For quite a while we’ve lamented the lack of whiteboards in our office and talked about getting some in. A week or two ago Brett actually arranged it and so I’ve wound up with a lovely big whiteboard above my desk that I happily draw all over. I’ve always been a big fan of whiteboards for problem solving or brain storming sessions, even if I’m working alone. Something about the big open space and ease of erasure makes it so much better than paper.

I discovered one of our client’s company blogs1 tonight because they mentioned they’d just upgraded to EditLive! 6. Reading through the backlog I discovered they’ve found a clever way to reduce the impact of form spam that I hadn’t come across before2 – only accept the submission if it uses multipart/form-encoding not just a plain post. Like most techniques it won’t work if everyone does it but it’s another interesting way to differentiate.

When an engineer can reproduce a bug they get excited because it means they can be sure to fix it.

When a manager can reproduce a bug they get annoyed because it means they keep running into it.

This is currently the most frustrating part of the transition from engineer to manager. I have in fact submitted a patch on one occasion – it was rejected because it didn’t have tests. Sigh.

One of the challenging practices in XP is daily deployment – it requires your development team to have a very low defect rate and completely automated build and deployment tools. In an off the shelf software scenario it has the additional challenge that you can’t actually get your customers to upgrade every day.

At Ephox we’ve adhered to this practice pretty well in the past by automatically deploying builds to all our internal systems, including our corporate wiki, website CMS and even this blog. Of course, that’s still just a small subset of the kind of environments that we’re actually used in and it’s not actually getting out to real customers. To take the next logical step, we need to make those builds available to any customers who feel like checking out what’s new – maybe not every day, but between all our customers hopefully regularly enough to give us good feedback.

It turns out the root cause of the problems I was seeing with Safari on Windows is that it simply doesn’t support signed applets. That’s pretty sad really. Apple seem to have implemented their own Java plugin instead of using the one that Sun provides (they’re using the Sun JRE via their plugin) and of course it’s missing most of the features you’d want from a Java plugin.

I’ll report it to Apple officially just as soon as someone fixes the bug reporter – it’s currently down. Perhaps there are too many people logging bugs against the new Safari and Leopard builds….

So Apple have released Safari for Windows – really no idea why, but they have. Sadly, just like on Mac it has terrible JavaScript and Java debugging support. In fact, it’s worse on Windows than on Mac – anyone know how to turn the debug menu on? Anyone know how to get a Java console to appear?

I’d really, really like to make things work with it but all I can do at the moment is randomly guess at the source of problems.

The antileech plugin so far has done nothing towards actually blocking content and frankly doesn’t really show a lot of promise that it ever will, however it has been interesting seeing where my content pops up. One that looks rather odd to me is dcomments.com. Frankly it looks just like a splog but it doesn’t have any ads or links out to other sites. It does however republish all my content without any extra comments and has the absolute minimum of linkage back to symphonious.net. In fact, regularly through the site the term “Symphonious” is used but linked to their version of the content – the only link back is labelled “Original article here”, right about an Add Comment button.

I suppose I should be happy but I’m not sure I am. It appears that my blog has moved from the insignificant long tail to the worth spamming and leeching long tail. Like every blog, I’ve always seen comment spam coming in, but I’m not seeing targeted comment spam picking out the posts with the best page rank and focussing on them. I’m also suddenly seeing splogs leeching my content.

Apparently someone told bloggers that adding pictures to your posts helps make things easier to read. Unfortunately, what they forgot to mention is that the pictures should actually be part of the message or at least tangentially related. Take for instance this post by Joel Spolsky about UI design and alarm clocks. Scattered through the article are pictures of random buildings, including for some unknown reason one with a sign reading “Cemetery for Soldiers’ Dogs”. Wouldn’t pictures of alarm clocks make more sense? What about a frustrated old woman? A sleep deprived man? All these things would actually relate to the content and perhaps enhance the message the post is trying to make. Buildings however only distract from the actual message – particularly quizzical things like a cemetery for soldiers’ dogs.

Olly Hodgson has a great article up pointing out how important it is to think about the usability of your CMS, not just the websites it creates. I’m even more impressed that he realized the editor is the key point of usability in the CMS and gave advice to go about configuring it properly.

Most people think a CMS lives or dies by it’s repository design, it’s content reuse potential or some other fancy backend feature. The reality though is that content management systems are really all about creating and editing content and that’s done with the editor. Most of the user’s time is spent using the editor and so their perception of the whole system is very much dependant on how good the editor is.

It’s been interesting watching the blog adoption cycle here at Ephox. For a long time I think I was the only person actively blogging, and just from the positive effects of blogging that I’d experienced other people got interested. Our CEO was pressured into getting back into blogging again1, the engineering team started up an internal blog to share some of the cool stuff we found which never really took off and then the CEO started an internal blog2 which has helped the rest of the company get more of a grip on where he’s going. Andy started a blog and we had a couple of hires who had blogs lying dormant that they were then pressured into getting back into and suddenly there was a critical mass of people blogging – enough to have a conversation between us on the blogs.

It seems every blog post today last fortnight1 has to use the word “malaise” so I might as well chime in. What tipped me over the edge was seeing the comment:

Scoble and Mike – get a life. You peaked.

What’s really amazing about that comment isn’t just that it’s mean and inconsiderate, but that I came across it by reading Robert’s link blog. He’s actually publicizing criticism of himself. Frankly, I wouldn’t be big enough to do that. Maybe A-List bloggers are as stuck up as people tend to assume they are, but I suspect most of them are just normal people that everyone else keeps putting up on a pedestal. I certainly found Robert friendly and approachable when I met him the other week. People need to stop assuming that a link from an A-List blogger is going to make or break their business. The fact is, getting a link from an A-List blogger isn’t as big a deal as you think and it just takes the fun out of it for the A-List bloggers: