You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown
- LAST THOUGHTS ON WOODY GUTHRIE

Forgive me, WordPress, for I have sinned. It’s been 8 weeks since my last blog post. And in that time many people have slandered WordPress, accusing it of not being a Web Content Management (WCM) platform at all. But that’s not important right now.

What is important is the main reason for my 8 week lapse – the arrival of my very own WCM – Willow Coco Marks, born 19 Feb and smiling ever since. So I’m now the proud owner of two darling little sproglets. And no-one would ever dare to ask me which of my children I love more. That would be horrible. It would be like asking a CMS vendor to take five super important features decide which they love the most. No-one who has seen Streep bawling her eyes out in Sophie’s Choice would go there.

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance - The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

Yes, yes, yes, we know they are all important. But not equally important to you. For example, would you choose a proprietary format if it made the editor interface better? Would you add the feature the developers all want if it affected performance?

So, dear vendors, have a long hard introspective and submit your answers in the comments in the form E P F D W (assuming you like the random order I listed them in) with the first being most important and the last less important than the other four. And no, there isn’t a right answer.

Who wants to play?

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

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

The Numbers

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

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

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

Most Underrated

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

Most Read

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

Best Traffic Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the highlights of the comments:

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

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

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

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

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.

It ain’t that I’m questionin’ you.
To take part in any quiz.
It’s just that I ain’t got no watch
An’ you keep askin’ me what time it is
- IF YOU GOTTA GO, GO NOW

A Quiz

Right, the quiz. It all started when I got invited to play some dumb-ass quiz on QuizTweet.com. Something about Which Mixed Drink Would I Be. Now I only drink beer these days, so I ain’t no mixed drink at all. But all the CMS cool kids were turning out to be Martini’s, so I bowed to the pressure to prove I was different. QuizTweet is pretty sneaky as once you’ve invested time and energy answering the questions, it then asks you for your Twitter creds so it can tweet your results. You find out how you’ve done at the same time as the world finds out. So I break my own rules and give the QuizTweet app access to my Twitter account. And it doesn’t really warn you either. @QuizTweet – if you’re reading this, I really think you need to add in a notification screen so people realise what is about to happen.

Once I’d sold my soul and creds to QuizTweet, I figured I’d try to set my own quiz up. The interface is pretty sweet and I was done in 20 minutes. You first define the different possible outcomes (with a description and an easy-to-select image), and then write the questions. For each question, you need to write an answer for each outcome. Which means I needed 13 possible responses for each question. This is far too many – I wish that I could assign multiple outcome to the same question response. The screenshot belows shows the kind of interface you get for each question. I’ve only shown 4 of the 13 response form elements though.

I’ve no idea how the system selects the outcome. I presume that it picks the outcome with the most responses, and is random in the event of a tie. In my quiz, I’m guessing selecting 3/10 questions for a certain outcome will be enough. If I’d known how popular the stupid thing would become, I’d have given the questions more thought! As of now, over 600 tweeps have taken the quiz and it has made page 1 of the Top Quizzes. It’s even “Trending” which isn’t bad considering the small target audience. The annoying way that it tweets the results for you also makes it very viral. I think QuizTweet has potential.

For those that are wondering, the 13 possible outcomes are Alfresco, Alterian, Day, Drupal, EMC Documentum, EPiServer, Fatwire, MOSS (SharePoint), Notepad, Open Text, SDL Tridion, Vignette and WordPress. Day was added late. Alfresco and MOSS added even later. The choice of what was included was pretty random – they are systems I know something about, and are not too close to one another.  I really liked the cheap marketing stunt from @martinvm with this tweet claiming to have done the quiz and got GX WebManager – even though it wasn’t an option. Nice work, Mr Product Manager.

As QuizTweet doesn’t let me see the results, I am monitoring them via a Twitter Search and am getting them emailed to me via Twilert. If people are interested, I’ll post them in a couple of days.

In case you were wondering, it turns out I’m not different from the other CMS nerds. I’m also a Martini. If you have the urge, you can play the CMS Quiz here. And if you’re really impressed or truly horrified by the result it gave you, please leave a comment.

Some Beers

If you don’t live near London, you can stop reading now. Maybe do the quiz again. However, if you do live near London and you’re still reading, I figured I might as well plug the Last Thursday CMS drinks. A few people get together over some beers and talk about Content Management, the web industry and other random things. We meet on the last Thursday of every month. It is a bit like the CMS/Pub/London drinks we used to do about 5 years ago. If you’d like to find out more, have a look at Meetup.com Event. Everyone is welcome. The only rule (especially for CMS vendors) is no hard selling please. Any attempt to sell anything to anyone must be preceded by buying a round of drinks for everyone within earshot. Note that although one of the organisers works for Squiz.Net, the event is in no way affliated with or sponsored by any vendor.

So far there have been about 5 meetings, and they’ve been good fun. Hope to see some more of you there for interesting discussions. By the way, did you know that there is a Free Beer published under a Creative Commons License? That’s free as in speech, not free as in beer.

A Celebrity Visit

Some breaking news. There is going to be a Danish celebrity having some beers in London on July 2 – that’s next Thursday. Come along and get a beer and an autograph. The Danes don’t make beer, but if they did, it would probably be the best beer ever.

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

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

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

The Theme

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

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

Key Plugins

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

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

RSS Feeds

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

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

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

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

OPML Feed

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Version

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

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

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

All done. Cheap and cheerful mobile version.

Google WebMaster Tools

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf,
Ring them bells for all of us who are left,
Ring them bells for the chosen few
Who will judge the many when the game is through.
- RING THEM BELLS

It seems Top 10 lists are all the rage these days, so before the month ends, I figured I’d jump onto the bandwagon and present my Top 10 Tech Lists of the Month. As far as I can tell, all these lists were first published in March 2009.

Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world,
Not now or no other time
- PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS

Like many others, I use Twitter Search to listen to the word on the street in the areas about which I’m passionate. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of searches for “CMS“. In this case, however, the problem I have is that very few people are talking about the kind of CMS product in which I am interested. To illustrate this, have a look at the search for “CMS” using one of my favourite visualisers – the Twitter Stream Graph.

Twitter Visualiser for "CMS"

You probably can’t see the detail here (click the image to see the current stream), but it is clear that when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. There’s always a big PHP strand in there too.

So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress (from this blog, mainly). We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I’ve never been involved in an implementation with either. In fact, the technology team where I work is 45% .NET, 45% Java and 10% Misc. We tend to avoid PHP, Python, Perl and other scripting languages for various reasons which I won’t go in to here. So, are we really that out of touch?

I thought I’d dig around a bit more. I found the CMS Focus: CMS Report’s Top 30 Web Applications article and, of the 30, I’ve heard of about 60%. But we only implement 2 (SharePoint and Alfresco). That’s 7% of the top CMS products. Not very good.

So I tried the Open Jason 50 Content Management Systems list for a bit more choice. Of the 50, I’d only ever heard of about 10, most of which are blogging platforms (TypePad, MoveableType, Blogger and WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! are there. But this list is a year old, and the only new ones that have come onto my radar recently are Silverstripe (now available on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and GoodBarry. The rest have names like Moodle, Pligg, Triggit, Jogango and Weebly which just make me feel old . And we’ve never implemented any of these for a client, excluding simple blogs. So that is 0 / 50, or 0%. Things are going from bad to worse. Had a look at the 52 More Content Management Systems from the same source. Got a bit better there. Heard of maybe 20, and actually implemented three (Alfresco, eZ Publish and LifeRay).

I needed a more recent list, I think. Found 10 Promising Content Management Systems by Jacob Gube. Heard of 5, implemented 0. It’s getting desparate.

Fortunately, it seems, the clients that we work with don’t play in this space either. Just to reassure myself, I re-checked the list in my bible (that’s CMS Watch). Still good there. Of the 42 vendors covered, I’ve dealt with about 70% of them, and been on projects with about 50% of them.

Which brings me to my point. There are two worlds out there, in which the term CMS means something different. The Big Wide World, and My World.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Looking at it from the other side, it seems difficult for a product that is Java or Microsoft to make it into the Big Wide World. There are very few good open source Microsoft (which I don’t find surprising) and Java (which I do) CMS systems. The open source community has embraced the scripting languages. If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.

In my head, the two worlds are still quite far apart. My “web generation” is extremely uncomfortable even calling WordPress a Content Management System. But the scary thing is that I suspect that I’m probably completely wrong on this. The two worlds might collide sooner than I think. Or maybe they have already and I just didn’t see it happen.

P.S. Here are two great posts that highlight various super cool Twitter visualisers:

• 6 Unique Twitter Visualizations by Ben Parr
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by Nathan Yau (a year old but still cool)

P.P.S. The Open Source CMS Market Survey by Ric Shreves gives a really good overview of the Open Source CMS market. I wish I’d read that before I wrote this blog entry.

Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken
- EVERYTHING IS BROKEN

Well, the dawn of IE8 is upon us. My favourite feature has got to be “Automatic Crash Recovery” or ACR. It sounds pretty scary. Will I even know it crashed? Will it ask me to send an error report? Okay, okay, it actually is going to be a useful feature. But I’d still prefer it if it didn’t crash.

To be honest, I’ve got no idea just how bad it is going to be, but a Twitter search for “IE8 broken” is starting to return results. We have done some testing against our sites on the beta versions, and maybe things won’t be too catastrophic. Things will break, but hopefully only little cracks. It isn’t going to be fun for the front end developers who have yet another browser against which to test, but it doesn’t look like the world will end. Someone has reported this it breaks WordPress, which I don’t think I believe. And as I write this, Twitter is over capacity and dead again. IE8′s fault perhaps?

As for me, I’ve turned into a bit of a coward since I became an early adopter of Vista. That wasn’t fun, so I’m in no hurry to install IE8 until the blogosphere decides it works properly. My plan for the next few weeks is to install this toolkit to ensure I don’t get auto updated. grab some canned food and a fridge full of beer, and hide in the basement until the smoke clears.

P.S. If you want to read an article that actually has a lot of useful insights into IE8, I would suggest CMSWire’s IE8 8 Released, Already Obsolete?