With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
- SAD-EYED LADY OF THE LOWLANDS

Short version: I drew a picture while watching crap on TV. Scroll to the bottom to see it.

I seem to be bumping into Google absolutely everywhere these days. When you take a step back and think about it, it really is astonishing how many areas they play in, and how many competitors they have. And it changes fast. In the last few days, they’ve ditched Google Video, acquired PushLife (their 94th acquisition) and are rumoured to be building a FlipBoard killer.

I also recently read a wonderful article, The Freight Train That Is Android by VC Bill Gurley (@bgurley – follow him now). He introduces his article with a famous quote from investor-extraordinaire Warren Buffet, who said:

In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats

In Google’s case, the economic castle is search and ads. That is the cash cow. Gurley then go on to say:

Google’s aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). Because these layers are basically software products with no variable costs, this is a very viable defensive strategy. In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.

Click for large image. High Res available below.

So, inspired by all of this, I drew a picture to give myself a birds-eye view of everything I know that Google is involved in as of 20:00 GMT on Monday 18th April 2011. They’re not winning on all fronts but they’re doing pretty well. “Social” is their weak point at the moment, which is why Larry P just announced that 25% of all Googlers bonuses depend on their social success.

Now I am sure I didn’t waste hours of my life on this beast and you’re all going to stick it on your wall at work and home. Here are the big versions:

Download Hi-Res PDF: 1.3 MB
Download Hi-Res JPG:  4.2 MB

And feel free to point out all my cock-ups in the comments and I’ll update this next time my wife watches another shitty romcom.

Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
- NOT DARK YET

Poor RIM took a beating this evening after announcing their quarterly financials. It all seems rather up and down. Probably more down. Either way, I think the next few months are going to decide if RIM have a role to play in The Great Mobile Wars This Decade. Here is my summary of their 2011 so far.

Bad News

In January, some douche decided that he’d launch the new careers site at http://rim.jobs/. I mean, seriously. Surely everyone reads Urban Dictionary these days. This is even better than  http://www.experts-exchange.com/ before they stuck in the clarifying hypen.

Good News

They took the site to the more sensible domain http://www.rim.com/careers/. It briefly redirected but the domain is completely gone now.

Good News

RIM have finally announced that their new tablet, the PlayBook, is shipping this month. It’s been delayed a few times so hopefully this is it. I think the name is okay, actually. Although if it is meant to refer to a basketball/football playbook, then it makes more sense in the US.

Bad News

It going to have a similar price to the iPad2. It is $500/$600/$700 for the models with 16GB/32GB/64GB RAM. This can’t be good for them. Tablets need to be cheaper than the iPad to get traction.

At 7 inches, it is much smaller than most other tablets. It seems it ain’t going to be much good unless you tether it to your Blackberry. And there are still questions about battery life (which has not been mentioned in any spec sheets I’ve seen yet). Maybe another more detailed post about the features of the PlayBook some other time.

Good News

Their QNX operating system is interesting, and might mean they can run Adobe Flash faster than other Android based tablets. Flash on Android still needs to prove itself. And the fact that they’re not Android might be a differentiator in a world of Samsung Galaxy and Motorola Xoom. Bad news here is that some analysts are blaming poor battery life on greedy Flash and the theory that QNX wasn’t designed for mobile usage.

Bad News

The fact that they’re not Android means they don’t have many apps at all. It’s pretty difficult to write apps for the PlayBook at the moment. This was highlighted in a hilarious blog post “You win, RIM!” by developer Jamie Murai that went viral. You should read it (seriously), and his follow-up post. RIM did respond to his rant pretty well I think. The fact that they’re trying to lure developers by chucking free PlayBooks at them is a sign of the times.

Good News:

RIM have just confirmed that they’ll run Android apps. Woot. It’s been rumoured for a while but they’ve confirmed it now. Some argue that this is an admission that their own developer SDK is a pile of shite. However, if they didn’t do this, I think they’ve have been dead in the water so it is a smart move. You won’t be able to download your RIM apps from the Android Marketplace (or the shiny new Amazon AppStore for Android). Instead, developers will need to resubmit their apps to BlackBerry App World. This is probably okay.

The highlights of the press release:

• BlackBerry PlayBook to support BlackBerry Java and Android apps
• Native C/C++ development support added, in addition to HTML5, Flash and AIR support
• Support from leading game engines: Ideaworks Labs (AirPlay) and Unity Technologies (Unity 3)
• BlackBerry PlayBook becomes a new market opportunity for all the developers who have already created over 25,000 BlackBerry Java apps and more than 200,000 Android apps

It’s probably also slightly good news for RIM that GOOG might be about to annoy the developer community slightly with their delayed open sourcing of Honeycomb.

And finally

Note that I really want RIM to do well. The more players in this game the better, and a two horse race between Android and iOS is a bit dull. Having RIM and WebOS in the mix spices things up. And at least they’re getting a whole lot of press again. There is no such thing as bad publicity, right? Go RIM!

The joint is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
- HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU, BABY

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

I’d never heard of it until last week when I was lucky enough to meet the cool folk at betaworks (@Borthwick and @aweissman). These guys don’t mess around – they’re behind such social media hits as TweetDeck, bit.ly and twitterfeed. You heard it here first – chartbeat is going to be big.

It’s really easy to get started – you just stick a couple of JavaScript tags onto all your pages a.l.a. Google Analytics, and you are done. The reports you get are much simpler than those from GA, but it is really real time. You can see the visitors on your site within a couple of seconds of their arrival. I wrote a test link bait post (sorry), tweeted it, and saw my 17 concurrent visitors within seconds.

Visitors to your site in real time. Notice one person is writing a comment. Click for large image.

But there is more. GA simply registers a hit when a page is loaded. chartbeat has a heartbeat and chats to the server every couple of seconds. This means that it can more accurately measure time spent on the site, user actions like scrolling (giving a nice scroll depth metric), and even keypresses. In the screenshot above, you’ll see one person is writing – they were leaving a comment at the time.

Typical detail page. Gotta love the scroll depth and engagement indicators

It also comes with a nice preintegration with backtype. This searches the social media buzz of the interwebs and reports activity as part of your report. When @izahoor, @theg, @irina_guseva, @cmsreport and @kevinc2003 were kind enough to retweet my horseshit blog post, I saw my dashboard get a bit busier and saw their link love appear shortly afterwards in the backtype console. Good stuff.

Nice integration with backtype. Click for large image.

It has an API and a bucket of prebuilt widgets. I haven’t had time to play with these, but I might add a widget here soon. The downside being, of course, it would pretty much always say “1 user currently viewing this page”. And that would be you.

It gets better. chartbeat even monitors the health of your site. While I was testing, my dickhead hosting company GoDaddy had yet another embolism, and my site flatlined for about 5 minutes. But unlike the previous million times this happened, it didn’t die silenty. I got a nice email from chartbeat informing me of the tragedy. Also, it tells you how long a page took to load for each user. 20 seconds isn’t great, GoDaddy. And yes, it has a free iPhone app too.

Because I’m a social media guru who understands transparancy and douchebaggery, I’ve shared my wonderful stats with the world. So have a look at my chartbeat dashboard.

You do have to pay a small fee for all this goodness, but it is money well spent. Buy it. Finally, a huge nod to @arctictony for helping me out.

I already assumed
That we’re in the felony room
But I ain’t a judge, you don’t have to be nice to me
But please tell that
To your friend in the cowboy hat
You know he keeps on sayin’ ev’rythin’ twice to me
- SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW

We’ve got some more BlueWashing going on. IBM announced today that they’re acquired analytics and marketing vendor Unica for $480 million. It seems like a lot of cash to me, but then again IBM have got plenty and what do I know. I do know it follows quite shortly after they bought pure analytics vendor CoreMetrics.

The “Farewell to Coremetrics and Web Analytics as you knew it” post from the Unica blog (two months ago) is quite interesting in retrospect:

Now, IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics follows suit as IBM folds Coremetrics into Websphere with the likely intention of making it part of the Websphere eCommerce technology stack.

With no major standalone contenders remaining in the market (WebTrends had signaled their interest in getting acquired) prospective web analytics buyers must evaluate the core competencies of the parent company in order to determine the best match for their current and future needs.

IBM does NOT appear to be making a play for a broader analytics offering

The wise seem to be saying that IBM isn’t actually going to bother marketing either Unica or CoreMetrics, but rather just add them into the already vast IBM Suite. Which effectively mean they’re being withdrawn from the Analytics battlefield. If that is the case, then the three players that will be slugging it out will be Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics and WebTrends. And although WebTrends are alledgely not trying to put themselves up for sale, I suspect they might be gobbled up quite soon. Maybe AAPL will feel left out of an Adobe vs Google slugfest, and buy WebTrends just to join the fracas. Maybe we should count Nedstat too, but I don’t see much of them. Or have they already been bought?

I’m the kind of guy that likes to believe the IBM <-> HAL thing (although Arthur denies it), and I’ve got this vision of poor IBM acquired vendors trying to wriggle free of the corporation. For no good reason, let’s end on this:

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Black crows in the meadow
Across a broad highway.
Though it’s funny, honey,
I just don’t feel much like a
Scarecrow today.
- BLACK CROW BLUES

It’s been yet another busy April Fool’s day. Sites like Techcrunch and Slashdot have enormous lists of tech related scams, but my favourite are listed below. There isn’t any particular order.

Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay Maybe I shouldn’t, but I just love those guys at The Pirate Bay. Following the lawsuit has been pretty funny, and I seriously hope nothing happens to them. Their home page now has a “Warner Brothers Heart Pirate Bay” image on it. And if any of you have some downtime, reading the letters on their Legal Page is quite possibly the best way to fill it. Be sure to read their response to the various takedown notices.
Introducing Joopal Finally, the difficult decision for Open Source CMS implementers is over. Drupal and Joomla! have finally decided to collaborate and have brought us Joopal. It has “the power of Joomla! with Drupal configurability”. Some of the comments on the thread are also pretty fun, with fans of both CMS systems having digs at one another. Now I’m eagerly awaiting Tridignette and Docuwoven.
Pay and Get Back your Original Facebook I’m one of the many that really doesn’t like the way FaceBook keeps changing things. It’s like supermarkets that keep moving products around to make you buy more. In fact, I’ve pretty much given up on FaceBook now. While I appreciate the fact that they’re extremely agile, it is also annoying as hell if you’re an old dude like me that fears change. Not only that, their last API change broke my first FaceBook App! But the good news is that “beginning today Facebook users will have an option to pay a yearly sum of $24.99 and get back their favorite Facebook“.
Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink Now this is something that could actually happen one day. This time last year, we could have had an April Fool’s joke saying “Skittles Ditches Corporate Site For Twitter”. Anyway, not only are The Guardian becoming a Twitter-only publication, they’re also converting their entire archive into Tweets. My favourite is probably “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?“. Read the article, and the history at the bottom. A classic.
Gmail Autopilot by CADIE – The easiest email could possibly be. This one got a lot of publicity of course. The world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) has been released, and Google are kind enough to let you use it for free to automatically reply to emails. Looks extremely useful, and will make you rich by automatically closing multi-million dollar deals with Nigerian bankers.
Introducing Opera Face Gestures The browser wars are hotting up. Using Face Observation Opera Language (FOOL!), they are able to “recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser.” The video of the idiot operating the browser is awesome, and the handy guide to the gestures is pretty fun too. Nice one.
Internet Explorer 8.1 Eagle Eyes Leaked Maybe spurred on by Opera’s announced, Smashing Magazine have leaked news of Microsoft’s new browser – IE 8.1. aka “Eagle Eyes”. They actually did this quite early yesterday, and I know a few people that fell for it. It unveils a host of new features that actually look quite real. Eagle Eyes will even support Mozilla based add-ons and those tested “worked flawlessly (some of the developers even claim that – in terms of performance – they work much better under IE 8.1 versus Firefox 3).“
ECM Vendors Throw in the Towel at Philadelphia Summit Love this. And maybe even a hint of truth in it. Combining April Fool’s and the G20 summit, the guys at CMS Watch announce the death of ECM. The twenty main ECM vendors (the E20) declare the whole concept a waste of time. My favourite quote: “I can totally understand it,” says CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe, “hell, we can’t even manage our own documents.” CMS Watch recently reverted to its f: drive after a failed, four-year effort to implement a commercial document management system.
Up, Up, and Away – Cloud Computing Reaches for the Sky If, like me, you’re sick to death of hearing about Cloud Computing, this is the one for you. I’m just going to re-quote the intro and hope you’ll read the rest: For a while the cloud was simply a metaphor meaning “a bunch of computers somewhere else.” Until now, somewhere else meant good old terra firma, the Earth itself. After extensive customer research we found that this rigid, antiquated way of thinking just won’t cut it in today’s post-capitalist world. They need locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it.
SlideShare Rockstars Let’s end on a slightly controversial one. To summarise, SlideShare made every presentation look like it had been viewed 100 more times than it had in reality. They then mailed users telling them that “they must have done something right” and that they should tweet their success to #bestofslideshare. They’ve had a bit of a backlash from users that didn’t find it funny. They say on their blog: “We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.” Personally, I think it is hilarious. It’s April Fool’s people. Live with it. People still falling for it too.