You said you were going’ to Frisco, stay a couple of months.
I always liked San Francisco, I was there for a party once.
- MAYBE SOMEDAY

Good news. CMS Geeks are getting tanked up all over the world, and it’s spreading. We all drink and blabber on the last Thursday on every month, unless a conference or something means we should move the date for an uber-event. Here is a quick summary of where we are.

London (MeetUp, LinkedIn) - The original, a.k.a. #LastThursdayCMS. Thanks to Kenton and the other guys at Squiz for starting it. Been going a few years now, and had many celebrity visits. We will have lots of nice photos once our most recent celebrity visitor, @theresaregli, figures out how to download from her camera.

New York (LinkedIn) –  Follow this one on #CMSGeekUpNYC. There have been a few meetings, with another big one coming soon. Irina (@irina_guseva) has taken the baton here.

San Francisco (MeetUp, LinkedIn) - The first one is TONIGHT (20 May 2010), moved to coincide with Gilbane SF. The Mad Monks (@pmonks) is your guy for this one, and it’s on #CMSGeekUpSF. Hoping for some photos soon.

Amsterdam - The first event is tonight, and they’re using #CMSGeekUpAMS. The SDL Tridion folks will be there in force and you may see a Hippo or two. With the @erikmhartman event in town, it’s likely to grow. Don’t be put off by the stupidly small beers they serve in Amsterdam. Just drink more.

Boston - Yet to have a meeting, but the intentions are good. Threatening to organise is @natea. This should get big with many vendors based in the Boston area. Not sure we have a hashtag yet.

Paris (MeetUp, LinkedIn) – Just created! First event is on Monday 14 June, after which is becomes Last Thursdays. Created by @adeforsan and @elieauvray, and you can follow it on #CMSGeekupParis. Expect free drinks from Nuxeo, Jahia and others.

Geneva (MeetUp) – We’re “spreading like cholera”. A new joiner, set up by @scroisier. Looking forward to hearing about their first event.

So if you live in/travel to one of these areas, join your groups and tell your friends. A few cities with a visible CMS presence haven’t joined in yet. I’m talking to you Stockholm and Copenhagen. And Western Europe could use a couple. Australia (Yuval, you listening?), New Zealand, South Africa and India need to represent too.

Start spreading the word and creating those groups. Finally, feel free to map a better map than my horrorshow.

Celebrity Guest In London

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
- MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Well, after ten brilliant years at the company now known as LBi, it’s time for a change. I wasn’t looking for anything, but an opportunity came along that, had I turned it down, I’d probably regret for the rest of my life. More on this here; I plan to keep this blog going strong – time and lawyers permitting.

To all my LBi colleagues, thanks for the wonderful times, the beers and the things you’ve taught me. You’ve got an awesome gig going, and the road ahead looks rosy. In particular, thanks to the exec for their vision and guidance, the technical architects for all their wisdom, and my development teams for fucking up far less projects than the industry average.

To the Dream Team (@mislip, @laurajaybee, @dacrumb, @skinnybouffant and @shakster), congrats on a job well done and I’ll be watching a certain site with eager anticipation. And a huge huge thanks to my boss, Mark, for keeping me honest for the last few years.

To end my Paltrow-esque blubbering – to all my wonderful, well-informed clients that read this blog, thanks for letting me go near your projects, and for making most of the work a pleasure.

We’ll always have The Pride. It’s been real.

P.S. If anyone wants my old job (the best job at the best agency in London), mail careers@lbi.com for the attention of Mark Agar and the subject “I want Jon’s old job”. I’m serious.

Trails of troubles,
Roads of battles,
Paths of victory,
I shall walk.
- PATHS OF VICTORY

The votes have been tallied, checked and verified by our independent auditors. With over 250 tweets to the #cmshaiku hashtag and 114 votes in the Grand Winner category, it’s been more popular than expected. Time to announce the #cmshaiku 2010 winnners. The worthy Grand Winner from Cheryl McKinnon (who knows a thing or two about legacy vendors and legal):

Legacy vendors
want to play haiku too but
poems stuck in legal

I’ve always suspected that Peter Monks is actually a Bot written in Erlang, but he proved me wrong. He’s actually a BotNet with a powerful Poetry Plugin. Sadly, his Distributed Denial of Justice attack meant that poor Kathy Brown’s masterpiece was pushed into third. Philippe came a close fourth, although yours truly thinks his was probably the most inspired entry.

Cheryl (Self Promotion) and Peter’s (Random) legions of voters meant they also won their categories. Embarassingly I won the Product category by a country mile. Laurence Hart won the General section, and Paul Carvill won the Despair section. I fear I did Philippe (@proops) a disservice by including both his genius open source haiku and my fork in the same category, thus splitting the vote.

So, I owe Cheryl, Peter, Kathy, Laurence and Paul beers. You’ll receive your prizes next time we happen to be in a bar together. All liability for events occuring after drinking said beer falls squarely on the drinker. Kathy can tell you what happened last time I bought her a beer …

If you need a bit more poetry in your life, you can follow all the entrants using this Twitter list.  Also, a special shout to Tim Walters for laughing in the face of the Forrester personal brand building embargo.

Lastly, make sure you get your copy of the book from our friends at Gilbane Outsell.

And please, I beg, tweet /  haiku should inspiration / find you! For the book.

Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don’t win the race,
It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.
- I AND I

It’s the biggest competition to hit the web in a long time – The 2010 CMS Haiku Beer Contest. We created the fourth worst poetry in history, caused the CEO of Sun to resign, and inspired a prize for the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. If I have forgotten you, please leave your entry in the comments. You can still make the book.

But enough of that, it’s time to pick the winners. Due to the overwhelming response, I’ve divided the best into six categories of five. Please vote in each category. Voting closes on Feb 10. I’m buying beers for all the winners.

There were many other fine entries. Sadly, a few good ones didn’t meet the strict traditional 5/7/5 syllable rule. We decided that an @ or a # could count as a syllable, but didn’t have to.

Happy voting, and watch this space for the winners.

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.

The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
- IT’S ALL OVER NOW, BABY BLUE

Every now and again, certain tumultuous events coincide that makes us feel insignificant. A bit like a total solar eclipse, which is a rare and humbling thing. This week three seemingly unconnected occurances came to pass which made me stop and think. Firstly, CMIS was mentioned in the New York Times. Yes, the New York Times. Secondly, Jeff Potts released his “Getting Started with CMIS” tutorial. And, finally, I had the chance to drink beer and talk shit with the great David Nüscheler.

So, to honour all of this, I drew a picture.

Why, you may ask. Well, after chatting to David, I felt inspired to think (and blog) more about the JCR, CMIS and OSGi. But while doing my cursory research (that’s a strong word for what I do, but anyway), I discovered that there were quite a few things I knew nothing about, and a few products that I’d never heard of. I also coined the word Dignorance in honour of my newly found knowledge gaps.

So here is a small version of the picture. Click for a large one, or download it as PDF. Do whatever you want to with it. If you think it is useful, or think it needs fixing, leave comments here or get in touch. I’m sure it’s completely wrong all over the place. If you want the original Visio drawing to play with, let me know.

Next time I come to your office, I except to see this printed as A3 and stuck on your wall.

UPDATE 18 Dec 2009: I’ve written an article on CMS Wire which explains some of this. Have a look:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/wcm-field-notes-the-skinny-on-jcr-cmis-and-osgi-006279.php

Well, early in the mornin’
‘Til late at night,
I got a poison headache,
But I feel all right.
- PLEDGING MY TIME

I managed to get to the EPiServer Customer and Partner Day in London on Tuesday. I presented there last year, but this year could relax and go to lots of sessions. There were over 250 people, a big increase. They’re doing rather nicely in the UK, and everywhere else. They claim to have launched 500 new sites in the last three months. Personally, I hate the number of sites metric. I wish vendors would use number of new clients. For a nice, general overview of the day read James’ blog post. I’m just going to ramble a bit as usual.

EPiServer are still moving extremely quickly, which I talked about six months ago at the Swedish event. The main goodies on the roadmap are the new Marketing Arena, and EPiServer 6. And I stayed till far too late and still have a headache two days later, but that’s a story for another time.

Yams, Yams everywhere

Yes, we’ve got Yet Another Marketing Suite. Hot on the heels of  SiteCore’s Online Marketing Suite, Tridion’s Unified Online Marketing Suite and Autonomy/Interwoven’s Optimized Landing Page Solution, our friends at EPiServer showed off their new Marketing Arena. EPiServer’s product has four main prongs (each sold separately, batteries included):

Campaign Monitor and Optimiser (CMO)

The CMO has two parts. The Landing Page Optimiser (LPO) performs A/B Testing and has a nice interface. It is an entry level product that doesn’t include demographic information in the A/B testing which, for me, is something they need to introduce before I’d consider using it. The tool needs to be able to say, for example, “Page A performs best for US customers and Page B for European customers”. It also doesn’t perform Multivariate Testing but who know what the future holds. It provides basic web analytics, but wouldn’t claim to complete with a niche analytics product. In summary, it’s a nice entry level tool.

The second part, EPiServer SEO, performs good static analysis of your site and provides friendly instructions about how to improve your searchability based on the ever-changing rules of the search engines. It does all the things it should, looking at sematic code quality as well as content quality. It summarises this into a single number (your Digital Visibility) in a similar way to WebSite Grader. It’s a hosted service maintained by a third party. I wish I’d known about this before an we could have tried to set up a partnership with LBi instead – we have a service that’s very similar.

One thing I don’t like is the fact EPiServer SEO also has basic web tracking, to provides things like Heat Maps showing where users focus. Other parts of the CMO already have script based tracking. Two products doing this is one too many. And another trend I don’t like – black seems to be the new white. CMO has a shiny black background on their new “funky” product, while everything else is still white. Vignette did it with their Rich Media product. What’s wrong with white backgrounds anyway?

B2B Adapt

This is cool. Using an enhanced version of the Dun & Bradstreet company database, it maps the visitor’s IP address to their company’s Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code. From this, the product can tell the vertical industry of the company, the number of employees and even the annual turnover. These attributes are then fed into the rules engine to allow you to target different content to the revelant people. For example, you could show a very different pages to a small Swedish fishing company and a large US pharma. This is a hosted service which contains both the up-to-date database of companies as well as the rules.

I’d really like to use a service like this simply to get the demographic information and then put it to use in my own evil ways. However, I’m told this isn’t legal. There are strict (and somewhat quirky) rules around how company demographic information can be used.

B2B Prospect

This is a lower-cost option using the same technology as B2B Adapt. It simply provides a report of the companies that visited your site, including contact details and other useful things.

From Zero to Hero

Those of you that are wise in the EPiWays will recognise a few of the features mentioned above. EPiServer have a really really strong development community and an extensible API, so third parties are continually adding modules and features. They’ve just taken the first step towards an EPiAppStore with the release of the EPiServer Extra directory which includes free and commercial modules created by EPiServer and third parties. Many of these modules are now in the main product. Some of the extras that have made the big time include:

• dropit - Their X3 add-on has become EPiServer Composer, part of the Create+ package.
• Meridium – Their ImageVault DAM add-on is also part of Create+ (and they stayed late and had lots of beer)
• Ottoboni - Their InteractiveScene is in Create+ too.
• Online Services – XTractor for EPiServer has become EPiServer SEO.
• Enecto - The adaptivecontent and prospectfinder are B2BAdapt and B2BProspect respectively.
• EPiTrace – this is now bundled in the Marketing Arena.

I really like this model, by the way. All the most of the integrations are loosely coupled, and using partners like this allows the EPiServer guys to focus on the core.

What’s in EPiServer 6

The other big news is, of course, the arrival of EPiServer 6. Technically, this isn’t a massive change and the upgrade from 5.x promises to be trivial. As @rogerwirz pointed out in his closing presentation, it’s more of an “editorial training upgrade” than a technical one. I loved the comedy-act demo from @sunnaster and @mathel, sucking Tweets into the new Dynamic Data Store. I’m slightly uneasy about the Dynamic Data Store “Big Table” architecture, but I think this is because I’m old-school and fear change. But don’t get fooled into believing that this is anything like Google’s BigTable which isn’t an RDBMS and wouldn’t pass the ACID test. The EPiServer “Big Table” really is just a big bastard of a SQL table which sounds pretty hard to index. But I’m sure they’ve got it right. Something to talk to Roger about next time he’s in town.

I liked the demo of the new Dashboard (and how to write extensions for it) from @epirach and @bevan_souster. This Dashboard is based on the new EPiServer CMS Shell framework and provides good Portalesque features. However, I think it also overlaps enormously with many of the features of EPiServer Composer. So much overlap, in fact, that keeping both technologies alive doesn’t make sense. If I was a betting man (which I am) I’ll wager the heart of EPiServer Composer will be ripped out and replaced with a shiny new one in one (or at most two versions) time. At least I hope so.

Some other new features of EPiServer 6 which excite me:

• Completely browser compatibility on the editorial site
• Complete mirroring rewrite, which is a very good thing
• Access rights on page types
• Access rights on languages
• Drag and drop page tree ordering

Final Thoughts

The thing I like most about EPiServer is their geekiness and honesty. For example, in the keynote, they happily admit which products are simply OEM’ed partner products. Some competitors will wax lyrical about how their product has won Award XYZ, which happened before they even OEM’ed it.  The final presentation was a tech demo that everyone was forced to watch. I did hear some less-technical people saying that some of the presentations aren’t slick and “marketeer” enough. Which is great. Keep it up I say.

But please use a shorter hashtag than #episerverdayuk09 next year.

I’ll go to some bar room
And drink with my friends
- MOONSHINER

Today was Day 1 at Internet World 2009 a.k.a. #iwexpo for the Twitterrati. I got there nice and early, got myself a coffee and settled in to CMS Watch’s Theresa Regli talking about “Findability in a Web 2.0 World”. It is really difficult for the speakers to pitch these at the correct altitude as the audience is so varied, but I quite enjoyed the talk. My favourite part was when she called most marketing “crap”. A nice relaxed, honest presentation.

I spent most of the day chatting to vendors. Got the lowdown from (in alphabetical order) Alterian, CoreMedia, Ektron, EPiServer, EZ Systems, FatWire, FirstSpirit, Gomez, Hybris, Jadu, Kentico, OpenText (nee RedDot), SiteCore, Squiz and Vyre. I enjoyed my chat with Ian about the crazy CMS shit we all got up to in the late nineties.

I am alway interested to see who has the biggest stands at these events. A few years ago, Tridion were all over Internet World but they aren’t at here at all any more (maybe the SDL influence?). Vignette and EMC weren’t there either. Autonomy/Interwoven were there although their collateral isn’t merged yet. Last year, Vyre had the biggest stand but they’ve decided to spend their marketing budget elsewhere and went for a normal stand this year. EPiServer seemed to have biggest stand and the most people this year. SiteCore had a big one too. Peer 1, a dedicated hosting company, had a massive stand and some really hot chixors in hotpants who looked nothing at all like network engineers.

There was a stand labelled “Plone” which made no sense and smelled a bit like a systems integrator trying to pull a fast one. It was actually manned by a company called Netsight that were trying to hijack the Plone brand. I don’t like those guys at all. Don’t give them any money please. [UPDATE: I got this very wrong. They did actually get permission to do this and are, by all accounts, good guys. So you can give them money. See the comments below or the Netsight blog for their explanations. Apologies to Netsight, Matt and everyone else. Although I'd still be happier if the booth company name said Netsight. ]

One of the cool things about these events are the freebies. I couldn’t find many stress balls this time. I did pick up one from Kentico and another from SiteCore. I’ve recently defined a new approach to Vendor Selection Exercises, so thought I’d ask the expert (my 11 month year old son) to perform an one:

After much thought, he picked SiteCore over Kentico. I’m pretty convinced he went for the rugby ball shape over the football shape, but it might have been down to cost or the developer API. As soon as he can talk, I’ll let you all know. Sometimes vendor selections can be rather random.

I watched LBi’s Dom Collier and Jill Lloyd (and our friends at the British Red Cross) talking to a packed session about a recent LBi project. For the LBi groupies, Mikey and Mark are talking about British Gas tomorrow at 13:00. One of my personal favourite projects. Get along and have a listen to that one.

The highlight of the event was, for me, the drinks afterwards. Was lucky enough to share quite a few pints with Tony Byrne from CMS Watch, Lau Andreasen from JBoye, LBi’s very own Microsoft guru Riaz, wise man James Hoskins and some other top secret guests. I can’t think of many things I enjoy more than a few pints of Guiness and a chat about CMS. Hope we can do it again some time soon. And I hope Tony has a better photo than my crappy iPhone one below.

All in all, a really interesting and enjoyable day! More tomorrow. I love this game.

Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook.
A lily-white duck come and swallowed him up, Uh-huh.
- FROGGIE WENT A COURTIN’

Had a look at the People’s United Bank site that has just been launched and recently tweeted. Firstly, well done to everyone involved for getting it live. Always nice to see a new big CMS driven site. It looks good too – nice and clean. Hats off to the designers.

But I do have to ask my friends at Vignette – was it really necessary to use your portal products (Vignette Application Portal and Dynamic Portal Module) for this? I have only looked at the site for 15 minutes, so have probably missed something huge. But I’m going to assume I haven’t and soldier on.

I realise it is a bank, so there are probably a lot more Portal suitable features behind the different logins. But all of those seem to go off-site away from the Portal implementation at the moment. It’s often the other way round. The post-login functionality is driven by a portal, not the pre-login informational/marketing section. The site seems to be primarily static content. Maybe the content differs depending on your ZIP code – not easy to tell.

Portals are meant to aggregate applications, not provide a set of off-site links to them. The login goes to a server running ASP.NET. The career application is an offsite IFRAME. The branch finder goes to MapQuest. The search goes to Mondo with a secure/unsecure warning. Even the search results are displayed on Mondo, but maybe this is for the term highlighting.

I’ve noticed on the Vignette site that the Portal product is now classified under Intranet , not under Web Content Management. That’s a step in the right direction. It can make a mighty fine Intranet. But it still seems to get recommended as the delivery mechanism for every site you launch.

Maybe there are no downsides to using the Portal for this site. But if it is so easy to fix the friendly URLs , the validating markup, and the TABLE based layouts , I’m looking forward to seeing them in the next release of this site. Google really digs that stuff, and banks really dig organic traffic. At the very least, please put the <link> to vgn-ext-templating.css somewhere after the opening<html> tag.

The implementation was probably a fair bit of effort too, I’m guessing. Did you choose an external spider for the site search because it felt right, or because it is actually quite difficult to implement an internal search on a Portal? Any issues with sessions and bookmarking? Do the editorial team need to use both the VCM and VAP to create new pages, or do they have a nice, single tool that they use to create pages and content? And it is all easy and cheap to maintain?

I guess someone might have played the “we’re not using the Portal functionality for Phase 1, but we need a future-proof platform to carry us forward” card. Or did someone say synergies a lot? Oh for a penny for every non-implemented planned Phase 2 feature I’ve seen. We all love agile development these days; whatever happened to agile product choices? If the post-login part of this site is live on VAP in the next 12 months, however, I’ll eat my hat, apologise, and buy everyone lots and lots of beer.

I really like the VCM. And I really like VAP. But this site isn’t a Portal. Dear Vignette, please don’t make us use VAP for everything. You do have other delivery mechanisms. Dear other major vendors, stop smirking. Many of you do the same.

Not every site is a Portal. Sometimes a Portal is really a Gate To Hell. Here there be Demons.

I been wond’rin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there.
- SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENT

Well, I normally wouldn’t play this game. But I also normally wouldn’t be lucky enough to be on Kas Thomas’ esteemed blogroll. If he tags me and says play, I’ll play. I’m nowhere near as interesting as Kas, and I’ve never been a pilot. And there is nothing about technology or Content Management either. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

• I am a born and bred South African. Studied at the University of Cape Town, although my working life has been based from the US, the Netherlands and, for the last 10 years, London. I can sing the South African National Anthem in Xhosa if I’ve had enough enough to drink.
  
• I am a chess geek. I thought I was good, I won the South African under 18 championship once. Since I started traveling, I’ve realised I’m just crap. Did you know that Iceland has 9 chess grandmasters out of a population of about 300,000. South Africa has 0 out of 47 million. These days, I play better chess when I’ve had enough to drink.
• There’s a pattern emerging. I used to drink far too much beer, but now get a hangover after three or four pints of Guiness.
• I have a wonderful 11 month old son. He has done 12 international flights. He’s one of the reasons I don’t drink too much any more. He’s also the main reason my blog entries are written between 12:00 and 2:00 am and I’m not getting enough sleep. He rocks. His name is Noah. It might have been Dylan, but my wife said that would be confusing because …
• I have two Persian cats. One is named Dylan (after Bob, who supplies the intros to all my blog posts) and the other is Poo (’cause she looks like one).
• I love cricket and rugby. Watching, not playing. I dress my son in a South African shirt for the games so I can taunt him when he grows up to be an England supporter. Did I say we’re currently Rugby World Champions. And #1 in the world one day cricket rankings?
• I did the first year of a Bachelor of Arts (Economics, German, Astronomy, Religious Studies) when I couldn’t find a supervisor for my thesis on dynamic shortest path algorithms in 2D strategy games (think old Warcraft or Command and Conquer). Can’t remember anything from Economics. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut. Astronomy was probably the most enjoyable thing I ever did at University. I’m not a religious man.
• I won the Girl’s Prize in a Maths Olympiad once. I used to call myself Jonny but they read it as Jenny. They called my name out a few times before I had the balls to stand up. Which technically I shouldn’t have had. So it’s Jon now.
• I monetised a FaceBook app that I wrote ( with James) in my spare time. About 100 man hours netted £0.42 in ad revenue. But how many people made anything at all from their apps. I’ll link to the app for prosperity, but one of the many changes to the FaceBook API fux0r3d it badly.
• I’m the worst artist I know. Unlike Kas, I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag. You can’t even tell if my stick figures are male or female. And I can’t choose colours that look good together either, although I do use a lot of pastels.

Well, that’s me done. Let’s never speak of this again. It’s all tech from here on in. Find yourself a real post from my useful new index page. Irina, Julian, Lee, Pie and the rest of you on my blogroll. Anyone care to step forward? You’re it.

Here’s a Meme ID just in case: 42a4263e9ae40c23da79bd43370fd814

Nothing like a bit of rugby. Did I mention we're currently World Champions?

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.

Now, there’s a woman on my block,
She just sit there as the night grows still.
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
- LICENSE TO KILL

Just come back from a nice Brick Lane curry and a few beers with my old colleagues from Accenture. Just enough beers, in fact, for a minor rant. Before I start, I’d like to say that there is nothing I dislike more than someone that complains about problems without offering a sensible solution. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

Here’s my problem. My day job involves me drawing many system architecture diagrams. This poses many challenges: How do I ensure that the solution is fit for purpose, reliable, scalable, extensible, performant, resilient and more? How do I select the best-fit third party products? What colours should the boxes on my Visio diagrams be, and should they have round corners? And how do I say my clients money?

Don't want to do this

It would be ideal if the vendors’ licensing models allowed us to harmoniously achieve all the goals stated above. The sad reality, however, is that the licensing model sometimes means that we have to sabotage our architectures in order to save a fortune on licensing. Some examples situations are given below:

• A per site or domain cost – Many vendors will charge you per “site”, the definition of which isn’t clear. Sometimes this is an IIS site or Application pool, but more often than not it is based on domain. So, if I have a global presense and use domains such as www.globalcorp.com, www.globalcorp.co.uk, www.globalcorp.jp and so on, I can get hammered with a 60 site license. Whereas, if I go with www.globalcorp.com/en-GB/ or www.globalcorp.com/jp/ instead and place simple redirects on my top level domains, I have a single site license. I prefer the first option, but not if it is going to cost the client tens of thousands of $$$/£££’s. Which means we sometimes reluctantly go for option 2. That said, option two does have it’s advantage in that single domains can be easier to manage (SSL certs, SEO and more), but I still prefer a domain per region.
• A per machine / CPU cost for a very small component – There are some vendors which will charge extra for each machine on which a component is installed. My pet hate here is a deployment listener, which is most often seen in a CMS that operates a decoupled publishing model. If, for example, I publish a news story from my content staging environment behind my firewall to my load balanced production environment on the other side, two things normally happen. The content is published to a remote database cluster, and the associated static files (images, for example) are remotely copied to the file system of each in the cluster. If the CMS employs a baking model, the content is normally also deployed as a static file. Now this is all great, until my web tier server farm gets large and I have to pay a ridiculous license fee for each box for the priviledge of having a file copy. The workaround here is simply to install the deployment listener on one server in the cluster, and run some free file system synchronisation tool (for example rsync) that copies that content to the other machines in the cluster. Another workaround is expensive hardware (like a SAN) which may be overkill.
• A cost for each named CMS user or editor - I believe it is extremely important for each user of a system to have a unique username and password, mainly for security and audit trail reasons. However, I’ve seen cases where a single login is shared by multiple editors purely to avoid a per login license. I wouldn’t be surprised if this arrangement violates the licensing terms, and it isn’t something we’ve ever done. I think this model is rare these days, normally replaced with a concurrent user limit.
• Vagaries around inter-, extra- and intranet use – Some licensing models depend on which part of the Enterprise use the system. I think the difference between an internet site and intranet site is still fairly well defined, but an extranet can cause enormous grey areas. Falling foul of this can have massive implications on licensing and needs to be considered when designing the architecture.
• A per hit cost for an Analytics products – Now this is off topic and more a question than a statement. Some of our clients use a free service (you guessed it, Google Analytics), but most use a larger commercial product such as Omniture or WebTrends. The licensing model is often based on the number of hits received by the tracking server. And this is what I was wondering: If I have an extremely high volume site, what happens if I only sample the visitors by, for example, tagging 1 in 1000. This sampling is a bit like an exit poll in an election. It would be quite expensive to ask everyone who they voted for when leaving the booth. Asking a small subset is much cheaper, and yields reliable results if the sample is truly random. This could potentially save a significant amount on licensing, and all I need to do is read my reports in terms of 1000′s of users. Of course this is a terrible idea when using advanced techniques such as A/B Testing or Multivariate Testing to increase the value per user. But it might be a good idea if you’re simply tracking behaviour. For the record, I’ve never tried this and don’t know if it would violate the licensing agreement. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I could probably go on a bit more. There are considerations around physical machines versus virtual machines, active-passive Disaster Recovery configurations and the definition of a staging/pre-production site. If anyone could add to the list above I’d be interested to hear from you.

I wish I could end this post with a suggestion for the perfect licensing model for the vendors, but sadly I have no answers. The vendors are all well aware of the short-comings of the existing models and people a whole lot wiser than me have been trying to find logical and fair ways to repair these. If any major vendor does think their price list avoids all these issues, I’d love to see it.

Until these issues are properly addressed, we will have to continue to consider vendor licensing models when designing our system architectures. But it depresses me enormously when a quirk in a pricing matrix makes me do something that I know smells a little bit like horseshit.

The wind it was howlin’ and the snow was outrageous.
We chopped through the night and we chopped through the dawn.
When he died I was hopin’ that it wasn’t contagious,
But I made up my mind that I had to go on.
- ISIS

Just come back from EPiServer Day 2009 in Stockholm. I’m pleased to report that this was a truly excellent two days. Interesting presentations, interesting people and an interesting product. There were over 1100 people there, which is extremely impressive in the current climate. Speaking of which, it snowed throughout the event, but not enough to deter the Lesser-Spotted Hardened English Smoker, captured on film below.

First, the speakers. I was really impressed with the Keynote, Tim Walters from Forrester Research on the Death of WCM. The quality of the thinking from the large research companies is always impressive, but the presentation was given in a relaxed, informal manner which I really enjoyed.

I also loved the “It’s Like Being In A Rock Band”presentation by Andreas Sjöström from Sogeti. It had a very simple message, but presented extremely well. I was glad to discover I still have my passion. Also, the Crowd Surfing presentation by David Brain was enjoyable, and had a few intriguing nuggets. The Trust Survey highlighted how people don’t trust CEO’s very much …

None of these presentations had much to do with EPiServer, but they were great anyway.

The EPiServer specific sessions were also informative, and as usual I was struck by the speed with which they develop things. If anything, the roadmap moves too quickly for me! But it was good to hear that the majority of the focus is on the core products – Content Management and Community. I’m always skeptical of a CMS vendor that trys to expand into too many areas. I don’t need another End-To-End eBusiness Solution. I need focused products that solve my customers’ problems.

I attended another session on EPiServer’s Create+ package, which was far more of a technical deep dive than I’d seen of it before. The X3EPiServer Composer product has gone up a couple of notches in my esteem. For some reason, I’d previously thought that a page was either an EPiServer page, or an Extension Page, but not a combination. This is because of all the demos I’d been shown, no-one had ever combined normal EPiServer properties with an Extensions page. I think a better way to think about it is that the Composer adds a new property type (not page type) to an existing EPiServer page.

As usual, there was a fair bit of socialising. We had a few brews and talked about Life and Content Management. While I was the only representative from LBi UK this year, I was lucky to spend time with collegues from Sweden and the Netherlands. I met a few new Content Management Geeks that I’d not met before, and had some interesting discussions. We sensibly avoided the 2:00 am trip to a late night drinking venue, so I started Day 2 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Three London based Agencies had been nominated for EPiServer Awards (LBi, Rufus Leonard and Fortune Cookie), and we tried to stick together with the UK EPiServer staff. Unfortunately, our show of solidarity wasn’t enough to bring an EPiServer Award back to Blightly. In an extremely slick Oscars-like ceremony, the 5 awards were handed out. However, the voting felt rather Eurovision-esque, and while the UK received nil point, Sweden bagged 5 out of 5 awards. Earlier in the day, one of the keynote speakers asked the audience if they felt Sweden would be a top IT supplier in the next few years. After taking a clean sweep at the EPiServer Awards (beating 118 entries from 11 countries, if memory serves), they certainly already are. Maybe next year …

Finally, a note to EPiServer marketing. Changing the URL to the Events pages (Upcoming_Events to Passed_Events) makes linking to them pretty painful.

Expect another update from the next EPiServer Event in London Town.