Raible Designs

PowerPoint 2.0

From beyond bullets:

Larry Lessig has been called a PowerPoint virtuoso, and his approach recently inspired Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identify, to use a similar film-inspired approach in his recent presentation, "Identity 2.0" at a conference called OSCON 2005.

You can view his presentation at this link.

It's very creative, visually interesting, and makes great use of visual humor. You're sure to be inspired to try some of the techniques he used on your own storyboards; and it's a good example of a completely bullet-free presentation.

Woah. I'm blown away. This is a great example of what your presentations can be. To be honest, this looks very hard to do. You basically have to know what every word you're going to say is, and you have to have a new slide for every 2-3 words. It sure would be fun to deliver this kind of presentation.

Gmail's New Auto-Save Feature

I dig the new auto-save feature in Gmail. It seems to fire off about every 20 seconds and I can already tell it's going to be a life saver. This is something we need desparately in Roller. There's nothing more frustrating than having your browser crash when you're writing a long post. Of course, the easy solution to that problem to that problem is to use an offline editor to author the post. However, I much prefer using my web browser.

Trackback Spam

Roller seems to have done a pretty good job of suppressing comment spammers. The math question seems to trip up automated scripts and I only get about 1 or 2 spam comments per month. At least, I only see 1 or 2 per month - many get marked as spam and just sit in the database - never to be displayed. However, recently I've started to notice a lot of Trackback spam.

I dive into my "comment" table a few times a week to format comments so they look like their author intended them to look (I never alter wording). In the past couple of weeks, I've noticed a buttload of spam trackbacks (up to 10-20 per day). Here is an example. How do we go about stopping trackback spam? I'm guessing the easiest way is to disable trackbacks.

The Busy Season Begins

I never thought the 4th Quarter would be the busy season, but it is for me this year. Tomorrow marks the beginning and it won't end until after The Spring Experience is over. My current schedule is that I'll only be in Denver 2 weeks in the next 2 1/2 months! Of course, I'll be home on the weekends, but I'll be on the road the rest of that time. Most of the travel is for conferences, but a few weeks is for clients, as well as a couple weeks of remote work/vacation. I'll be traveling to Florida (twice), Keystone (Colorado), San Francisco and New Jersey.

In that same time span, I'll be speaking 15 times. 2 times at Java in Action next week, 6 times at the Colorado Software Summit (in two weeks), twice at Denver's No Fluff, at the Gator and Orlando JUGs in November/December, and 3 times at The Spring Experience. Phew! That's a lot of talking. Conferences are fun though, especially since you only have to really work for the hour or two while you're talking.

The last part of the whole roadtrip should be a really good time. We're heading down to West Palm Beach (Florida) for Thanksgiving and staying for 3 weeks. I'll be working remotely, swimming in Julie's Mom's pool, speaking at the JUGs and ending it all at the Spring conference.

If you're going to any of these shows, let me know. I'm always up for a beer.

New Laptop

When I saw Russell's Why I Might Switch Back... post a couple of weeks ago, I found myself wanting to write a response. My response was going to be I completely agree and I was going to bitch about how slow my PowerBook is (once again). Then, later that day, I was doing something with iPhoto and I thought - I really do like OS X. It's the Mac hardware that I don't like. And it's not the look of the hardware (I love that), it's the fricken speed!! Most PowerBook users I know don't switch b/w computers a whole lot - whereas I spend 50% of my time on a fast Windows desktop. When I go from something that's so fast to something so slow, it's quite painful.

Last week, I started working with a new client - developing an application with Spring, Hibernate, WebLogic and Eclipse. Installing WebLogic on OS X was pretty easy, thanks to this article. Even remote debugging with Eclipse was pretty easy to setup. However, when I started running WebLogic locally and trying to debug it with Eclipse, it was extremely frustrating. I've never seen the spinning beach ball so much in one day. When other developers would watch me work, it was embarrassing how slow my computer was. And it's not like I had a whole lot running: Mail, Safari, Eclipse, WebLogic and iTerm.

Over the past couple of months, I've started debating if my next laptop should be a PC. It's not like I hate the Mac or don't like my PowerBook - but Java development on a Mac is far slower than on a PC equivalent. The problem is that I really like the PowerBook's form-factor. I'm so comfortable using the keyboard, right-clicking with the Control key, and all that jazz - that I'd probably have a hard time adjusting. I realize that a lot of my PowerBook bitching might seem unfair - as I'm often comparing a Desktop to a Laptop.

What I'd really like is two laptops: a PowerBook for doing all non-Java stuff and a PC for doing Java stuff.

My dreams came last Friday when my client handed me a brand new Dell Latitude D610. It's got Windows 2000, a 1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM. To be honest, I expected it'd have a lot bigger processor. However, the fact that it doesn't makes it easier for me to show you how fricken slow my PowerBook is.

I used AppFuse for this test and ran ant clean war 3 times on each. I had ANT_OPTS set to -Xmx256m, JAVA_OPTS set to -Xmx512m and I'm using the latest 1.4.2 JDK available for each respective platform. It's possible my PowerBook suffers from some OS Rot, but it's still amazing how much faster the Windows laptop is.

• PowerBook: 58.3 seconds
• Latitude: 17.3 seconds

Holy ass-kicking batman!

My PowerBook has a 1.33 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM. It'd be interesting to do the see the numbers for a PowerBook with a 1.67 GHz processor. Here's to hoping OS X with a 1.6 GHz Intel processor can keep up with Windows for Java development.

Drupal's Blogging Engine vs. Roller

Now that we're basing the next Virtuas' website on Drupal, we have to make a decision about which blogging engine to use. Is anyone out there using Drupal for blogging? Does it support multi-author blogs? I'd much rather use Roller for our blogging engine. However, if we have two different engines powering our website - there won't be a way to search both sites. We can make http://virtuas.com/blog look just like http://virtuas.com, but if searching one doesn't grab results from the other - it seems like it might not be worth it. Anyone know of a way to integrate Drupal's search index with Roller's?

Denver Tech Meetup on October 13th

From Stephen O'Grady:

For the Colorado residents in the audience, I'm pleased to inform you that I've finally scheduled the first of what will hopefully be many Denver Tech Meetups. The theory behind this is simple: there are meetups for just about every possible group out there, be it a company, database, development language or operating system, but nothing that I'm aware of that that brings folks from all of those different areas together, in one place. This is my attempt to rectify that particular problem, while having a few beers in the process.

If you'd like to attend, drop your email in a comment and I'll shoot over the Evite (you can join Larkin in laughing at me for using one of those), but otherwise it's Thursday, October the 13th, 6:30 PM at the Wazee Supper Club.

Bruce and I talked to Stephen about this a few months back. It's great to see the idea coming to life. Well done Stephen! I especially like the part about skipping the meeting and going directly to beers.

In related news, the Great American Beer Festival is in town this weekend. We're going tonight. 1,669 beers on tap is too good to pass up...

How do we get good designs for the CSS Framework?

I love the idea of Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework. It's so simple: name the elements in your XHTML with a specific set of names, and then create your CSS to match that. The only problem with this framework is I haven't seen any good-looking designs on top of it. For good-looking design examples, see the CSS Zen Garden or Open Source Web Design.

While the CSS Zen Garden is nice, most of the designs are not useable for web applications. They're more of a showcase of what CSS can do, and often contain too many images for a real-world application or website. The designs from oswd.org, on the other hand, are perfect for web applications. However, the underlying HTML is different for each design.

So how do we marry the two? Maybe we should lobby some designers at oswd.org to use the CSS Framework for their designs? I think this would be a great asset to many communities - imagine what you could do with your Drupal theme if you didn't have to change your template files (only CSS). That'd be pretty cool.

Open Source CMS Evaluation - Part III: Implementation

In my last post, I narrowed my open source CMS candidates down to Joomla and Drupal. I was hoping to have a choice made by Monday morning, implement the design in the morning, and populate the content in the afternoon. Two days later and I'm now where I was hoping to be on Monday morning. I've spent the last two days implementing both Joomla and Drupal. Monday, I spent most of the day with Joomla. While it was easy to apply my own theme, I became very discouraged when I discovered I didn't have full control over the HTML markup produced. All of the content I produced was wrapped with a <table> - and from what I could tell, it was impossible for me to change that w/o hacking Joomla's code.

Based on that discovery, as well as the overwhelming number of pro-Drupal comments I received, I moved on to implementing Drupal. Monday night and yesterday were spent with Drupal. It's been extremely frustrating, but mostly because of all the CSS I had to write. The major problem with Drupal is the admin interface uses the same template as the reader interface. I did find a nice way to use an existing theme for the admin, and our own for the reader - but decided not to use it because it would give content authors the wrong impression of what their stuff looks like.

The majority of the time I've spent with Drupal has been modifying templates and installing modules. For the most part, Drupal doesn't come with everything you might need. I found the CivicSpace download to be much more complete with modules I needed. In addition, it has an installer which makes things a bit easier to setup for a web designer. I'm currently using the Article module, which works quite well, but I wish I could create multiple blocks for different categories (taxomies). Instead, I had to hack up my own block using some SQL to select all the "news" content types (for a Recent News block).

My biggest problem with Drupal continues to be my lack of knowledge. Luckily, there's a plethora of information out there and a lot of people are using it. I've been able to use the Drupal Forums as well as Google to solve most of my issues. Now the hard part comes - I need to show it to the designer/marketing folks and teach them how to use it.

The brochure site in an hour tutorial was extremely helpful for me to get started with an About page, Contact Us page, and Press Releases. However, it says to use "books" to create pages, and I've seen others recommend "page" and "story". So which is the best one to use? Should I advocate using "page" for regular site pages, and then "story" for our articles and whitepapers? Or should we use "book page" for the main pages. I'd like to limit the number of choices if possible.

I think the major problem with using Drupal is going to be tweaking our template. Every time I see a new custom theme (like this one) I want to steal stuff. Right now, I'm using a design from oswd.org and much of the CSS from the spreadfirefox theme.

Conclusion: No CMS is perfect. You'll have to hack it on one way or another to make it fit your needs. Drupal seems to be used by many web designers w/ little to no programming skills. Most folks love it and I've received many, many positive comments about it. I've received hardly any positive comments about Joomla. Zope and Plone also seemed to inspire hatred among some users.

Lesson Learned: Listen to your readers. Other users' experience is one of the most valuable indicators of a good open source project.

Open Source CMS Evaluation - Part II: Customization

This is the third and final post in my quest to find the best open source CMS for my needs. Previous posts include Building a website with an Open Source CMS and Open Source CMS Evaluation - Part I: Installation. Based on these two posts, reader feedback, and my installation experience, the final round of candidates include Joomla, Drupal, Magnolia, OpenCms and MeshCMS. These are listed in the order that I expected the final rankings to be - just to let you know what my feelings were going into this final process.

The CMS I choose will be used to build Virtuas's website, as well as customers of Virtuas. By using a CMS to produce websites, the design is separated from the content - and the "adding content" process can be much easier for the customer. This greatly simplifies the "creating a website" process for us, and will likely save our customers a fair amount of design costs. In addition, it makes it much easier for site owner's to maintain the site after it's been published.

As for Virtuas's site, it's static right now, and we'd like to change that. We want to ability to show recent blog posts on the front page, as well as make it easy for Practice Leaders to publish articles. In addition, it should be easy for our designers to change the design (1-2 files) and for our marketing team to add press releases and update existing content. Tomorrow, I'll be presenting my choice to the rest of the team, and we hope to design and start publishing content this week. Our goal is to have a new Virtuas site up and running one week from today.

My goal today was to see how easy each CMS was to customize. In addition, I wanted to see how easy it was to publish an article, as well as to aggregate our latest RSS feed titles onto the homepage. To test the design customizability, I tried to reproduce the current Virtuas homepage. Then I published Jeff's Geronimo Article, and attempted to aggregate feeds from Maria's and Bruce's blogs. My main reason for putting the Java CMS'es lower than the PHP ones in my suspected order of finishing is because I don't they don't have the RSS Aggregation feature.

Rather than just jumping in and using each CMS in anger, I tried to start off by reading the documentation for each. My main focus was on how to customize, but I also looked for an RSS Aggregation feature and ease-of-publishing for articles. I read documentation for 15-20 minutes, then dived into creating a custom theme and adding content. I installed each CMS on my PowerBook, and used Safari and Firefox on OS X, as well as Firefox on Windows XP in some cases.

MeshCMS - I spent 40 minutes looking into MeshCMS before I knew it wasn't the one. The main problem I had with it was the upgrade process. To upgrade to a new version, they recommend that you use symlinks to your files and store them in a separate location on the file system. While this may work for some, it seems a little brittle to me. I'd rather use a solution that keeps everything stored outside of the application by default. Creating a new theme was quite easy - but there didn't seem to be any support for multiple menus (i.e. global and local navigation), nor was there any means to customize the menu template.

I did manage to blow up the whole application at one point, simply because I was missing a JSP tag in my template. Since I had this template selected for the administration as well - it hosed the whole application and spit out stack traces for each page. Luckily, renaming the template directory caused MeshCMS change to revert to the default settings and everything was fixed. The interesting thing about MeshCMS is it looks very similar to the SiteMesh+JSPWiki CMS I wrote a few weeks ago. However, mine allowed full menu creation by editing/creating wiki pages.

OpenCms - When I installed OpenCms a couple of days ago, I initially did it on Windows. Everything worked fine and after waiting 18 minutes for everything to import, I was able to browse and edit the default site. However, today was a different story. The version I installed on my Windows XP box no longer works. When I got to http://localhost:8080/opencms/, I get a directory listing with "resources" and "setup" on it. The same day I installed OpenCms on Windows, I installed it on my PowerBook. It took 38 minutes to complete, but nevertheless, it said the process worked. Today I re-ran the setup and now I have the same result as on my Windows XP box. If the setup and installation is this fragile, I'm not interested. Blame me and the fact that I'm a redneck all you like, but the Magnolia installation is still functioning just fine.

Magnolia - I spent about a half hour with Magnolia before I knew it wasn't for me. While the admin UI is impressive with all it's Ajax goodies, creating a new template is cumbersome and not designer-friendly at all. You have to create a "new node" and then a bunch of "data nodes" under that. The documentation (a QuickStart PDF) is 17 pages long and forgets to mention the "title" data node is needed before the template will show up properly as an option. Once you've created a new template in the admin UI, you have to create the template on your file system - inside the web application. This may make it difficult to upgrade if you're deploying Magnolia as a WAR. The worst part is after creating the template, you have to restart the server. WTF? That seems a bit ridiculous to me. Granted you'll likely be designing your master template in a development environment - but good luck installing Magnolia for a client and having them create a new template.

One of the most interesting things about Magnolia is most of the folks who've recommended it have highlighted that it's "built on the revolutionary Java Content Repository Standard JSR-170". While I can admire the technical merits of this effort, it doesn't necessarily make this a good product. A good product, IMHO, is easy and intuitive to use. The admin interface for Magnolia is not intuitive. I like the fact that I can right-click on a page/node/etc., but on my Mac (with Firefox and Safari), the real context menu shows up on top of the application menu after a second or two. I'm going to pass on Magnolia due to the fact that its not designer friendly, as well as the fact that templates can't be edited in the browser. It looks like something that might be very interesting for developers, but it's simply not friendly for HTML developers.

At this point, it's 10:30 p.m. on Sunday night. I need to make a decision before I go to bed tonight and I'm scheduled to meet with our designer at 7:00 a.m. to start implementing his new design. I haven't started the PHP options, and I've had a couple new ones recommended on my blog while doing this evaluation today. Mal recommended Exponent and Jacob recommended MySource Matrix.

Because I'm down to two choices (and I haven't tried to customize either one), I decided it was worth looking at both of these PHP solutions. Exponent installed easy enough, but MySource Matrix failed miserably. Joomla, Drupal and Exponent all had an easy-to-use web installer that *just worked*. MySource spit out a bunch of permissions errors (even after chmod -R 777 *) and told me I had to run .php files from the command line. Since the other options all installed easily, I decided not to continue evaluating MySource Matrix.

Exponent - I didn't spend very long looking at Exponent. At first, I didn't think it had any documentation b/c it was a bit difficult to find on their site. Maybe it's because they don't have a background set on their site and my browser defaults to gray - making the gray text difficult to read. Even w/o documentation, I was able to navigate around the default Exponent site and figure out how to edit content. It's an easy UI to use, but again I was disappointed to find the "corporate" theme doesn't have a white background. Most good web designers know to set a default background color - and it always annoys me when someone misses this step. It's possible they don't set the background on purpose - like Yahoo does.

The deal-breaker with this CMS was that I couldn't edit any files w/in my browser to change anything (all I wanted was a white background). While it's theme management and templating looks powerful - it's another file-based system where you have to configure everything and then upload it. I agree that this is likely the path that web designers will want to use to get started - but I think it's important that files can be tweaked on-the-fly. Using a good FTP tool is certainly an option, but I'd prefer theme-editing to be part of my CMS. The one thing I did like about this CMS was the clean URLs. Granted, they aren't static-looking by any means, but having a simple ?section=# seems cleaner than the multiple parameters that other systems use.

Drupal - This CMS seems to have a lot of things I want/need as first class citizens. A blog, news feed aggregation and the ability to provide pretty URLs (aliases) for more cryptic CMS-type URLs. I couldn't get the URL aliases to work, but I suspect I was doing something wrong and didn't give it enough attention. I didn't spend a whole lot of time with this CMS, but rather just browsed around the admin interface and read a bit about how to create themes. I installed the PHPTemplate engine, but never installed any themes. When I found out I couldn't edit any of the uploaded templates contents, I started to get discouraged by Drupal. One thing I found disappointing, with both Drupal and Joomla, is they seemed to hard-code my server name into many of their URLs. When I installed these applications on my PowerBook, I used "localhost" for the server name. When testing out things from my Windows box, I couldn't even login to Drupal b/c it kept redirecting me to "localhost". Joomla had a similar problem with localhost, except that it only screwed up stylesheet paths. I was still able to administer the application.

Joomla - My time with Drupal was short-lived, mainly because I was itching to start playing with Joomla - which I've heard a lot of good things about in the past week. Furthermore, it's got a really good-looking administration UI. It's the type of UI that a designer would look at and appreciate. When trying to edit pages from my Windows box - everything worked, but I couldn't save the page. No JavaScript errors or anything, there was simply no reaction. Editing pages and content from my PowerBook solved the problem. I was able to easily create a simple theme that looked like virtuas.com and upload it. The theme isn't perfect, but it was easy enough to create using the Velvet theme from Joomlashack.com as a template. The weird thing about Joomla, at least with the default install, is there's no notion of pages. Everything is some sort of news item. In the pages I created, I was also unable to remove all the authoring notation and other junk that I don't want to show. The admin UI had options to remove the stuff, but even after "applying" the changes, they still showed up in the reader view.

It's now 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning and the last three CMS's definitely didn't get the attention they deserved. Nevertheless, I think they're the best of the bunch. Not only were they much easier (and quicker) to install than the Java options, but their UIs are also good-looking and easy to use. Drupal and Joomla both seem like excellent choices. Drupal seems to be more of what I'm looking for since it has all the features I want, and allows aliasing of URLs to make it appear like a static site. However, Joomla is a lot more eye-catching and that alone makes me want to use it. Neither of these CMS'es seem to have a full-featured blogging engine, at least not one that's as good as Roller.

Conclusion: I'm going to recommend we use Joomla, and look into doing some URL Rewriting to pretty up it's URLs. I doubt there's a whole lot we can do, but I'd like to figure out a way to make them a bit more search engine friendly. Drupal seems like an excellent choice as well, but the fact that I can't edit templates from the UI kinda sucks.

Thanks for listening y'all - all your comments and feedback during this evaluation have been great.