Permissions and an edit link.

All too often we think of wikis as some special breed of software that’s completely different to CMS. In reality any good CMS should be able to be a wiki simply by opening up the permissions, removing the workflow and adding an “Edit this page” link when viewing the site. The problem is, most CMS implementations spend all their time focussing on locking things down and adding 10 stage workflows. It’s no wonder user adoption is such a problem, no one has the required permission to do anything!

As part of a very good series on sustainable software, Gianugo Rabellino writes:

The market couldn’t care less about your developers’ kids in need of new sneakers or your VC craving about his next Lambo: the argument that someone has to pay for software development is one of the biggest straw man of Open Source – the market pays for value, and if you build very little, guess what, you won’t get more than peanuts. This isn’t just limited to Open Source software or even software in general. Far too often people make the mistake of thinking that company expenses justify the price of goods and it’s simply not the case. Value to the consumer decides what something is worth and if that happens to be below the cost of manufacture that’s the company’s problem, not the consumer’s. If that means the company stops making the product, consumer’s won’t care because they’ve already decided to go without.

Dear lazyweb (actually, just more intelligent web, I’ve done a lot of searching on this already…),

I have a nice install of WebSphere Application Server and IBM Portal 6.0.1.3 up and running with the WCM component configured. This is great, really happy.

I’d like to add Quickr (later also Connections and maybe even Sametime) but all the Quickr installs I can find want to deploy a second instance of WAS which isn’t ideal. Is it possible to just add Quickr to an existing install or is it possible to install it separately and move it into an existing install?

Since the search function for Apple’s mailing lists is pretty much useless, I’m making a note of the Reading PICT Images thread which contains numerous options for rendering PICT images in Java on OS X.

James Robertson:

Having a catchy and memorable intranet name is a great way of promoting the intranet.

A name can help build an identity, even give the intranet a personality, removing that ‘techy’ edge. This is useful when trying to build staff awareness and engagement with a new or relaunched intranet.

It is an opportunity to leverage off the organisation’s brand or simply to differentiate the intranet from the organisation’s internet site.

So here’s a surprise – FireFox 3.0.1 can’t handle RSS/Atom feeds that have a port number in the URL. The problem stems from the fact that it uses a custom feed: protocol instead of just working off of the mime-type of the content.  So if you visit http://www.example.com:10038/ and it provides an RSS autodiscovery link that points to /feed/, FireFox will try to go to feed:http//www.example.com:10038/feed/.  Note the missing colon after http.

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

I’ve always liked the Atom spec. It’s neat and tidy with strict rules about what’s valid and what’s not with all those rough corners and incompatibilities of RSS sorted out (well, mostly). If I run into one of the silly sites that offer both RSS and Atom I pick Atom just because it feels right even though both would work perfectly well for me. So it came as quite a surprise to me to discover a major weakness in the Atom spec – it’s a right pain to generate. Let me explain…

Working in the world of editors there are a range of blog posts that float back up to the surface every so often, generally because they discuss an age old concern that just keeps resurfacing.  Recently a post from Moxiecode resurfaced complaining about the lack of focus on editing support in browsers. There’s been a few such posts in the past that I’ve seen and while the world of contenteditable support has definitely improved lately, it’s still one of the weakest areas of modern browsers.

For those who are interested, I’ve put together the collection of links that I found on getting MathML to render in browsers on LiveWorks! I’m a little unsure about the status of Safari and Opera so if anyone familiar with MathML in those browser could provide any info that would be greatly appreciated.

Also, as a bonus tip that I’ve picked up while researching XHTML modes in browsers, if you save a file with a .xhtml extension (or .xhtm or even .xht I think) browsers will actually use their XML parser to read and render the file. Much simpler than reconfiguring your web server to send the right mime type if you’re just testing stuff. Web servers with up to date extension to mime type mappings will also serve the file as application/xhtml+xml which is handy if you are serving static files too.

Sylvain Wallez:

If your application uses java.net.URL, and chances it does are very high, and you are using Sun’s JVM (since 1.4.2), you should set the sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout and sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout system properties to a reasonable value. Otherwise, if a remote site hangs, your application or server will also hang. Useful to know…

A couple of years back I went on a crusade against manual deployment of pretty much everything in Ephox. It was originally driven by a desire to “dog food” our products so we needed to automatically deploy each nightly build to our internal systems. From there it went out to automatic releases (still problematic due to a dodgy FTP server at our hosting provider) and got a fancy webapp front end that let you pick which version to deploy.