This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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New Post Notifications

For years whenever I’ve made new posts on this blog I’ve sent out an email to the current Email Top Ten to let them know about the new post. That has always been a manual process for me. I’ve finally taken the time to automate it. So now when I make a post it will automatically generate those emails for me. Woo.

(Well, that is true as long as I post in the “normal” way. If I pre-publish so that a post will automatically get posted at a time in the future I have it set to just send an email to me. Same if I post something but for some reason mark it as “Closed”. Also, if I ever get the blogger API thing working again so I can post from a blogging app on my phone, it won’t send the email then either, although I think I now know how to add that… if only that functionality would work at all any more. It hasn’t since a MySQL update a few months ago.)

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile and finally did. Go me.

Now, I only need to catch up on my counting for the email top ten so that the current list of people emailed isn’t the email addresses who won it in October 2004… two of which are now invalid and always bounce. Oops.

One more note of interest… this is the first time in quite some time I’ve made a second post in a single day. I’d been sticking to the “one post a day” thing, but maybe I’ll switch that to “at least one post a day”. Of course, regardless it is only a matter of time until I get busy one day and miss a day entirely again. But that will be OK.

Posted by Abulsme -- Thursday 26 July 2007 04:30:08 UTC
Category: CMS | 2 comments

Excellent Content Management System

Oops.

The Spider of Doom
(The Daily WTF, Alex Papadimoulis)

Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn’t belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google’s very own web crawling spider. Whoops.

(via Digg)

Dumbasses.

Posted by Abulsme -- Wednesday 29 March 2006 01:41:30 UTC
Category: CMS | Leave a comment

Noguchi Filing

This is awesome. I’ve used systems very similar to this for a variety of things, but never knew it had a name, although of course it makes sense that it does. As I read this page about it, I am very tempted to use this for more things more often. I like it!

The Noguchi Filing System

New documents (envelopes) are added at the left end of the “envelope buffer,” and whenever a document is used (i.e., the envelope removed from the shelf), it is returned to the left end of the bookshelf. The result of this system is that the most recent (and frequently) used documents migrate to the left, while documents that are not used often or not used at all migrate to the right. After the system has been in use for a while, the shelf starts to look like the following. …

(via BoingBoing)

Posted by Abulsme -- Friday 14 October 2005 03:03:03 UTC
Category: CMS | Leave a comment

CMS as File System

Hey, a post related to my profession…

Content Management Systems have to a large degree been an effort to provide ways of managing and finding content that are better than simply using a shared drive on a file system. Which is great. That is definately needed.

But on the other hand people are used to their file systems. They use them every day. They are comfortable with them. A CMS with a new propriatary interface has to be learned. It is new. It is different. Some people like that. Many people do not, and will resist the change.

The product at my company tries to use “Windows Like” interfaces for some of the navigation for exactly that reason. CMSWatch notes last week that this is actually a trend:

Navigating Intranets by Folder

Perhaps heeding the old saw that Windows Explorer is everyone’s first content management system, vendors are constantly trying to make their tools more “Explorer-like.” A couple of product demos today really brought that home. First, CMS vendor Ektron […] Clearly, navigating folders is faster and more familiar to some employees than browsing or searching an Intranet website — even when the desired content is an HTML page. […] Which brings me to my second demo, of the new open-source document collaboration platform, Alfresco. Like many of its competitors, employees can mount the Alfresco repository as a shared drive and drag files into particular projects or business processes (see screen). For the enterprise, Alfresco pitches its rules engine here, but for the employee, the appeal is using good ol’ Explorer.

As I mentioned, we make our interface look like Explorer too. But it seems clear that exposing a CMS as a file system is something that is very powerful. You need the full blown CMS for lots of things. But in certain cases, just expose it… pretend to just be a drive. Then you can take advantage of a lot of other things too then that only know about drives.

The two systems mentioned, Ektron and Alfresco seem worth another look too.

As of this post I’m also adding a CMS category for the site, just as I recently did for Books, DVD and Cinema. That way if you want to look at just the stuff in these categories you can. I’ve been posting regularly enough about it, I thought it was worth seperating it out as its own category.

Posted by Abulsme -- Monday 18 July 2005 13:57:17 UTC
Category: CMS | Leave a comment