Gadgetopia

January 14, 2017

Some consultants spend a lot of energy trying to never, ever flinch. I’ve stopped doing this.

January 11, 2017

CMS users consistently over-estimate (1) how much they need form builders, and (2) how much the tools can do.

January 4, 2017

We often try to force-fit content into physical metaphors, where it doesn’t always fit.

December 28, 2016

Two examples of updating SQL databases from a CMS.

December 22, 2016

Content management is a bundle of skills which come together to form a larger, meta-skill.

December 14, 2016

There are some interesting reasons to use a headless CMS that go beyond the “single website” model.

November 21, 2016

Reflections on what it means to really understand a CMS, down to its bones.

November 15, 2016

The book itself matters. Beyond the practicalities it offers over ebooks, the printed book carries with it intangible characteristics that we take for granted and wouldn’t miss until long after their absence.

October 17, 2016

Pushing more content than can be absorbed actually causes feelings of loss and pain.

October 12, 2016

CMS personalization tools have failed. Here’s why, and how the next wave might be different.

October 6, 2016

What you want from a contractor is investment. Ironically, the biggest impediment to that is often the parameters of the relationship itself. Some relationships are simply designed to fail.

September 13, 2016

Someone once told me that a good sales opener is: “What can I help you with?”  Force the prospect to tell you what they need. While pretty good advice, the problem when selling digital services is that a lot of people have only a vague idea of their problem. They have no idea what specific solution […]

August 15, 2016

The “page-based CMS” is not a bad thing.  We try to pretend we don’t need to think about pages anymore, but most of the time, attempts to liberate ourselves from the notion of a page is just impractical idealism. Furthermore, the page-based model doesn’t really matter that much, in the big picture. The acknowledgement of […]

August 11, 2016

After a CMS migration, there’s often a problem of URL redirection.  A lot of our work at Blend is CMS re-platforming, so we often have clients with tens of thousands of existing URLs. When they switch to a new CMS they often change URL schemes, they want to make sure all their old traffic gets […]

June 12, 2016

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a book review, but I really enjoyed this little book (disclaimer: I know two of the authors, and they sent me a copy of it to review). Here’s the key: the book is focused. It knows what it wants to do.  It is — as the title […]

June 6, 2016

True story: some development firms lie through their teeth in proposals. Shocking, I know.  But sometimes the winner of a competitive proposal process is going to be the firm that lies the most convincingly. Of course, they couch it in terms that let them sleep at night, but in the end, they either tell bald-faced lies, or they […]

June 2, 2016

What is the name for people who consume content?  We have names for people who create the content — usually “creator” or “editor” — but what do we call the people on the other side?  The people who view/read the content we create and edit? “Visitor”:  This is common, but this presumes someone is going […]

January 27, 2016

We implement content management as a practice.  After 11 years of this, we see the same two patterns over and over again: Organizations not prepared to launch a new CMS because their content is mess Organizations who do not fully use the content management systems they’ve had implemented There are a lot of reasons for […]

October 30, 2015

Every Day I Want To Quit Social Media: This one hit a bit close to home. It’s a heartfelt, emotional piece about the love-hate relationship some people have with social media. There’s absolutely an element of addiction there. I don’t find the information I’m looking for. Desperately, I click back to the tab with the […]

October 29, 2015

What Libraries Can (Still) Do:  This is a good discussion about the future of the public library, which echos things I’ve talked about here before. […] librarians will need to cherish their special talent as “stewards” while letting go of the instinct to be “collectors.” Knowledge in physical form needs to be handled carefully, preserved, […]

July 14, 2015

For the last few months, I’ve been working on a book for O’Reilly: Web Content Management: Systems, Features, and Best Practices.  It’s a reasonable distillation of everything I’ve learned about web content management in almost two decades of success and failure (hopefully more of the former than the latter…) O’Reilly has an interesting system of […]

July 9, 2015

Everything Science Knows About Reading On Screens: More proof that reading on the screen is not the same as reading on paper. But this style of reading may come at a cost—Liu noted in his study that sustained attention seems to decline when people read onscreen rather than on paper, and that people also spend […]

June 27, 2015

This is a book about fonts (or type or typefaces — I’ve learned there are subtle variations in the definitions of each, but I can’t remember what they are). The book is a series of anecdotes about fonts/types. Each chapter is short — you can read one in 3-4 minutes, but they’re all pretty entertaining. […]

June 22, 2015

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing: Interesting times: Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it. Of course, however, there are debates about what a “page” means, when it comes to ebooks. To determine a book’s page count in a way that works […]

June 22, 2015

Inside a counterfeit Facebook farm: This is the process a “Facebook Account Mill” goes through to create a new account.  I found it fascinating. She starts by entering the client’s specifications into the website Fake Name Generator, which returns a sociologically realistic identity: Ashley Nivens, 21, from Nashville, Tennessee, now a student at New York […]