Contribute Publishing Server is still around and that is good
There has been some talk in certain higher web people mail lists recently that suggest Contribute Publishing Server is no more. Some have heard this from the sales team at the new Adobe. Just for the record, I have heard from the Contribute dev team and they assure me CPS is alive and well. Which is good.
It is good because it is CPS that makes Contribute 3 much more useful. Sure you can live without it but if you have a server end controller like CPS that allows you to access certain things through an API you can do a lot of things.
What things? Well hopefully in the next month or so CPA will be using the API and some PHP to generate RSS feeds from the stories we publish. With the news release site we actually parse mailman archives and pull them into a database. This works but only because news releases go out to a mail list. For our news stories that are featured on our new CPA page we have had to get a bit more creative.
Stories are published with Contribute 3—and we are just trying to figure out how to automate things. First we needed to get the site up and have someone maintain it. Then we can figure out how to automate certain things.
Google buys Measuremap?
Going through my RSS feeds and sorting through email, what do I find this evening? An email from Jeffrey Veen (which was obviously sent to all Measuremap users) explaining how Google has bought them! Odd. In the email he refers to this post on the Google Blog and now I left wondering… what the heck is going on? Google just hired Jeffrey Veen and acquired a prettier interface to their Google Analytics software I guess.
For those wondering, Measuremap is a pretty cool little tool to monitor your blog traffic. It’s designed specifically for blogs. I have been using it here for about a month now and I have found it really interesting… and Jeffrey Veen is a pretty well known web dude with an impressive portfolio. He is one of the big minds in user centered design, which I think we all can admit Google needs to work on their UI a little 
I have not yet had a chance to attend one of his presentations but I hear they are pretty good.
Anyway… acquisitions everywhere, dot com bubble 2.0?
Lectures in podcasts at Waterloo
There is at least one UW professor that has a podcast of his lectures. Robert Park has made available ANTH 320 in podcast form. I think this is the first podcast of a UW lecture and it’s from an Arts prof! Also, this is still unofficial rumor but at least one Engineering prof will be making podcasts of his lectures available in the Spring 2006 term.
Some things that have yet to be worked out:
- What is the most simple workflow available?
- What tools should be required?
- Is automation required?
Robert’s lectures are posted manually and he makes the mp3’s available outside of the XML. I like that because it means any student with access to a computer can listen to the lectures. Hopefully that becomes part of the standard practice.
Lets see how many more profs try this out…
Web standards in Waterloo
A couple weeks ago I thought: where are all the web people in the Waterloo region? Since this region is so tech savvy I wonder who the web folks are and would they want to get together? As I start I propose a Google group called Web Dev Waterloo Region that is open to the public, so sign up local web people and spread the word (cause Measuremap tells me only about 30-50 people visit this place a day—not really that many is it?).
Is there interest in a campus group for students? Prefer to make it a community group that looks at AJAX, Ruby, etc.
Recent web design stuff
Besides Joe Clark’s Failed Redesigns part 1 and part 2, the Globe and Mail has gone through a major redesign that I think is pretty cool, Collylogic is showing us all a really cool way to deal with width-based layout, and when designing how do you do up site maps for web applications?
There is an awful lot going on so far in 2006… I have a new ‘beta’ skin for the home page based on a lot of other stuff and a little JS. Collylogic’s width based layout just inspired me though. Stay tuned.
