I have been working as project manager to help build a website for a local school. There have been various difficulties, not least the obsession by some to send any if not all content in word documents.

Your in the supermarket you buy some stuff, it goes in a bag….but hang on, the bag cost 5p. Hmmm maybe I won’t take that bag after all. I think microsoft need to levy a similar charge when people reach for the word icon. They should probably be charged a £1 when using the medium exculsively for pictures… Just to cover network costs.

But why this obsession. Word files are no different to standard files. Why can’t the individual Jpg or gif be attached to an email. There must be ecameras, probably Kodak easyshare ones, that take pictures directly into word? Or perhaps on some PCs, notably those bought at supermarkets, Word is the default operating system. Fuck windows… All you need is the ability to make things bold, change text to comic sans ms and do a word count every 10 mins or so.

Sending pictures aside, surely when sending an email you write hello. Seems sensible to throw the rest of the content in there. The internet is not some sprawling word document tied together by dodgy tabs and misaligned paragraphs.

Anyway I have most of the content now but have all sorts of ideas to incorporate this habit into perhaps a key feature of the site. I could design the site entirely in Word and link the main URL to it so that the download starts straight away. It would time out half way through because of the file size exceeding the browsers buffer.

At some point some training will be necessary. I fear that the concept of a complex CMS may be too much. Today I connected excel directly to a mySQL database through ODBC. If the same could be done in Word to CMSmadesimple then I think they would be sorted. In fact, what started as a ridiculous post may have some merit after all.

Started working to integrate Brightcove video players with a third party ad agency today. Should be done pretty quickly so there will probably be few points of interest for me to bang on about here. Still, this kind of thing is relatively new so any problems I encounter are probably worth documenting.

The Brightcove tool is pretty impressive and has a slick flash interface, but is let down a little because it is not that flexible. Not to matter though… A few clicks here and there and I should have some ads popping up where people least expect them to.

The original system was set up by me before christmas by writing a 3rd party ad translator to integrate ads. This tool is still relatively new so not all ad providers have integrated their systems with Brightcove and so you need to work with the Brightcove API to get things working. The process was a little complicated and my hopes that things would just work were not realised. The silver bullet in this case was to use Adobe Flex builder instead of Flash to compile the actionscript SWF file. Once I did this, all worked perfectly. Another issue was getting crossdomain.xml files in place on both the client and 3rd party sytems. Flash is none too forgiving when running scripts between different places but it does not always visibly complain either. Needless to say, 3 months on and ads are still not getting served. Not great but a perfect opportunity to change provider and monetise some of these videos.

UPDATE
Got ads working pretty easily thanks to Acudeo’s tight integration with Brightcove. For some reason though, the ads fail in IE6… But who uses that browser now anyway, well, only all the people who are most likely to be idiotic enough to click on the ads in the first place probably. Fix due soon I hope.

A collage of file transfer hell

Today I had the pleasure of getting an 15GB image of RedHat with Oracle UCM installed up and running on one of the development boxes we have in a data centre, deep in the guts of the building. It should be a relatively easy task, only I do not have access to the data centre and so have to send files and operate it remotely. It is quite ridiculous the steps that have to be taken to get even close to getting this up and running.

To get at the image, I needed to install VMWare 1.08. I tried with the latest version 2, but it failed due to various windows server 2003 bugs. It kept saying “The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation”. Very annoying. Despite having over 1Gb of free space, I couldn’t seem to get the installer going.

But to even get to the point of actually installing stuff I had to get files there. This is probably the single most irritating thing to sort out. Accessing machines you cannot see is laced with trouble. I even installed Apache on my local machine due to lack of ping traffic to the remote server and tried to download from mine own PC having logged in remotely. To no avail.

I installed DownThemAll download manager extension in Firefox to get an earlier version of VMWare, since their website would never let me download more than about 1MB, then spent the next 3-4 hours transferring the image over the network. Needless to say, this did not work. Multiple GB image files are unhelpful to say the least.

Once I got the images over to the server, getting VMWare to load them was pretty simple really. I just pointed it at the .vmx/.vmdk files and it started booting up. One hiccup was logging in to the system once it booted up. I tried various different things, but luckily found that both the username and password was “oracle”.

Once in there wasn’t much to look at. I will look at the installation of UCM itself another day.

SEO is now a critical requirement for any website. Without consideration for SEO, a site cannot expect to compete for vital search traffic. While important for any webmaster, SEO is also a minefield of information, some good and some bad. Not to mention that the things you need to know are hardly ever all in one place.

The following is a list of the 60 key things you should consider. Most are built into any modern content management tool, but some are not. Any SEO consultant will only go through a list much like this one and investigate to what extent your site meets these obligations, there is no other mystery to it. Read more…

While working on a big media portal, I redesigned and added functionality to their content management system. This was a big achievement that really transformed the way the editors were able to publish content and so I was inspired to show the client what I had been built in a special presentation where  built the whole system out of cardboard. The highlights of this are above, and the whole presentation is at the end of this post. Read more…

Drupal Release Information

Today I installed the Google Analytics module for Drupal. For those who don’t know, Drupal is a powerful open source content management platform used by a number of big companies including MTV, Sony and Amnesty International.

I have not had much interaction with it so far, although hope to post more information once I learn more. Basically the module automatically adds a settings pane into the Drupal admin interface that allows you to configure Google Analytics on your site without creating a custom module or adding in the tracking code manually.

So what else does it do that’s worth caring about?

• Adjust which users you track, ie ignore admin users, rogues and other unsavouries
• Set up which pages you do not want to track
• Add in your custom segmentation without resorting to manually adding the code
• Plus a whole host of other buzzers, switches and lumps to further stretch your implementation

This is not the only example of a content management/publishing system giving you an easy way to install Google Analytics code.

• Drupal module
• Wordpress plugin
• Joomla extension

All in all, if you happen to have a website powered by Drupal, then you may as well turn this on and start mucking about with motion charts or something.