monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

WriteTheWeb has an Awesome interview with Brent Simmons, impressario from Ranchero Software and author of NetNewsWire.

Migraine Awareness Group: a National Understanding for Migraineurs (MAGNUM). Good informative site for migraine sufferers (”migraineurs”).

Jodi gets 3 or 4 multi-day migraines each month, and we’re looking for treatments more effective and less expensive than Maxalt.

Thomas Wilson has started a new weblog related to information technology and theory. The Information Research Weblog is affilliated with the Information Research journal, and covers information theory, the semantic web, trends in IT, and other related topics. In Tom’s words:

“The purpose of the list is to provide a log of ’stuff’ of interest to the members. By which I mean references to new articles, books, events, reflection on your own experiences etc., etc. on themes of relevance to Information Research - widely interpreted to include information management, information science, information systems, records management, the Webby end of library management, etc., etc.”

Welcome to the weblog community, Tom!

I’m working on a couple new Conversant sites for a client these days. In the process, I’m learning more about some of Conversant’s features that I’ve not used much, and appreciating again how cool Conversant is. Here are some of the interesting things I’m doing:

• On a couple sites, I’m using an Advanced Query Page to create list pages for a particular type of information on the site. However, instead of listing all messages of that type that are in the message database (Conversant’s content store), I’m using an option on the AQP that only returns messages that are bound to URLs. This means that when the user posts, say, a Case Study, it won’t show up in the Case Study list page until it’s finished and ready and the user publishes the page to a URL in the <site>/CaseStudies/<type>/ hierarchy.

• Custom New Thread forms are cool. Conversant has a page, at <site>/NewThread that allows a user or editor to post a new message to the site (as well as set a number of options). Well, using conditional macros I can check things like “is the user a member of the editors group?” or even the value of custom message attributes like “messageType” (for example), then display different message fields for the user to edit. With this I can have a user enter data for various message types (Case Study, Portfolio Piece, Song) without being distracted by non-related message fields.

My good friend Jim recently released a Mac OS X installer for Plone, a Zope-based CMS.

I downloaded the installer and (after reporting a bug and creating a necessary directory) successfully installed Plone. After poking around a bit, I can see that it’s quite deep, and is going to take some time to grok.

It’s my hope that Plone may become something I would recommend as a customizeable CMS solution for clients who are running (or want to run) linux or Mac OS X servers. We’ll see.

Sorry folks, I’ve been a bit under the weather lately. Gonna blog some more in a bit.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a potential design job that will help out, and some more work for a recent client.

The More Stuff 4 Less Blog is blogging super cheap stuff and great rebate deals in various online stores. This is the way I want to shop. Everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. -)