Former Utah CIO Phil Windley has two nice resources that touch on Identity Management:
Highlights from these resources include:
From my own sleuthing, I’ve uncovered a few other interesting resources:
Conn McQuinn points to an interesting Wired article on a report about cyberschools. Conn includes a nice little commentary on the article/report.
From A List Apart: Accessible Pop-up Links by Caio Chassot. I've used similar code for a while now, and have been quite happy with it.
Here's a nifty post, with examples, on the subject of creating accessible and stylish web forms. Worth exploring. (via mezzoblue)
I've updated my Expanding Nested Lists page with two new things:
Enjoy!
Michael Angeles' presentation Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic. His post made it sound like the presentation might have not clicked with some audience members...I gave a webloggin presentation to a group of librarians last year, and I'm not sure it entirely clicked with them either. Oh well...Michael's presentation clicked for me.
I recently wrote up a case study on creating a simple xml-based content management system for a site I maintain. I'm just now getting around to linking to it...
A Content Management Case Study
This is an account of my experiences building a small content management system (CMS) to manage a magazine website. What follows is part case study and part how-to manual. I offer it up in the hopes that some of the topics I discuss will be useful to others embarking on content management projects. However, the requirements and constraints I worked with will likely be different for most readers. Judging by the hundreds of CMS products and open-source projects there is clearly more than one way to approach the issues of content management. Take what you can from my experiences and adapt it to your situation. Read more...
I'd love to hear any feedback you might have on the case study. Email me at cms@karlnelson.net.
I'm cleaning out my "to blog" pile. Here's a list of interesting things I've run across in the past few days:
I'm still using BlogLines as my RSS reader. The fact that it is browser-based has, thus far, won out over the interface annoyances. And, it has one cool feature that NetNewsWire didn't have (nor will it likely ever have, as its way outside the scope of a desktop app.). BlogLines lets you create an email address that will show up as an RSS feed. So, I used this email address to subscribe to a couple of mailing lists. Rather than having these messages (even in digest form) clog up my in-box, they now happily show up among my 100+ RSS feeds, allowing for easy scanning and reading.
BlogLines isn't the only service that performs this Email to RSS trick. In fact, Andy Carvin has reviewed a couple of the options. Its worth a read, if you're interested in this sort of thing.
Right upfront, I'm a big fan of CSS. I've posted plenty about the benefits, and pointed to lots of articles and entries on the subject of CSS and standards. But...
CSS makes it difficult for the mere mortal to create a webpage. In the old days, hacking together a web page that looked decent was well within the range of many computer literate folks. I wonder if those days are starting to fade away.
CSS is powerful, and as a result, fairly complex. There are lots of pieces to consider, especially when something goes wrong. You not only have the CSS code to consider, but also the (X)HTML code and the scores of browser quirks and bugs. Automated tools, like the latest version of Dreamweaver and Style Master, help, but there is a decent learning curve with these approaches as well.
All of this was a very long-winded and slightly pessimistic way of saying that Dave Shea posted a very helpful little lesson on debugging CSS problems. I've used many of these tips before, but its nice to them aggregated into a single page that those new to CSS can reference.
User experience can be difficult to quantify. Clearly, people are drawn to companies that provide a good experience. And people run away when they're treated badly (assuming there is a place to run to). Peter Seebach, aka the "Cranky User," has some thoughts on the latter issue in his latest article, Businesses behaving badly: Put customers first or risk losing them (IBM DeveloperWorks). Seebach provides a number of examples, including:
Customer reactions are hard to predict. The problem generally comes from a lack of interest (or research funds) in learning what people need or want. Some companies that spam often don't test whether it works in the long run. But even when they do, it's difficult to determine how customers will react in real situations. A senior person at one company told me he had estimated that the returns from spamming their customer base without permission justified any harm that was done. However, just by hearing this, I decided to take my business elsewhere. As a result, they lost about $10,000 over three years from just one customer. I did let them know this, and perhaps by coincidence, they don't spam anymore.
Seebach doesn't attempt to quantify the impact of a bad experience. I'd love to see some literature that tried to do this.
When I read the summary for Jakob Nielsen's latest AlertBox, I thought it was a joke:
Number fetishism leads usability studies astray by focusing on statistical analyses that are often false, biased, misleading, or overly narrow. Better to emphasize insights and qualitative research.
If anyone has fallen prey to this particular disease, its Nielsen. But, look past the irony and read the article. Its an unusually long and well done entry.
Werner Vogels posted some statistics regarding which RSS Readers hit his site most often. My first thought was that it is interesting to see which programs seem to be the popular ones. My next thought was that, from a content producer's standpoint, it really doesn't matter much. They all read RSS (or Atom, and the various flavors). We're not looking at a repeat of the Browser Wars here.
Update (3/11): On a somewhat related topic, Chad Dickerson has been discussing RSS statistics....