

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
- MASTERS OF WAR

A friend of mine just reintroduced me to my favourite game of all time. A curse on all of his houses. Civilization Revolution is available on iOS and, the bad news is, it is as good and addictive as ever. It’s actually been around for almost a year, but I was blissfully unaware. I don’t play games any more, trying to balance my life between my kids, my job, my drinking, my blog and the odd bit of sleep. That’s all about to go to hell.

I’ve given it a try and it rocks. I feel like I’m 18 again when all I had to do was play Civilization I, go out and get drunk, play some more, drinks some more, write some pretty easy university maths exams, and play even more. But two decades later, I’m told I have “responsibilities”. I’ve got a bad feeling that this week the kids are going to go feral, my wife will leave me, the fridge will fester, and I’ll get fired.

But a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do. The game won’t beat itself on Emperor level, you know. Those asshat Greeks need to be taught a lesson, the shifty Aztecs can’t be trusted, and Ghengis Khan is really, really pissing me off. So until I’ve sorted that out, you won’t be seeing much on this blog. £3.99 is a small price to pay for your life to fall apart. Buy it, you know you want to.

[UPDATE]: The iPhone version went FREE the day after I flushed £3.99 down the bog. Makes my time-stealing, money-stealing friend that ruined my life even more of a ballsack. At least the rest of you can have your midlife crisis for free.

Your daddy walks in wearin’
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?
- ON THE ROAD AGAIN

It was only a matter of time. It seems some hacker group wanted to take down my site. Probably a Chinese military faction, a bunch of Free Content Tree Hugging Hippies, or someone I whipped in some youth chess tournament. Naturally, I was prepared for this shit so ensured my site was running the latest everything, and was more secure than Fort Knox – safe from ground attacks or air assaults.

But, it turns out, not safe from burrowing from below. These sneaky hackers realised my site was rock solid, so they took out the whole of GoDaddy instead. My blog was injected with evil PHP script which redirected my legions of adoring fans to malware pages. Apologies to the thousands of other bloggers on GoDaddy who were innocent victims of this malicious, round-about attack on Jon On Tech.

Fortunately, GoDaddy accepted complete responsibility for the situation, and their tech support really understood the problem and helped people quickly and effectively. NOT. Actually, they continually blamed non-patched software and their tech support people wouldn’t know they were being penetrated until the poker came out of one of their eye sockets. I hate those guys.

I’ve done some temporary fix (which you can find here) that goes through all the files on your system and removes the evil PHP. However, it’s only temporary. Me, and thousands of others, are completely at the mercy of the script-kiddies that currently can do pretty much anything to the GoDaddy servers. I might already be part of a BotNet. It seems to be some Linux Shared Hosts problem that is affecting other hosting companies too. If one account on the host is compromised, all the accounts are toast. So the Jon on Tech ship is floating, but leaky. Not to mention as slow and flaky as always. So why do I still live on GoDaddy? Cause I haven’t had time to get the fuck off it yet. But I plan to.

Here is what my home page looked like while fixing the problem. I stole the image from Google. Seems other people have the same sentiments as I do.

Thanks to @roekens who alerted me to the problem. It’s probably only him and my mother that read my blog, and Mommy dearest wouldn’t know Malware from Tupperware. As usual, I started this post with a Bob Dylan lyric. But let me end with the last stanza from a poem by the great (if slightly unbalanced) Sylvia Plath which sums up my #GoDaddy feelings nicely right now:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through
DADDY – SYLVIA PLATH

P.S. Please let me know if anything dodgy happens again, like you get redirected to some pr0n or anti-virus rubbish. However, don’t be alarmed if the site is slow or times out. That’s just GoDaddy’s usual service.

So all you newsy people, spread the news around,
You c’n listen to m’ story, listen to m’ song.
You c’n step on my name, you c’n try ‘n’ get me beat,
When I leave New York, I’ll be standin’ on my feet.
- HARD TIMES IN NEW YORK TOWN

Okay, this is getting stupid now. In order to end the horseshit on #mcboofsnewjob (thanks @pmonks) and the worst poll ever (thanks @jameshoskins), here is the official statement.

I’m the Lead Architect on a high profile News Corp project. It covers many areas that I’m deeply interested in, and many of my technology sweet spots.

Now leave me in peace. Speculate away, but I’m not going to be talking about this one much I’m afraid. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

P.S. If you’re a genius looking for a job, hunt me down on LinkedIn. Especially if I know you already.

I don’t build up illusion ’til it makes me sick,
I ain’t afraid of confusion no matter how thick.
- MOST OF THE TIME

As I write this, we’re kicking off the BCS Event – Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management? I’ll write more about the event afterwards, but I thought I’d share my presentation.

I assumed I’d be stoned if I used PowerPoint at an Open Source event, so I did this using Prezi, which I really enjoyed. First time I’ve used it – apologies if it makes you feel sick. And it probably doesn’t make any sense without me talking over it. Probably doesn’t make sense then either, but anyway.

You can see the presentation online here: http://prezi.com/rmga5cq2iplv/

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist, she don’t look back.
- SHE BELONGS TO ME

Baaaah. I said I wouldn’t write this post, and a few people advised me not to. “Don’t Look Back!” they cried. But, dear readers, some of you begged for it. More importantly, I’m doing it for me (thanks Finnur) as a record. So if you don’t like these Blog Year In Review posts, stop reading now. Bye bye, and Happy New Year.

The Numbers

I finally started this blog in March 2009. The main reasons were a) I was up most of the night anyway due to baby’s sleeping habits and b) I was forced to take some holiday in March. I was never expecting anyone to read it, so a huge huge thank you to those that did, and helped me get some traffic love juice. I also got lucky with my timing as the infamous CMS Vendor Meme started just when I did. In 10 months, I’ve done:

• Real Life beers with about 30 or 40 people I’d never have met if I didn’t start this blog. You know who you are.
• According to Alexa, a mere 700,000 sites are more popular than mine. I’ve got a Page Rank of 5, although these don’t mean anything any more.
• 65 blog posts (34 in the long gone super-keen first 3 months). So averaging 1.5 posts per week. Each post has lyrics from a different Bob Dylan song. I’m aiming for 100 before a theme change.
• 571 comments (just over 8 per post). Probably 100 of these are from me!
• 5,224 spam comments that Akismet has saved me from
• 21,700 visits, or 45,500 page views, according to Google Analytics

My biggest day ever was about 400 visits. A shitty weekend is about 30. The traffic numbers have actually stayed reasonably constant since I started, although the frequency of new posts has dropped enormously.

Most Underrated

These are the 5 posts I liked most that never even made the Top 20. Please read them and tell all your friends. The poor guys never stood a chance.

Most Read

Here is the obligatory Top 10 by traffic. I’ve used number of unique visits as my metric.

Best Traffic Sources

Here is just a summary of where the traffic came from. Again, a massive thanks to those that lowered the tone of their sites by linking to me.

• 25% of my traffic was from search engines. Google is the only one that matters sending about 95% of these.
• 30% of the traffic was “direct”. I never bothered to set up tracking from Tweets but I’d bet the majority of these came from Twitter clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck. Which means I get much more traffic from Twitter than Google. The other 45% of the traffic is from referring sites.
• Twitter was my top referrer by miles, with 25% of my direct visits.
• Second, third and fourth were all very close – cmswire.com, cmswatch.com and jboye.com. Eighth went to cmsreport.com
• FaceBook, LinkedIn and Delicious made the Top 20.
• The blogs in the Top 20 referrers were julianwraith.com (6), asserttrue.blogspot.com (7), reddotcmsblog.com (9), 2020visions.wordpress.com (13), sala.us (14), ecmarchitect.com (15), tristanrenaud.jahia.com (17), irinaguseva.wordpress.com (19) and persuasivecontent.com (20)

Well, that’s that. If for some reason you’re interested in a stat I didn’t share, ask in the comments. Be excellent to each other, and I’ll see you on the other side of the noughties for that beer. It’s been real.

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
- LIKE A ROLLING STONE

End of the decade again. Everyone is writing the Obligatory Reflection and/or Prediction stuff again. So I ain’t going to write one of those. However, being a blogging newbie, I learnt a shitload this year which, it transpires, was well understood by the Social Media gurus I’ve loved for years. So, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you their wisdom from 1965 – 1970, the years I should have lived in. I’ll take my lessons from Lennon, Dylan, Hendrix, Page, Jagger or Morrison over social media whore @GuyKawasaki or ego-blogger @Scobleizer any day of the week.

Lesson #1: It’s Noisy Out There, So Make a Bigger Noise

The Beatles, New York, NY, August 15 1965

The Beatles concert at Shea Stadium broke records all over the place, with over 55,000 people attending. And Beatlemania was at its peak, so the crowd was going mental. The noise in the stadium was, according to Lennon, “louder than God”. No-one in the stadium could really hear any of the music. And, as it turned out, nor could the band. So eventually Lennon just started banging the keyboard with his elbows just to make some sound that people could actually hear.

It’s noisy as hell in the blogosphere too. Most blogs don’t get read. If you want people to notice you, you need to make a noise. Start banging your keyboard with your elbows.

Lesson #2: Experiment, but Don’t Pander to the Crowds

Bob Dylan, Newport Folk Festival, Newport, RI, July 25 1965

As some of you might know, I’ve got a soft spot for Bob. I love his older acoustic gems. So I might have been one of the sheep who were upset when, at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan plugged in his guitar and backing band, and mixed it up a bit. At a concert in Manchester the following year, we had the famous Judas Incident. Details are still sketchy, but let’s go with the romantic version. Dylan starts playing some electric tunes, and during a gap between songs someone shouts “Judas”. Dylan replied with the rather cryptic “I don’t believe you, you’re a liar“, before turning to his band instructing them to “play it fucking loud!” And they did, belting out an awesome version of Like A Rolling Stone. The “rock” albums which followed (Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde) are two of my favourites, and they both went platinum nice and quickly.

So, like Bob, I’ve tried to experiment. Do different things, and see what your readers like. Don’t just keep doing what you think they like. Branch out a bit for potential new readers. Sometimes you can go a bit far, though. I’m really struggling to understand a world in which Bob could release such an embarrassing Christmas album. Maybe time will prove everyone wrong here too.

Lesson #3: Controversy Breeds Traffic

Jimi Hendrix, Monterey, CA, 16 June 1967

When The Jimi Hendrix Experience were booked at the Monterey Pop Festival, they were huge in England, but largely unknown in the US.  Some of the biggest names in pop at the time were performing – The Animals, Beach Boys, The Mamas & Papas and more. However, it’s Hendrix that is remembered. He closed his set with an insane version of “Wild Thing”, which ended with Jimi dousing his guitar in lighter fluid, setting it on fire and smashing the shit out of it. Surprise, surprise – people remembered that and the buzz helped propel him to stardom in the USA too.

In the blogosphere, more controversial posts generate far more interest. It can be really boring reading the same things over and over again where everyone agrees with each other. Have (or make up) strong opinions, play Devil’s Advocate and encourage debate around your posts. If these debates prove that you were completely wrong, admit you were an idiot, thank the crowds for teaching you something, and buy another guitar.

Lesson #4: Talk About What You Know, Your Way

Led Zeppelin, Boston, MA, 23 January 1969

The famous Boston Tea Party concert. The birth of head banging. Zeppelin only had one 70-minute album under their belt at the time , but they played for over 4.5 hours. In the words of bassist John Paul Jones:

There were kids actually banging their heads against the stage. I’ve never seen that at a gig before or since, and when we finally left the stage we’d played for four and a half hours … I suppose it was then that we realized just what Led Zeppelin was going to become.

Most of the concert was rambling, brilliant improvisation. They mashed up their existing songs, mixed in some covers and generally went with the flow. The band knew each other, they knew their craft, and just kept making shit up.

For bloggers, there’s nothing wrong with rambling and improvising. I’ve discovered that I can’t really plan blog posts, and I can’t write short ones. If Led Zep can get away with it, so can I. And I prefer reading posts that have a little personality thrown in.

Lesson #5: Shit Happens, Live With It

Rolling Stones, Hyde Park, England, 5 July 1969

The Hyde Park Free Concerts are legendary. As are the Rolling Stones. Two days before their scheduled appearance, band mate Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool, another victim of “death by misadventure”. Admittedly Jones hadn’t been playing with the band for a month, but the Hyde Park Concert was scheduled to be his replacement’s first live gig. So the concert turned into a Brian Jones memorial. Jagger opened the set by reading a section from Adonais, a poem by Shelley. Over 250,000 people were there.

By all accounts, the performance itself was pretty crap. But the lesson here is that bad things happen, and you need to be flexible and deal with them. I’ve written some blog posts that are ridiculously bad and I’ve been tempted to delete the bastard things. BJ Fogg said on Twitter “I regret 20% of what I tweet“. I’m probably about the same. But you can’t do anything about it. Get over it, learn, and move on.

Lesson #6: A Network is About Quality, not Quantity

Jim Morrison, Miami, FL, 1969

Aaah, the Miami Incident. Now this didn’t actually happen exactly like it did in the movie, but I prefer that version. The story goes something like this. Morrison was really struggling with his self-created sex-symbol rocker image. He arrived at the concert much more drunk than usual (and usual was pretty damn drunk). He stumbled to the mic, and started rambling – a few versus of his poetry, but mostly utter nonsense. The crowd was getting uneasy, and Jim was getting annoyed with his followers that didn’t understand him. He started calling them idiots, culminating in the often quoted (though not 100% accurate) “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!”

What am I getting at here? Well, Morrison had been collecting “followers” for years, and then decided he didn’t like them. Hordes of people hanging on his every word, but completely useless to him. They no longer understood what he thought he was. It’s a bit like Twitter really. The important thing is not how many followers you have – an army of SEO spammers or porn bots or follow-me-follow-you-gurus is no use to man or beast. You want people that care. Jim said it far better a year later in one of his poems – A Feast Of Friends a.k.a The Severed Garden. Admittedly he’s talking about death, but it works for Twitter too:

I will not go
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant Family.

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
- I SHALL BE RELEASED

How many WCM implementations leave customers grinning from ear to ear? The statistics make sad reading. But if so many projects don’t meet expectations, who is to blame? Is it the vendor, either because of a crappy product or dodgy practice? Or the implementer that eats your budget while making a beautiful product smell real bad? Or are the customers naive, unrealistic or worse?

On Wednesday morning, the Web Content Management Track of the Greatest Web Conference in the World kicks off. The opening session, “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges “, has a rather unambitious aim – to solve the world’s WCM problems. A bit like WCM World Peace. On the panel we’ll have Janus Boye himself representing the customer viewpoint, Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch representing the analyst massive, and little old me defending the honour of the implementers.

The topics are sure to be varied, and our esteemed moderator will be sourcing questions from the crowd, and from Twitter. We’ll be using the hashtag #fixwcm so be sure to set up your Twitter search now, and get involved in the discussions. Apart from blaming each other for multiple disasters, some other issues we might be covering include:

• Does the term WCM even make sense these days?
• Are there too many vendors out there, and will we see consolidation?
• Can buyers navigate the marketplace themselves?
• Why do so many projects fall on their face?
• Will Open Source vendors dominate in the future?
• Do you need hard requirements to select a CMS, or is it a philosophical decision?
• Are more Web / Content Standards the answer to our prayers?
• Why are the Requests for Proposal always so bad?

You can start shaping the session right now by tweeting your thoughts using our #fixwcm hashtag. We want to hear why you think WCM is broken, and what the biggest challenges are. Or if you just want a 140-character rant about a horrorshow of a project, that’ll be fun too.

Join us live on Twitter on Wednesday 4th November between 10:30 and 12:00 CET to throw in some curveballs. And if, for some reason, you’re attending the conference but choose to attend one of the competing parallel sessions (like the great Kristina Halvorson, Bob Boiko, Jane McConnell or Shawn Shell – it’s a tough pool), you can still participate on Twitter at the same time!

See you in person or in the Twittersphere. It’s going to be cold as hell in Aarhus, but the discussions are sure to get heated.

P.S. If you think the main WCM problem is the design of the content repository, it looks like @pmonks, @justincormack, @micycle and others might have it fixed before our session starts. Hope they’ll share their findings live! The Content Tree is Dead. Long Live the Content Graph.

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge
- TOMBSTONE BLUES

It’s almost 17:00 on a Friday afternoon, and I’ve just spent the last hour trying to write a blog post on Google Wave with The Motley Crew. Rather than say any more, read the post we made. I’ve embedded the wave below for those that have a Wave account, and the full blog text is at the bottom, and hopefully repeated on the blogs of Irina, Justin, Ian and more. Maybe even CMS Watch if Adriaan can twist Tony’s arm!

The Wave

Things We Hate About Content Management

- By The Motley Crew

It was a lovely Friday morning/afternoon, and we were Waving. The experiment initiated by McBoof (yes, that one) brought together 6 CMS folks from around the world. The event gathered together analysts, journalists, vendors, system integrators toWave on a topic that was decided at that very moment. We had one hour (in between conference calls and other job thingys) to pick a topic and Wave it.

A little collab on what exactly to Wave about later, we decided to do “a mindmap of things we find annoying in CMSs.” To up the ante, we also decided to take the original bullet points (deemed “too easy”) and convert the whole thing toprose. Was the tool given really up to the task? Were our minds flexible enough to wrap around this kind of realtime collaboration?

In the beginning — we blame the tool — we were Drowning, not Waving. We (almost) didn’t fight about  edits. We almost didn’t step on each other’s toes. All in all, it turned out to be a fun and productive collaborative exercise. Read on to see for yourself.

Cosmetic Issues

There really should be a CMS UI fashion police. As there should be a Magic Quadrant for shoes and handbags. Why? Well, there’s a couple of issues.

For instance, sloppy, non-designed design. You know the kind of thing that has not been thought about and reworked and made to feel right. The sort of thing coders do if you don’t force them. But at the same time, over-designed interfaces can be just as bad: the designers and developers really need to be on speaking terms.

When building a system that works, you can’t have the development team in the basement on a sustenance of Jolt coding away into the night, and the designers in the penthouse in turtleneck sweaters sipping espressos. Too many CMS designs end up being programmer vs. end-user friendly. And this is not the best way to charm away those marketing and web content folks.

Developers and designers need to talk to each other and essentially, both should talk to users – not just eat your own dogfood – but listen to what dogs like to eat. A developer or UI designer are not content editors, marketers or knowledge and information workers.

Some vendors say that the agonizingly and depressingly black UI backgrounds are hip and modern. Well, they are not, really. Who told you that? Especially if you add a Star Trek theme to it and sprinkle in some stars and cosmic swirls, because if Apple does it, it must be cool right? Not pointing any fingers, but I would quit if I were a content manager having to spend my 9-5 staring into the “black hole” of some of the CMS UIs that are out there on the market.

Even pop-ups seem less annoying when compared to dark UIs. Which brings us onto…

Interface Issues

Interfaces need a comfortable lived in feel. Content management is something people work with every day, it is their interface to their job. You meet people who hate the interface, and that makes their work a heap of pain. I have seen people who describe the 44 clicks it takes to insert an image. You have a responsibility to these people, to make them love the content and make the tool disappear.

We all hate it when the interface does something on its own that ruins your context. E.g. a page refresh, or in Wave the jumping around of the scrolled window in some cases Or the lack of an easy way to bookmark, so you can reference someone to the content. Remember people will be collaborating and need to send links around. Make sure the UI is a proper web application with URLs. And why do tasks that are easy to describe and often repeated in exactly the same way still take more than a few clicks? (Or maybe even dozens of clicks.) With bonus points for forcing users to use dialogs or tabs to enter mandatory information. Remember people do not have all the information in the right order.

Also, we need sane conflict merges. Check in and check out is too extreme for most uses. But people want to edit offline still. Of course Wave doesn’t have an offline: Google thinks this problem is going away, it’s real time so there are never conflicts (that’s defined in the XML protocol; it’s quite interesting if you are that way geeky). Does Google have the right answer here? Well, the Motley Crew is struggling here, and some browsers lost sync during this experiment.

“Power users” (those who use it all day long) of CMSs needed to have a “Desktop” experience. What does Desktop Experience mean? Well, it doesn’t really have to be on the desktop — these days it is perfectly possible to get very close to a hitherto Desktop experience in a browser or similar. these are qualities: very low latency from action to response, no page refreshes, modal and modal-less dialog boxes as appropriate, “push” notification.

Architectural Issues

Architectural issues of the wave overtook any architectural issues of Content Management Systems. The fact that we authored this entire article in a single blip didn’t help, and slowed everything down enormously. McBoof learned the hard way that he really need a new laptop and spent most of the session giving his machine CPR. Next time we’ll do each paragraph in its own blip to stop FireFox going down like a Led Zeppelin.

Monolithic systems. Build it out of pieces that the client can not use all of. Obviously your pieces may work together better, but there should be components. Do not try to reinvent all kinds of wheel. “Best of breed,” though, is just another weasel marketing idea, as if systems are pinnacles not about meeting requirements.

Marketeers are adroit at using the term Best Practice to position Their Way as the only way that a particular matter can be solved. (Many of us live in that netherland of having to pedal that point of view, but it is a falsehood that the careful buyer should try to see through.)I think this devalues genuine best practice, vendors should cite references

Most often a marketeer’s Best Practice view is the only one they subscribe to as their product development has paddled up the wrong stream and cannot or won’t reverse their architectural design (probably because of the cost of doing so). This intransigence most often causes a product to doom itself. (Think of IBM and The Mainframe Is The Only Way To Do Serious Business).

Who really still believes that there is a place in this world for Flash or Java Applet based Rich Text Editors? TinyMCE, FCKeditor and others are filling the gap left by Ektron when they bit the hand that feeds and entered the CMS market. Ephox is trying to spread, but I find it difficult to come up with an excuse to use an Applet over HTML with javascript these days. Stick with the standard.

Business Issues

Where you are buying into something that you may very well need to change or integrate with there is strong benefit in considering Open Source. Open Source used to frighten commercial software companies but we have come along way on that road to understand that commercial organisation can operate in an Open Source world and benefit. This does not necessarily mean that their prized system needs to be fully opened up, but taking the spirit of it to mean that you are completely open to people seeing and learning from your code how it operates.

Exactly what you need to see opened up varies. In a CMS there may be a subsystem that stores the content or one that allows a Rich Text Editor. These arguably don’t need to be opened up, but when a CMS ships with modules for, for example, an RSS feed widget, calendaring tool, prebuilt webforms, users who then want a variation on this module can benefit from seeing how the “pros” did it, they can then use it as a starting point for their own different implementation.

We really don’t need vendors that pay lip service to the buzzwords. When they think the new CMS buzzword “engagement” is just a screenshot of Google Analytics. Or when they add an image picker and call itDAM . And a cross-over between WCM and ECM? Don’t think WCM is like ECM and it’s about organizing content, not about effectively communicating with the audience. And don’t think that if you organize the content, you canaut omatically communicate effectively.

Completely different, but equally frustrating, is procurement (and the procedures that go with it.) Procurement folk don’t recognise the importance of user adoption to the success of the project — of the black background and all the UI issues pointed out previously. If a CMS is procured according to procedure, the selection is a success to them. But those same rules are often a recipe for ignoring what the users really need.

At the same time, budgets that aren’t transparent are an issue – customer and vendor should be able to have a sensible grown up conversation. As a customer, of course you want good value, but how cheap are you?But to vendors: many licensing models don’t make any sense, and force you to do stupid things. People are scared to have that conversation – the best architectural fit first I say, lets figure out an appropriate license around that.

Conclusion

So much hatred rolled up into a tight little ball of anti-CMS rage. Who would have expected it from such a respected bunch of CMS folk. We hate the designs, the interfaces, the architectures and the business. Time for a beer/wine? Wave good bye!

Thought I’d seen some ups and down,
Til I come into New York town.
People goin’ down to the ground,
Buildings goin’ up to the sky.
- TALKING NEW YORK BLUES

People have been talking about their entry into the Content Management world. Pie started it. Lee Dallas followed, as did others. They’ve all got a common thread to their stories – getting sucked into Content Management completely by accident. So I thought I’d join in.

My working life started out pretty sweet. The day after my last University exam, I hopped on a plane to New York town armed with only my wits and a fistful of quickly devaluing South African currency. I was planning to flip burgers or sometihng, but was lucky enough to get a job writing Oracle Pro*C programs for Standard and Poorson Wall Street. For about 4 years, I did about 10 months in the Northern Hemisphere contracting and 2 months back in South Africa, completely avoiding winter. Among other things, I wrote some ODBC drivers in London and did a Verity K2 gig for ABN Amro in Amsterdam.

Although I had played with Java applets at University, the web wasn’t really a big thing at all. In 1997, I did my first pseudo-agency job for Electric Ocean in Cape Town while tutoring 3D Graphics and not doing my planned PhD. Although this was all web based, there was certainly no concept of an out-of-the-box Content Management System. The closest thing to a product then was Netscape LiveWire on Netscape Enterprise Server, which is now iPlanet. It was really just a lot of haxoring with C++, Perl and server-side JavaScript, and a bit of sysadmin on the side.

Then, in early 1999, I started a job on a start-up Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) project which had a big idea and a whole load of funding. I mean really a whole load of funding. We were partying like it was 1999, which it was. The tech team I was on probably peaked at around 15 people, and I found myself sort-of-leading the web tier. We were using Sybase’s Jaguar CTS server, all the Netscape Servers and good old CORBA. And some new thing called Vignette Story Server 4.1.

No-one in the team had ever seen a CMS before, I got to know Vignette really really well. I started out doing the Content Delivery Application (CDA) with my newly aquired TCL skills. Anyone else remember syntax like this:

[SEARCH TABLE retro
INTO var
SQL "select RETRO_OID, RETRO_NAME from CMS_SYSTEM where ( SYNTAX = $crap)"]

I love [FIELD RETRO_NAME [FIRST $var]]

Then, about a month into the Vignette implementation, someone had the nerve to ask how content was actually getting into the system. It was about that time that we realised Vignette Story Server 4.2 didn’t actually come with an interface and we’d have to, um, build on ourself. So we panicked, flapped, scritched and pokked for a while. A team photo at the moment of realisation is shown below:

Team Photo after realising we had to build our own authoring interface

Quite a schoolboy error for a multi-million pound project. So the project plans were hauled out again, and I became Content Management Application (CMA) gimp. If I have to say so myself, we built the best darn CMA in the whole of the UK.

My summary of the project looking back - we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and it is a testament to Accenture’s impressive project management methodology that we actually managed to deliver the project. The startup became Sportal.com and did pretty well in the end. I managed to make a good few friends on the project, many of whom I still see today. Some might actually read this – please comment if you do. After this I guess I became a Vignette consultant for a while and, when Content Management became mainstream, I ended up in agencies doing Content Management implementations all over the place.

And that’s the story of how I met Vignette over 10 years ago. And although the Vignette name will soon be dead, it might just be hanging around for another 10 years. But that’s a story for another time.

P.S. I think #cmsorigins is a cool Twitter hashtag. If there is a Meme ID out there, let me know.

You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows
- SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

You’re not going to believe this. I’ve been getting some criticism. “Your posts are too long”, some people cried. “Lose the Twitterfeed”, shouted someone else. “Your Southpark Avatar is so 15 year old” claimed an anonymous coward. Hey man, I made that avatar myself. That hurts. But seeing as I work for an agency that prides itself on its insight and user research, I decided it was time to do some user research of my own. As the budget I assign to run this blog is three fifths of fuck-all, Survey Monkey was the logical choice. Thanks so much to the 37 people that answered it.

Firstly, let’s talk about the Bob Dylan blog introductions that I’ve been pouring my heart and soul in to. As the chart below shows, more than a third of the respondents don’t read them. And another bunch want a change of theme.

So I thought about this. Granted, some of the quotes are, at best, very tenuously linked to the topic at hand – I need to improve the relevance. But Bob’s got so much more to give. I’m going to try not to repeat songs yet, but again, some tunes have so many classic lyrics that I might have to. If I do a new a brand theme, it’ll be in 2010. After deciding this, I tweeted my new found conviction:

To which someone responded:He has a ridiculous avatar, and what kind of  name is @golansleepweed? What does that mean, anyway? Nevertheless, this clown also happens to be the Head of LBi Intergalatic Creative Domination so I feel obliged to listen. I know which way the wind is blowing, so Bob is staying on the blog. After all, if he’s good enough for sat-nav, he’s good enough for me. Thanks, Chris, for the vote of confidence.

Some other findings of the so-called “research”:

• 19% of you actually want links to open in new windows. 64% agree with the no-new-window policy. 19% don’t care. Sweet.
• Only 13% of you found the survey annoying. 87% of my readers are all round nice guys. The web is about giving, man.
• This one surprised me. 76% like the automated Twitterfeed announcements.  13% don’t care and only 11% want them dead. So they’re staying, giving me less reason to retweet my own posts and feel like a douchebag.
• Only 12% think I should tweet with my real name instead of @McBoof. 41% don’t care, and 47%, for some reason, like my dumb-ass name.
• On the other hand, more people think my beautiful South Park avatar is lame (29%) than like it (24%). Most don’t care
• 56% don’t care about my WordPress theme, 44% think it rocks, and 0% (yes, zero) think it sucks. Woot.

And the highlights of the comments:

• Most people want me to swear more. There was a wee bit of concern of kids reading over shoulders and evil corporate firewall traffic snoopers. There was far more swearing on the survey than on my blog.
• I need a proof reader. Badly.
• My posts are too long and ramble a bit. This is because it’s quite difficult to write a well-constructed, thought out post that actually has a point.
• Someone wants me to write more about Kas Thomas.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I’ve been involved in more than a few projects on which the client commissioned my agency to perform high quality user research and then chose to ignore the results. They’re idiots. I guess that makes me an idiot too.

P.S. @Ivanka, I hope you aren’t reading this. See what happens to User Research here after you leave …

Don't worry, Bob. I'm not ditching you just because the crowds are baying for blood

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’,
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
- A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL

So I got my Google Wave account about a week ago, having requested it the day after Google I/O. I think Wave might be huge. But that’s a discussion for another time.

I’ve used the wavr plugin to embed my first wave. You’ll need a Wave Sandbox account to see it. And it doesn’t like Internet Explorer much either. If you can see it, join in the fun! I’m McBoof AT wavesandbox.com if you want to play.In theory, this is a public wave so anyone with an account can join in. To make it public, I added public@a.wavesandbox.com to the wave as instructed by some FAQs.

[UPDATE: You actually need to add public@a.gwave.com - that makes the Wave visible to all users. However, it seems people can't edit the embedded wave. However, they can see and edit the wave through the Google Wave interface. Once they've edited it, they can edit it via the embedded version. Weird. What am I doing wrong?]

For those that can’t see it, here is a screenshot of this page just after I posted it.

And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin’.
- WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN

So, you want to follow the CMS world on Twitter. How about the ability to follow the creme de la creme of the CMS Twitterati in a couple of clicks. Well, my friend, you’ve struck gold. [UPDATE: Even more gold than promised. The list is growing. More than 40]

First, here’s is my list. I’m sure I’ve forgotten people so many apologies and DM me to get added or if I’ve spelt something wrong. I’m not including any CMS vendors here. I am including people who work for vendors but don’t use Twitter to sell. You can get a list of vendors on Twitter on the Gilbane blog. For those that are impatient, I’m recommending Twitterator to follow all the users in one go. All of these folk are engaging on Twitter and active in the blogosphere. You can filter them first if you’d like. In no particular order:

1. cmswatch – My favourite CMS analysts
2. cmswire – My favourite CMS news source
3. cmsreport – More CMS news and chatter
4. jboye – Organises the best CMS conference in the world
5. TonyByrne – CMS Watch, Founder
6. theresaregli – CMS Watch, Search and DAM
7. jarrodgingras – CMS Watch, Content and Usability
8. kasthomas – CMS Watch, Geek, Web CMS
9. adriaanbloem – CMS Watch, Search and SoCo
10. janusboye – The man behind jboye
11. lwelchman – WelchmanPierpoint, Web CMS and Operations Guru
12. cpierpoint – WelchmanPierpoint, Coffee Addict
13. jdavidhobbs – WelchmanPierpoint, CMS Consultant
14. dkonizeski – WelchmanPierpoint, Web Operations
15. apoorv – Wipro Guru – Portals and Web CMS
16. irina_guseva – CMS Wire writer, says it as it is
17. barbmosher – CMS Wire writer, SharePoint junkie
18. fgilbane – COE of Gilbane Group, Content and Web
19. billtrippe – Gilbane Analyst
20. lehawes – Gilbane, Collaboration and KM
21. lciarlone – Gilbane, Content Globalisation
22. tim_walters – Info and Knowledge Mgmt., Forrester
23. kreidy – 451 Group Analyst, CMS and Collab
24. jmancini77 – President of AIIM
25. skjekkeland – Vice President of AIIM
26. sggottlieb – Content Guru and Open Source Analyst
27. halvorson – Content Strategist, Author
28. rahelab – Content Strategist, Intentional Design
29. StepTwoDesigns – Intranet Talk from Down Under
30. jimmurphyamr – Knowledge and Content Management, AMR Research
31. netjmc – Intranet and Portal Strategy
32. ldallasBMOC – Big Men on Content
33. dankeldsen – Co-founder of Information Architected
34. McBoof – Compiler of useless info and lists.
35. jameshoskins – Wise CMS man
36. jamesurquhart – The Cloud Myth Buster
37. piewords – ECM/CMIS techie/blogger
38. pierotintori – CEO of TERMINALFOUR. CMS Techie.
39. jessewilkins – ECM, ERM, Former USMC drill instructor
40. julesdw – SDL Tridion – blogger
41. puf – SDL Tridion Developer Ubergeek
42. davidnuescheler – Day Blogger, CMS Guru
43. kevinc2003 – And the Day CMO
44. IanTruscott – Alterian Blogger
45. yuvalararat – Vignette Blogger
46. johnnewton – Founder of Alfresco and Documentum
47. dcaruana – Alfresco Chief Architect, CMIS, Open Source
48. jeffpotts01 – Optaros ECM practice lead, Open Source fan
49. bdelacretaz – Open Source, Apache Foundation and Day R&D
50. trieloff – Day DAM and SoCo expert
51. dirkmshaw – Vignette Social Media Strategy
52. ebarroca – CEO at Nuxeo
53. sfermigier – Yet another Nuxeo ECM man
54. efge – Nuxeo R&D, Architect. CMIS man.
55. MartinSS – Open Text ECM architect
56. pmonks – Alfresco consultant. CMS visionary
57. justincormack – Squiz Tech Guru. CMS visionary
58. darrenferguson – Interwoven and Umbraco CMS Dude
59. cherylmckinnon – Open Text, Enterprise 2.0
60. twentworth12 – Web Solutions Evangelist, ex-Autonomy>/li>
61. craighepburn – RedDot (Open Text) Social Media Strategy
62. adrianmateljan – RedDot (Open Text) CMS Blogger
63. jeanmariepascal – Open Source ECM Consultant
64. erikmhartman – Independent Consultant, Writer, Speaker
65. LuisSala – Alfresco Big Gun
66. scroisier – Jahia Strategy
67. OlegR – Content and Text Mining Evangelist
68. athraen – EPiServer R&D Developer, Blogger, CMIS.NET
69. danielchalef – KnowledgeTree CEO, fellow Saffa
70. tony_bailey – Gin Drinking CMS consultant at Acquity Group
71. tednyberg – Agency side EPiServer MVP, Umbraco and more.
72. proops – Independent, CMS Blogger
73. izahoor – Independent, Public Sector CMS Dude
74. daponovich – CMS Myth blogger
75. jeffcram – CMS Myth blogger

So, next step is to copy the nicely formatted list at the bottom of this post, and paste them into Twitterator as shown in the screenshot below. You need to give them your Twitter creds, sadly. James promised he’ll write me a bulk following program that uses OAuth. Don’t worry if you’re already following some of the users. It handles these pretty well.

[UPDATE: Forget Twitterator! TweetML is far better. Use this link: http://tweepml.org/McBoof-s-CMS-Gurus/]

And here is the list in a nice cut and paste format. Stick them into your clipboard, and off to Twitterator. That’s it. Happy following. Don’t forget to delete me if you only like serious CMS chatter. Finally, if you want some of these people’s blogs, have a look at the OPML Feed of my blogroll, or the large list compiled by @proops.

cmswatch
cmswire
cmsreport
jboye
TonyByrne
theresaregli
jarrodgingras
kasthomas
adriaanbloem
janusboye
lwelchman
cpierpoint
jdavidhobbs
dkonizeski
apoorv
irina_guseva
barbmosher
fgilbane
billtrippe
lehawes
lciarlone
tim_walters
kreidy
jmancini77
skjekkeland
sggottlieb
halvorson
rahelab
StepTwoDesigns
jimmurphyamr
netjmc
ldallasBMOC
dankeldsen
McBoof
jameshoskins
jamesurquhart
piewords
pierotintori
jessewilkins
julesdw
puf
davidnuescheler
kevinc2003
IanTruscott
yuvalararat
johnnewton
dcaruana
jeffpotts01
bdelacretaz
trieloff
dirkmshaw
ebarroca
sfermigier
efge
MartinSS
pmonks
justincormack
darrenferguson
cherylmckinnon
twentworth12
craighepburn
adrianmateljan
jeanmariepascal
erikmhartman
LuisSala
scroisier
OlegR
athraen
danielchalef
tony_bailey
tednyberg
proops
izahoor
daponovich
jeffcram

When I’m gone
You will remember my name
I’m gonna win my way
To wealth and fame
- ‘TIL I FELL IN LOVE WITH YOU

I’ve now been live for about 100 days. Initially, my main focus was building the blog nicely. You can read about my theme, plugins, feeds and mobile version in My First 50 Days of WordPress – Part I. The focus of the this post is further validation, authoring, SEO and traffic driving. I don’t like buttons and badges on sites as they slow things down, but I decided I’d keep a separate page with all of them – Tools, Buttons and Badgers. This page will be a continuous work in progress.

New Plugins

Firstly, I’ve added a few more plugins and painlessly upgraded to WordPress 2.8.1:

• BackUpWordPress - a useful plugin to ensure you don’t lose anything. It even emails you your backups.
• GZippy - enables GZIP HTTP Compression to your pages (not static files like .js or .css which can’t be done by a plugin as it is an Apache level thing) which reduces bandwidth and latency significantly
• Robots Meta – I’ve used this to stop search engines indexing my archive, category and tag pages. I only want my home page and posts in their indexes. Also a good place to store your verification codes for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft WebMaster tools.

WordPress for iPhone App

I’m a huge iPhone fan, and use the free WordPress for iPhone app to write my posts on the underground. One warning – the Mofuse plugin breaks this and you get the dreaded NSXMLParserErrorDomain rubbish. The short explanation: Mofuse detects the user agent of a request to decide if it should redirect a user to the mobile site. Unfortunately, it uses quite a blunt search for this, so any user agent with “mobile” or “iphone” in it becomes a mobile version. WordPress for iPhone has a user agent that includes “wp-iphone”, so Mofuse redirects the XML-RPC requests to your mobile domain which doesn’t do XML-RPC. I’ve mailed the creators of the plugin so hopefuly they’ll fix this soon. In the mean time, you’ll need to change the code of your plugin yourself by adding this at line 95 of mofuse.php (I’m on version 0.9o):

94: if (stripos($mf_ua, ‘iphone’)!==false || stripos($ua, ‘ipod’)!==false) { $mf_isiphone=1; }
95: if (stripos($mf_ua, ‘wp-iphone’)!==false) { $mf_isiphone=0; } // ADDED THIS LINE
96: if (stripos($mf_ua, ‘android’)!==false) { $mf_isandroid=1; }

Twitter for Traffic Driving

I’ve posted about this earlier in Twigger Happy Self Promotion. I get more traffic from Twitter than from organic search, which is why I’m mentioning it here before SEO. As mentioned in the previous post too, I’ve stopped being a douchebag and only tweet about a blog posting once, unless I have real updates. Flogging the same horse gets you unfollowed. The most important thing is to engage people, and follow people that talk about your areas of interest. Hopefully some will follow you back, and give you the much needed retweets to expand your audience. Here are the Twitter tools I use:

• TweetDeck (and Tweetdeck for iPhone) – you need a good client to keep on top of the game. I like running a few searches for topics of interest so that I can keep up with the breaking news and meet folk that have similar interests to me. I also love the grouping functionality so you can make sure you don’t miss tweets from the most important Tweeple you’re stalking.
• Twitterfeed - this is hooked up to my RSS feed and posts a Tweet once, normally about 30 minutes after I publish a post. I’m thinking about turning it off.
• Twilerts - can run a search and email you daily which the results. I used it to track the results of my stupid CMS quiz. It turns out it’ll only do 100 results per day though.
• BackTweets - Great site. I use it to send me an email whenever someone links to my domain. It understands all the URL shorteners out there so does something a simple seach can’t

The Twitterverse - Click for Large Image (cc) www.briansolis.com + www.jess3.com

WebMaster Tools

When it comes to SEO, these should be your first point of call. The three big players all have their own, and it is well worth getting account with all of them and fixing all errors. They each tell you different things. They’re still indexing more than I want them to.

• Google Webmaster Tools – I mentioned this in the previous post as it is super important. I’ve got no errors and no warnings on my site. Use your GMail account for this. This site doesn’t tell your your PageRank – more on that later. Google still has my tag pages indexed even though they have a noindex – http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:jonontech.com
• Bing Webmaster Tools -You need a Windows Live ID for this, and validate your site in a similar way to Google. Again, no errors or warnings here either. Strangely, my site gets 5 / 5 “Green Bars”, which sounds good but I don’t know what it means. Bing has my category, tag and archive pages – http://www.bing.com/results.aspx?q=site:jonontech.com
• Yahoo Site Explorer -Yahoo! ID this time. Similar site validation required. Also has tag pages – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/search?p=jonontech.com

SEO Checkers and Directories

I use the following sites to check if all is well – I probably run them about once a week. Between them, I think they check most things:

• Multipage Validator – Recently found this site, which checks multiple URLs using the W3C HTML Validator. Only does about 200 pages but stil useful
• WebSite Grader – Checks all manner of things, including entries into various directories
• Web Optimisation Web Page Analyser – checks things related to the download speed
• popuri.us – quickly checks your rankings, postions in a few places – see image below
• Technorati - I’ve added my blog and check the positions there. I only have one fan. Me.
• Alexa - The daddy of ranking sites. I’m only just in the top million
• Cacheability Engine – Check how well your site caches. I need to do work here still

In closing

This post has been a bit of a brain dump of the tools I’m using. Probably as much for me to remember them as for others. I hope some people find it vaguely useful and I’d love to hear from you if there other things I’m missing out on.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.
- IT’S ALRIGHT, MA (I’M ONLY BLEEDING)

So here’s a question. How many times is one meant to announce the arrival of their latest and greatest blog post on Twitter before they look like a knob head?

Twitter is a good traffic source for clowns like me that have just started a blog. It isn’t like millions of people know you exist, so you’ve got to advertise somewhere. Have a look at my Google Analytics Traffic Sources graph:

Try to ignore the grey piece of pie. That’s all the “other” sources aggregated together. Direct traffic is biggest.  I get slightly more visitors via the Twitter web site than Google. And I have a feeling a large chunk of the direct traffic is from desktop Twitter clients such as TweetDeck or Seesmic. I’d estimate at least a third of my traffic is Twaffic. As an aside, if anyone has a good way to track a) how many clicks came via each Twitter client (which is probably impossible) or b) which tweets actually generated the traffic (which is possible if you encode more things into your shortened URL) I’d love to here about it. 

So, tweeting about blog post at least once seems sensible. But the problem with Twitter is that it is a bit too real-time, and unless someone a) is following very few people, b) likes to scroll back through their history or c) is running clever notification tools, the chances are that your lone tweet will go unnoticed.

When I started, I thought I’d let the all important first blog post Tweet come automatically via Twitterfeed. That way I didn’t feel like I was blowing my own trumpet. After all, the machines were sending the Tweets, not me. For those that don’t know about it, you simply point Twitterfeed at an RSS feed and it does the shouting for you. Some people think any automatic Tweetbots (such as Twitterfeed) are a lame violation of the Twitter ethic. After all, if someone wants to know when I post something, they can subscribe to my RSS feed. I don’t agree with this – many people tend to use Twitter as their uber-aggregator at the moment. My RSS feed stats are sad proof of this.

So, with Twitterfeed rearing to go, I published my first post. After 45 mins of silence and feverishly waiting for my first blog visitor, I couldn’t take the suspense any longer. I manually tweeted my arrival on the blogosphere to my slavering hordes of followers. About an hour later, Twitterfeed finally kicked in and did its thing. That’s become my pattern now. When I publish a post, I tweet about it once myself as soon as I’m done, and the bot spews something about about an hour later. Job done. The world knows about it.

Or does it? I tend to publish my posts between 23:00 and 01:00 UK time. Most of my sensible followers are in bed, or at least not sad enough to be scrutinising their feeds. And as the Google Analytics map above shows, I’ve got 75 other countries who depend on my wisdom for their blog reading fix. So, as much as I hate the douche bags that repeatly tweet the same link to their blog posts, I’m becoming one of them. I normally unfollow the stuck record tweeters quite quickly. My current theory is to tweet my post again at about 10:00 UK time, and then again at about 15:00 UK time for my adoring fans in the US of A. Is that reasonable? Or is three manual tweets and one Bot tweet per blog post also flagrant douchebaggery?

Of course the answer to all of this is to harness the real power of Twitter – the retweet. These are waves of publicitly goodness that spread beyond your usual audiences into brave new worlds. Grovelling with a “Pls RT” at the end of a tweet is out of the question, though. So you have to desparately hope that the lovely people will retweet your plug because they really really like your article, or because they just feel sorry for you.

I think what this all means is that if your content is crap, no amount of self-promotion is going to get you anywhere. But create content that is interesting and it can spread across the interwebs like wildfire. Then you can sell out and put ads on your site, make lots of money and live in Bermuda.

In closing, I’d just like to get on to my knees and beg you all to tweet about this blog post. Retweet anything you see about it. Use the social networking links at the bottom of this post to Digg It, add it to Delicious, Technorati Rate it and everything else. Link to it from your esteemed sites. Send a mail to the EVERYONE mailing list in your company. Add it to your student’s coursework. If you are an editor of Slashdot, El Reg or Mashable, can we do a link exchange? Please. I’ve got a young son to feed. He wants his Daddy to make the big time. He wants to live in Bermuda. Tweet this. Please.

Pretty Please.

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said
“You look like the silent type.”
- TANGLED UP IN BLUE

I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked. When I started this blog, I planned to post a lot more from the “Agency Perspective” but all the recent CMS activity has kept me busy. This post was the post I planned to write first as it helps to set the scene for things I’d like to talk about in the future. So, “Hello Everyone”. Welcome to my blog.

What is a Full Service Digital Agency?

Let’s start with just the Digital Agency part, and use Wikipedia for that:

A digital or new media agency is a business that delivers services for the creative and technical development of internet based products. These services range from the more generalist such as web design, e-mail marketing and microsites etc. to the more specialist such as viral campaigns, banner advertising, search engine optimisation, podcasting or widget development etc.

The million dollar question: What exactly is a Full Service Digital Agency? I’m going to take some liberties here and invent a new acronym:  FSDA. Everyone and his dog seem to be one these days. New Media Age (NMA) tracks Agencies in their Top 100 Interactive Agencies list. I wouldn’t trust everything you read in here. Most of the numbers are volunteered by the agencies themselves, so you’re never quite sure how reliable they are. One interesting aside – the agencies have to put themselves into one of three categories: Marketing, Design & Build or Technical. Quite a few of the agencies listed would love to pick more than one of these, but you are forced to choose. Rules is rules. As a techie, I’d prefer to see us listed as “Design & Build”, but that does seem to exclude many of the other services we offer. So we’re listed as Marketing. I’m a marketeer now, I guess.

As most of you know, I work for LBi in the London office (for the purposes of this post, I’m only going to talk about the UK market in isolation, although in reality I spend a fair bit of my time working with the other offices in the network). We call ourselves “The Largest Full Service Digital Agency in the UK”. I’m going to off-brand and say we’re quite possibly also the smallest Full Service Digital Agency in the UK, if indeed it is possible to be Full Service at all. For the record, the 2008 Top 10 Agencies (by Turnover) is shown above. We’re the biggest by headcount in this list but, as I said, some of the numbers in here might be crap. The LBi headcount numbers are correct. I’ll post more about these numbers some other time. We’ve got about 350 permanent employees in the UK.

What are the services?

So, what do all of these people do in an FSDA? By definition, everything digital. I’m not going to attempt to say what this is, but I will outline what my agency does by listing all the departments in our London office. To stop myself rambling, I’ve decided on a self-imposed 140 character limit per department. All you crazy people can tweet the definitions to your friends. Or tweet me better definitions if you don’t like mine. Especially if you’re from LBi and I’ve insulted your department. I haven’t mentioned User Centered Design here as this is a key philosophy that spans all departments. In a vague project order:

• Planning & Strategy – Consultancy, Business Plans, financial models, requirements, user research/testing, personas, planning and buying
• Experience Architecture – Information architecture (sitemaps, taxonomy), requirements, wireframes, usability
• Concept & Design – The Officially Creative People. Concepting, Design, making things look pretty, copy writing, win lots of awards
• Technology - Architecture, Product Selections, Interface Dev (CSS/HTML/JS), App Dev (Java/C#), RIA (Flash, Adobe), Testing, QA
• Managed Services – Live projects. Hosting, maintenance, monitoring, application support, incremental development, tickets, help desks
• Media - Where to spend your online media budget, keywords to bid on, place ads. Campaigns, email marketing,  outbound email comms
• SEO - Get you into the first page of Google organically. Analyse algorithms. Semantic markup, crafted content, link building. Analytics.
• Delivery Management – Ensure projects are delivered, as usual, on time and under budget. Producers, Project and Programme Managers
• Client Services – Keep existing clients sweet and “grow” accounts. New Business Development (Sales) and Account Management. Play Golf

That’s 9 different departments. Within each department, things can get even more specialised. For example, our Technology department is split into 3 sub-departments: Technical Architecture, Quality Assurance and Development. The Development Department is split into Interface Development, Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft and Java. Within each of these, things get even more specialised. As the interwebs mature and spread, the number of technologies we need to be expert in continues to grow. And it isn’t going to converge any time soon. Other departments specialise in a similar way. Note that these departmental divisions are often more of an organisational need then a working reality. We try to get our teams to blend well together and many individuals could easily fit in to many of the little boxes on the org chart.

Does Size Matter?

Ignoring our internal “Core Services” (HR, Finance, Operations, Resourcing, Office Services, Marketing and Upper Management) which every company has to have, I’m told, we’ve probably got a shade over 300 “project work” people in our London office. The rough breakdown of department size by headcount looks something like this:

The information isn’t top secret, in case anyone was wondering. We disclose it on our NMA Listing (albeit mapped to their categories). When you break it down like this, an uber-agency of 350 people suddenly has less than 40 project managers (which means less than 40 active projects), under 60 designers, and less than 80 techie nerds like me. Which brings me to my point. In order to provide all the services we need to provide in order to be a credible FSDA, we couldn’t be any smaller. I’d say that any company under 300 people cannot begin to claim to be an FSDA.

It is also interesting, referring back to the Top 5 from the NMA list, that all of them have a similar number of employees. Why aren’t there any agencies with more than 400 people? The short answer – because it is difficult to keep the “agency vibe” using the structures needed to manage a massive company. The larger agencies are not trying to be like the big IT services/consultancies (Atos, Deloitte, KPMG, Accenture, Fujitsu, Cap Gemini, PWC, Wipro etc). They’re trying to behave more like a “boutique”, while maintaining the scale, professionalism and expertise needed to service the major accounts.

Neil Potter from RedWeb (another FSDA) blogged about FSDAs recently on his excellent blog . He argues that the LBi view of full service (a one stop shop that can provide everything) is outdated. While I do agree that being truly full service is probably impossible, I think a handful of agencies (in the UK) get pretty close. Neil’s blog entry says:

As Richard Sedley, Director of cScape Customer Engagement Unit and Course Director for Social Media at Chartered Institute of Marketing, told me “Today you can be full service with a limited focused offering”. I like this. “Full service” doesn’t have to mean jack of all trades. In fact, it shouldn’t mean that at all. Nowadays clients need specialists; people who know their discipline intimately and who can work with the client from conception of the idea to delivering the end product, and then studying its performance. This is where the real skill and expertise comes in.

I don’t understand the quote from Richard Sedley. Full Service does not mean “limited focused offering”. Can anyone shed any light on this for me? I agree with the rest. Of course Full Service doesn’t mean jack of all trades. Of course you need specialists. You need lots of them. You need more than 300 employees to have them, too. Yes, size matters.

You didn’t answer the question!

Sorry. In closing, I’ll define an FSDA as a Digital Agency that provides all the services you need – a one stop shop. Of course there will be gaps in the offerings, but the FSDA should have partners to help plug these. Often customers will only engage an FSDA to perform a small subset of their services. This can be a very sensible “avoid all eggs in one basket” strategy, or they already have specialist agencies with which they’re very happy. In these cases, the various agencies on the account need to work closely together. Other customers will choose to use all of the services offered as they see benefits gained when different disciplines blend. Or they just want one agency to shout at if things go tits up.

Some parts of an FSDA compete with more traditional above the line marketing agencies. Other parts (like mine) will compete with pure play systems integrators, although it looks to me like the SIs are trying to become more like agencies these days, introducing elements of the User Centered Design process into their traditionally purely technically offering.

Seeing as I’ve been agency-side for the last 10 years, I’ve got a decent understanding of most of the disciplines. But of course I know most about the technical ones, and that is what I plan to use this blog to talk about. If you do have any particular burning issues you’d like me to focus on, please let me know. Nothing quite like pandering to a non-existent audience …

Lord, you shouldn’t mistreat me, baby, because I’m young and wild,
Shouldn’t mistreat me, baby, because I’m young and wild.
You must always remember, baby, you was once a child.
- RAGGED & DIRTY

It’s been about 65 days since I started this blog, and about 50 days since I moved from hosted WordPress.com to a self-hosted version. Since gaining my freedom, I’ve learned a lot about blogging, WordPress and various tools of the trade. For some reason, I’ve struggled to find resources that list all of the nice tips and tricks out there. The sites I’ve found are generally full of crap. So I figured I might as well brain-dump what I’ve used and learned. I’m sure you all know all of this already, but if nothing else it will help me remember what I’ve done. As usual, I have to thank James as he is the brains behind the operation.

In this post, I’m only going to talk about how it is built – the on-site stuff. In Part II I’ll talk about the off-site pieces – things like Twitter, Directories, SEO and other external tools. And yes, I know I have a blog with hardly any visitors. But at least it is a compliant, SEO friendly blog so that all I can blame for the lack of visitors is my content.

The Theme

I didn’t put too much thought into this, and just looked for one that looked simple and flexible. I picked Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll which has worked nicely. It has many options and has allowed me to change virtually everything I’ve wanted to without writing any PHP code or changing the .htaccess file. The theme handles favicons properly, which is nice. I notice many many WordPress blogs still have the good old out of the box W icon. It also lets you flip between excerpts and full posts on the listing pages, which I like. Finally, it is really easy to add custom HTML or CSS anywhere. Have done a fair bit of this.

Of course, I wouldn’t pick a theme without ensuring it produces valid XHTML. This one does, and the blog validates using the W3C validator at the time of writing. However, I didn’t validate the CSS when I chose it which was a pity as this is a bit of a disaster. Something to try to fix later.

Key Plugins

I’m not going to go into any detail here as I’ve gone with the mainstream ones. I’m also not going to mention the gimmicky plugins that appear in the sidebar. The ones that provide core functionality are:

• Akismet – saved my ass. At the time of writing, I’ve had 229 real comments and Akismet has blocked 635 spam comments. It’s let 1 spam item through, and blocked 2 that weren’t actually spam.
• All in One SEO Pack – this works well and plays nicely with my theme. See the later section on Google Webmaster Tools.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – of course. Much better than the other WordPress options
• Google XML Sitemaps – you’d be mad not to. It works very well. My sitemap is here: http://jonontech.com/sitemap.xml
• No Self Pings – great if you like cross-linking between your own posts like I do
• Sociable – to allow all the community site features beneath each post. Sadly, no-one seems to click them. And we needed to change the CSS on the theme to make it pretty.

RSS Feeds

Everyone is using FeedBurner, so I joined the party. I have two feeds – one for the postings and one for the comments. The only person who has subscribed to the comments is me. It isn’t linked to on the site yet. The FeedBurner feeds look like this:

First step was trying to decide what URLs to give the feeds. I asked James (he is, after all, on the RSS Advisory board) but I can’t remember what he said, so screwed it up going with /jonontech for the main one and /jonontech/comments for the comments one. Bit lame, really. James can’t remember what he recommended. Anyway, moving on, the feed details should look something like this:

Last step was to kill the horrible http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ FeedBurner domain and use mine. Off we go to the MyBrand page which lets you do just that. I decided to go with feed.jonontech.com as the domain, so I just need to head off to GoDaddy to enter a CNAME (feed CNAME 181d3ce.feedproxy.ghs.google.com) as instructed, and follow the simple instructions. Make sure you only promote your nice new feed URL- in my case, this is http://feed.jonontech.com/jonontech.

We’re not quite done with the feeds yet. As usual, let’s make sure everything validates. Off we go to www.feedvalidator.org. All good as you can see here and here.

OPML Feed

I really like RSS. I read my feeds on the tube (i.e. subway) on the way home as I don’t have internet access there. It’s pretty tedious to add RSS feeds to my shitty iPhone RSS client, but it does do OPML. I decided I’d like to add my entire blogroll in one go. Enter OPML. I found a plugin called Get_OPML which sort of does this. Once you install it, there are two steps. Step 1 works well. You click a button, and it runs off to your blogroll and technorati (you need a technorati API key) to update the RSS field in your blogroll links. Admittedly, if your blogroll is short your could skip this and just enter the RSS feed URLs yourself when you add a blogroll link.

Step 2 sucked a bit. It generates the OPML file from the blogroll. Two problems. Firstly, the query gets ALL links, not just the ones in the blogroll. So all the “About Me” rubbish and more. To avoid this, I hacked the SQL query in the module to only get Blogroll entries. In case anyone wants to do the same, the new query looks like:

SELECT link_id,link_url,link_name,link_rss
FROM wp_links AS l
JOIN wp_term_relationships AS r ON l.link_id = r.object_id
JOIN wp_terms AS t ON t.term_id = r.term_taxonomy_id
WHERE t.name = ‘Blogroll’ ORDER BY link_id ASC

Second problem – the dude that wrote the plugin hard-coded his own feed into the plugin. Lame. Comment it out. And Have a look at my OPML file if you want to add everyone to your RSS readers.

As usual, let’s validate it. At present, the only OPML validator I am aware of is dead, but maybe it’ll come back. I don’t know if my OPML file validates.

Mobile Version

A colleague of mine told me I need to get myself a mobile version, and pointed me at Mofuse. The setup was really painless. Go to their site, create an account and add a mobile site. You’ll need to pick a SiteID so your site becomes available on <SiteID>.mofuse.mobi initially. Enter the link to your RSS feed, and you’re done. You can upload upload a header image, pick some colours and even add pages to your mobile site if you want to. I just did the header and colours and left the rest as it is. That’s it – you’ve got a mobile version which looks something like this:

There are a few other things worth doing. I like everything under one domain, so using their Custom Domain option on the dashboard, I added m.jonontech.com. Then it is back to the Daddy to add a CNAME mapping m -> jonontech.mofuse.mobi. After all this, my GoDaddy Total DNS looks like this (also see the feedburner entry):

But wait, there is more. Fancy a dedicated iPhone version? Mofuse support this too. Just go to the iPhone Settings option on the dashboard and follow the simple instructions. You can see my iPhone version at m.jonontech.com/iphone. They’ll use your HTTP User Agent to make sure you see the right version. But how does WordPress know to send a visitor to the main site to the mobile site. That’s easy too! Mofuse supply a WordPress plugin that does exactly that. Download it, install if (version 0.9o is the one I’m on), and configure it. Screenshot of the configuration is shown:

All done. Cheap and cheerful mobile version.

Google WebMaster Tools

I’m presuming all you bloggers out there are using the Google WebMaster Tools. If not, you’re insane. Add your site, verify, and away you go. Make sure you register your Google sitemap that you created earlier. You can add the Gadgets to your Google Home Page if you use that. Look at all the errors and warnings you get, and try to fix them. I’ve managed to get rid of all of mine now, which the exception of some old Page Not Founds which a new crawl should fix.

One thing I did discover – WordPress out of the box is configured so that it will cause duplicate content errors, which Google doesn’t like at all. This is due to pagination of comments. In order to correct this, siply don’t paginate them. So go to Settings > Discussions, and uncheck this checkbox:

Final Thoughts

That’s all for now, I think. In closing, a couple of questions for those that know what they’re doing. Firstly, I hate links that open in new windows. So all my links use the same window. However, I’ve had a few people complain about this as they say they keep leaving and having to come back to the site. What’s best practice these days? Secondly, I’ve gone with jonontech.com as the canonical URL instead of www.jonontech.com. Is there a good reason to pick one over the other? Finally, I’m not going to put any badges (e.g. This site is valid XYZ) on the site. They’re not as bad as ads, but who needs ‘em. Right?

If anyone knows of some sweet plugins or tips out there, please let me know. You can read about the second 50 days in My Second 50 Days of WordPress – Part II.

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”
And I answer them most mysteriously,
“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”
- BALLAD IN PLAIN D

So, as you can see we’ve moved. About two weeks ago I decided to start this blog. A few hours and a few beers later, I was up and running on the hosted WordPress.com site. Picked the theme that I disliked least from the 17 or so available, and sprouted my first post. A couple of days later people that I didn’t even know started reading it, which was all very exciting.

It was about that time I realised that although WordPress.com is easy, it also sucks the big one if you want flexibility. The things that annoyed me in a week included:

• I have to pay to change the CSS. Probably a good things as my CSS is terrible and I’ll just make things worse, but I demand the right to change my CSS anyway.
• I have to pay to remove adverts. Fair enough I guess. In a moment of purity, I paid this for a year. Which was $30 down the toilet in retrospect.
• The built in analytics are horrible. I’m not actually sure what they mean. Of the 3,500 “Page Views” I’ve been told I’ve had since this has been live, I suspect 3,450 were from me, and the rest from me mum. Not even close to Google Analytics on the functionality front.
• The themes are inflexible. For example, I wanted to show only excerpts on my home page, not full stories. No-can-do with the theme I chose, I’m afraid. And the one line PHP change was beyond my control.
• I started to discover lots of cool plugins written by clever people, but I couldn’t touch them.

So yesterday we moved everything. I hope the migration has gone okay. I’ve chosen a theme I prefer. I’ve lost one comment, and it seems all the nesting of the existing comments. I’m going to see if I can h4x0r those back. I think all the existing deep links to the old jonontech.wordpress.com domain will actually still work. And the RSS feed is fixed with the auto-discovery feed matching the advertised feed. Thanks a million to James for helping me with this, seeing I couldn’t CSS or PHP my way out of a brown paper bag.

We had a few issues. My current hosting provider, it turns out, can’t support multiple host headers to my Linux VM, so that attempt failed. Then I tried my free GoDaddy hosting that came with my domain registration. Turns out that my account was incompatible with WordPress because “WordPress can only run on a paid hosting service”. Bastards! So I’ve coughed up my few dollars a month and, in the end, it was all remarkably easy. I also had to buy another WordPress.Com add-on so I could set up the deep link redirect to my new domain. Ching ching. That’s now $45 to WordPress. About a year’s hosting cost.

To be honest, I do think WordPress.com is pretty good. But, if you want flexibility and like WordPress, don’t be lazy like yours truly. Make the effort to host the thing yourself. Biggest blogging mistake I ever made.