Status-Q

I’ve spent most of the weekend looking at Content Management Systems. Not necessarily my first recommendation for a fun weekend, but it had to be done.

I was after an Open Source one, and there’s plenty of choice. Some are primarily oriented towards news-type sites, such as PostNuke and Slash. Others deal more with the idea of a published set of pages, and control access to them, editing, finding your way around etc. The best known at the moment seem to be OpenCMS, Mambo, Plone (base on Zope), ezPublish and Midgard. That’s the sort I needed and yes, I’ve installed and experimented with most of them, except Midgard, which looked good but whose installation instructions ran to rather too many pages.

But the one I’ve been most impressed with and I think am most likely to use is the less well-known Typo3. If you have MySQL & PHP this is pretty easy to install, but incredibly powerful. It won’t give instant results in the way some of the others might, but it has a great deal going for it, if you take the time to read the very substantial documentation. It is remarkable that such a competent piece of Open Source software is so little known. It’s also unusual in being so well documented! Recommended.

Anyway, I must get back to the 120-page ‘Quick Start Guide’ before I get down to the serious stuff…

[Original Link] Ha! Well, John may have a mini iPod, but if he wants a cup of coffee to drink while listening to it, I bet he can’t make it as easily as I can!

[Original Link] John Naughton’s turning up the heat on our competition by getting an iPod Mini. It reminds me of a friend who said something like, “Mobile phones are the only things where men argue about whose is the smallest…”

[Original Link] About a year ago, I wrote here that LaunchBar was ‘my current favourite utility’. A year on, and it still is. It’s not the most visible bit of software on my machine, and I probably only use it a couple of times a day, but it’s the thing I miss first when I use a Mac which doesn’t have it installed. It works the way my brain works, requires minimal configuration and stays out of the way when not needed. Still recommended a year on…

[Original Link] Another gem from John Naughton’s weblog.

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LinkedIn is a service designed to help you find contacts, recruits etc. You can invite people you know to be part of your ‘network’ of referrers, and you can then search for people based on particular criteria. It’ll tell you how many degrees of separation there are between you. You can only actually make contact with the people if those in the chain between you agree to forward your request. When the system gets past beta, you may need to make a small payment to LinkedIn as well.

This has been an obvious potential use of the Net ever since the whole ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ thing – see the Columbia SmallWorld project, for example, but this is an intriguing commercial implementation of the concept.

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To follow on from my post of a few days ago, I’ve now written a fairly substantial document using NeoOffice/J on my Mac, and it’s been completely stable, certainly more so than Microsoft Word, which has taken to crashing rather regularly for me. Maybe Word is just sulking?

Printing under NeoOffice seems to be phenomenally slow sometimes, but otherwise I’m very happy with it. I’ve realised that, these days, documents I’ve written become PDFs to be emailed more often than they become pieces of paper.

[Original Link] Is this the Swiss Army Knife for solid-state digital media?