• Organizing Wordcamp Twin Cities 2009
• Converting rocking HTML Designs into rocking WordPress Templates
• WordPress Overview for Beginners
• WordPress as a CMS

Details:

We have a thriving interactive community that presumably should be interested in things WordPress. Any takers?

Email jmyers at visi dot com or @jaymyers

Granted, it does appear that the open source CMS market has matured nicely. There’s definitely a short list of quality products spanning a variety of back-end technologies to pick from. But in the commercial/enterprise realm, it still seems to be business as usual.

We have to shortlist our options (unfortunately) down to a Microsoft-centric product (we need a .net solution). Of the 4 or 5 commercial apps I’m curious about, a majority of them:

1. Have no indication of pricing what-so-ever on their web sites
2. Reply to any email with approximately 8mbs of PDF brochure attachments

Now, granted, I suppose the industry is still pretty much run by CMS sales folks selling shiny brochures to upper management but I am bummed that business model hasn’t changed in the past 5 years. More power to the Open Source folks, I guess…

The first is a quick “focus group” with Fred Beecher to help him gather some info to report back to the 2007 IASummit committee–it’s your chance to help shape next year’s conference.

The second is a discussion topic proposed by Lynn Leitte:
Content Management Systems: uses, functionalities, good/bad/ugly, etc.

So, on with the MNBits…

script.aculo.us

In addition to getting me thinking about having to now get my own ‘ious’ URL, this site is a repository of some truly amazing javascript libraries. Take a look at the drag-and-drop demo. While I haven’t had a chance to play with these enough to see if there are any accessibility issues, they do look promising for a variety of tricky interface needs. Also, thse libraries will be built into the next release of Ruby on Rails.

Microformats.org

Microformats.org is a community web site put together for the sharing of simple, open data formats built upon existing web standards.

StructuredBlogging.org

Structured Blogging is a site that is focused on bringing more structural markup to blogging…namely via WordPress. One could certainly argue that this may be overkill for blogging, but it is nice to see more thought put towards storing content in a structured manner. My biggest gripe in looking at umpteen Content Management Systems last year was the total lack of structured content support. Whenever I’d ask about it, I’d get a stock answer of ‘Oh, sure…we have a press release module’. Ugh.

So, most folks may have no need for structured markup on their blogs, but many may. The simple explanation used on the site is:

Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that – formatting blog entries around their content.

I went through a long list, and finally went with XStandard. It is by far the best option out there if you are concerned about creating HTML that is valid, accessible, and semantically rich. It does suffer from one major drawback, though: it’s an activeX control. They decided to go this route (rightfully so, IMHO) to get around the inconsistencies between IE’s and Moz’s built in abilities to edit text in a textarea. Most (all?) of the javascript based systems depend on the these built in abilities, which leaves you with inconsistent markup depending on which browser you are using.

So, it was a bummer, but we’re IE-based here anyways, so we went with it. Fortunately, this seems ot be a very progressive company, and within a few months, they had a working Firefox version ready as well. And now, the big news: An OSX version is on its way…hopefully ready for beta by Summer.

Sproutliner

Sproutliner is a free web-based to-do list similiar to 37Sig’s Ta-Da List. Ta-Da list excels in simplicity. Sproutliner sticks with that, but it requires a learning curve to reach it (is that an oxymoron?). It also uses XMLHttpRequest/Ajax for creating it’s interface. What it does differently is how you interact with the interface. It’s a sparse page, and pretty much everything is done with the keyboard. Hardly intuitive at first, but rather nice once you get used to it. The ‘click text and just edit’ it concept works wonderfully as well. Lot’s of cons to the interface, of course, but it’s certainly a new way to look at interacting with the page and definitely worth a look-see.

Colorcombos

Colorcombos is a site that let’s you create, save, and ‘borrow’ color pallets. A great way to quickly experiment with some color concepts for a web site. Related: Color Matters, Color Blender, Color Whore, Defense Mechanism, Color SynthAxis.

De.lirio.us

I’m a little late on this one. De.lirio.us is an open source clone of De.licio.us that launched 2 weeks ago. So what? Well, good question. Apparently, that’s been a debate that’s been going on for the past couple weeks. Will it splinter users? Is it a good backup? I’m not sure I care. I do feel like I should be using one of the two, though, but have found Firefox’s built in ‘simple tagging’ to really be all I need at this point. De.lirio.us’s ability to run locally has some potential. Related: The author of de.lerio.us. Spurl.net – another clone that also looks like a contender.

Odd and Ends…

Delocator is an independant coffee shop search engine. Ann ‘facts be damned’ Coulter to come to St. Paul. Pie security on high alert. More updates on St. Paul’s attempt at going wirless. Squarespace is a hosted CMS system that looks promising.

A few months back, phpiCalendar stopped spitting things to the website. When I went to their site to get more information, I found this message:

“phpicalendar site is willingly offline until further notice”

Not a good sign.

WordPress, running weblog side of MNteractive, has a couple things I want the calendar to have:

• Multiple Authors
• RSS feeds

It didn’t create an iCal file, so I wrote a plug-in. I’m pleased to announce the MNteractive calendar is now running WP-iCal v.0.9.5.

If you want to keep up with Twin Cities’ design-related events, you now have 3 options:

• Web Browser
• RSS
• iCal

To add items to the calendar:

• If you’re a MNteractive author, just check ‘Calendar’ in the category list and fill out the event’s location and times when you write the post.
• If not, simply email me the event information

The key points to take from it are that an organization must first focus on its content before it even attempts to figure out how to manage it. And, once that task is completed, it may make the most sense to start small with a trial run of a small CMS tool to get some more insight into how things work. Too many organizations dive into a highly inflexible, complicated CMS tool that is more often than not a hindrance to managing content properly only to suffer through it since the money was spent.

As a follow up to that article, check out Alt Tags more recent post on Accessibility and Content Authors. The post mirrors my current experience at a government organization. We all know we need more content out on our web site. We all know that that content needs to be accessible. Yet, inevitably, most of the content still remains is Word or PDF files…which are rarely built with accessibility in mind. No specific solution proposed, but it’s an issue that warrants more exposure.

Websites are an excellent marketing tool. Like any tool, they need to be used correctly. To do so, they need to build a relationship between the company and it’s customers.

This is a nice way to say what Microsoft’s resident weblogger Robert Scoble said:

“You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.”

Why are weblogs addictive and marketing sites not? Authenticity, reality. and relationships.

It still surprises me how many websites aren’t weblogs. There are mechanisms with most weblog systems you get the following for free:

• Easy to maintain content management system
• RSS feeds
• Categories and sections
• Searching
• Permalinks
• Commenting systems
• and they’re Google-friendly

This means, these things don’t need to be build from scratch and it’s a fertile ground to build a relationship with customers.

Maybe like the old Tootsie Roll commercial, everything looks like a weblog to me. Then again, maybe weblogs are the most mature, effective mechanism to communicate news quickly to everyone that cares.

UPDATE: Dave Winer says not having RSS is like not having business cards. I completely agree. Considering the high percentage of my correspondance is through email, I’m frequently well into a working relationship before there’s an opportunity to exchange business cards.

The first thing I do before I meet someone, Google them. If a website with an RSS feed doesn’t come up, or worse – they can’t be found – I always hesitate.

Stowe Boyd over at Cornate’s Get Real blog, confirms my hesitation in his More Egosurfing post:

“…Google Juice is about people ‘voting’ on your relevance to the issues you have decided to wrestle with, and represents the degree to which you’d be missed if you stopped blogging.”

“…as an indicator of the karma that bloggers have built up, by crafting posts that make people think, link, and comment, Google Juice means something important.”