My Archives: February 2001
Friday, February 2, 2001
... when James mailed me this article about Lazy Software and the "associative model of data". Have grabbed PDF for train reading.
Posted by yoz @ 03:40 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
... that you don't work for KPMG: The KPMG Theme Song.
Posted by yoz @ 03:29 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Alba glows bright green when illuminated with a certain type of light. Bloody hell.
Posted by yoz @ 02:41 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Despite what I wrote yesterday, I haven't given up on the idea that there may be a third-party CMS that fits our needs. EPRISE Participant Server boats major integration capabilities along with personalisation, but a lot of it seems to depend on the system running as app server. That's at first glance, anyway. There's also the question of getting its own repository out of the way. But the diagram shown in one of their demos looked quite promising - it was a three-tier one like mine from yesterday, but showed integration with other systems at all layers. (The demos use this nifty ActiveX control that has Eprise's rather dull VP of something talking to you while you can see what's on his screen, with a transcript on the side. The nifty aspect is that it's very easy to skip around.)
Posted by yoz @ 02:36 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Massive US hosting company Conxion have just announced new hosting centres in London, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Posted by yoz @ 01:42 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Webvan is probably my favourite e-commerce site. It's a grocery home-delivery service, and I used it several times when I was living in San Francisco. The UI is beautifully done, with many lovely features that show a lot of thought in the design. (I still have an account, if anyone wants a demo - just let me know)
Posted by yoz @ 12:57 AM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
... from various O'Reilly sites: Hans's Top Ten JSP Tips are quite varied and detailed. Advanced Features Of JSP Tag Libraries also looks good. (As you can tell, I haven't read them in depth yet)
Posted by yoz @ 12:10 AM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Posted by yoz @ 10:38 AM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Thursday, February 1, 2001
Looking at our requirements, it seemed to me initially that the best thing to do was group catalogue, conventional web content and templates all together under the banner content, basically meaning anything that we want to give the client (client being the customer company - we need a proper glossary!) the ability to change without having to involve us too much. With this definition of content in mind, the next challenge was to find a suitable existing CMS to deal with it all. However, recently I've realised that this might not be the best approach, and here I outline my thinking. [more]
Posted by yoz @ 03:34 PM GMT [Link] [1 Comment]
First company on that Gartner report are Aspect Development. I typed in www.aspect.com and got a completely different company, but fortunately they seem to be more relevant. They specialise in e-CRM, and have an impressive product list. The worry I have is that tools like their DataMart mining tool would compare badly against products from companies like WhiteLight, who seem more focused on that, but the surrounding toys look cool.
(Incidentally, here's Aspect Development. Much more of a service to do with logistics and supply chain management, with a large existing catalogue content offering)
Posted by yoz @ 03:01 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Bearing in mind that the Sparza CMS may be used more for catalogue management than other content management ("other" being boilerplate text, furniture, templates, other stuff like that) I'm looking at catalogue management tools, which is quite a new area for me since I come from a less e-commerce-based content background. First useful find has been
this Gartner report, which list some of the systems in the market. A lot of them seem to be content/catalogue providers rather than toolmakers, and as for the toolmakers, it's the usual three-hours-wading-through-the-website-trying-to-work-out-what-the-product-actually-does. Ung.Posted by yoz @ 02:14 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
TransGaming have added some fab DirectX support for WINE, yay.
Posted by yoz @ 12:02 AM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
Wednesday, January 31, 2001
See this description of their new commerce architecture. Win2K is a lot more stable than NT 4, and .NET has a lot of good points too. Bet it's lock-in city as usual, though.
Posted by yoz @ 05:47 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
OpenAdaptor is a bunch of Java adapter modules for "Enterprise Application Integration". On the about page they contrast their approach with message-oriented middleware, though presumably you could use both methods together quite effectively. Open source again, this time by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a pretty damn big bank. I promise to try and post at least one non-open-source thing today before I leave.
Posted by yoz @ 05:34 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
I was having a chat with Robin (Bright Station bloke who's been hotdesking in front of me) about WebTrends which is a logfile analyser I was using at h2g2 for stats. It's a bit pricey and not terribly flexible, but it does do pretty reports. Anyway, someone asked about a log prettifier for Analog, which is an open-source log analysis program, and I remembered Report Magic for Analog, which is shaping up to be a pretty good free alternative to WebTrends, and probably more flexible too. Doesn't currently do session/clickstream analysis, though.
Posted by yoz @ 05:21 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]
The ArsDigita Community System is very intriguing, for all kinds of reasons. It's a combination of several applications in one, not just community (though that's how it started). It's written by Phil Greenspun, who's a bit of a geek god - check out ArsDigita Systems Journal for his writings. ACS itself is written in TCL but there's now a pure Java port. It's designed in a nice modular way, and there have been loads of extensions and modules contributed. It's all open source, too.
Posted by yoz @ 05:14 PM GMT [Link] [No Comments]