Magic Web Fairies

Oh my poor neglected blog. Well I finally have the opportunity to write a bit!

I’m in Seattle at the Plone Conference and will make notes here for my co-workers and friends who didn’t get to attend. So since this is me… it’s going to be a lot about social activity and connections and a bit of a brain dump of  detailed technical info gleaned from the sessions to remind myself later of what I learned.

Misc notes: It was mentioned that some of the rooms (Shaw and Lopez Wed and Thursday, Olympia room Friday) will be video recorded but unfortunately the other talks will not be audio recorded like they were at the symposium. I’m pretty bummed about that. Jon Stahl says they are going for quality over quantity.

9am

Welcome & Icebreaker

Jon Stahl gave a Chock Full o’ Love talk and then forced us all stand up repeatedly (oh the horror). This actually turned out quite interesting as he asked people from different segments to stand (business, research, education, non-profit, consultants). I was surpised at the number of business users which seemed higher than I expected as I still expect early adopters of Open Source software to come from non-profit and education.

Jon then went on to make us do a meet and greet game which would normally make my skin crawl but turned out to be quite lovely. This involved picking a partner and torturing them. OK not really – Jon would announce a question then we each have a minute to answer. (On re-reading this it seems like I’m portraying Jon as a bully which not in any way the case – everyone seemed to be enjoying his talk greatly and were more than happy to do whatever he wanted and were in no way frightened into submission by the rumored guy with the cow bell.)

So my partner was from Amsterdam and I can’t remember his name (Paul?) due to my lack of appropriate caffeine intake at that time. So I’ll call him Cool Guy from Amsterdam (CGA). CGA works on for a non-profit with 80K members world wide. I was able to pick his brain quite a bit about their use of lingua plone … more on LinguaPlone later. The thing I found most interesting was his answer to the question – What are your goals at the Plone con? He said that he wanted to hook up with other non-profits so that they could share specialized products focused on the needs of this type of organization. That made me think… hmmm… Good idea… I need to hook up with other corporate geeks who are using plone.

Enter Jeff Watts from National Instruments! Jeff looked familar and I realized Tom Parish and I had met him at the one day blogging conference we went to in Austin. Jeff told me that they used our site TalkBMC in order to sell a plone implementation at NI. How cool is that? I’m going to email Jeff in a bit as I’d like to talk more about how they are using Plone over there.

As Jeff and I were talking, the wonderful Myroslav Opyr from QuintaGroup came up! (Hey Tom – I’m on MOs agenda for Friday evening to go over my list so let me know if you think of anything else to mention.) Then Sean Kelly walked up and turns out he’s from Texas too (Allen which is near Dallas) and hosts his sites with QG. Sean is a Plone consultant. Big love fest over QG services ensued. I need to write them a testamonial for them.

10:30

Member and Remember: Advanced Member Management in Plone 2.5

I didn’t have access until the 11:20 session so I wrote a small page of notes which I’ll brain dump here. Rob Miller gave this talk and stepped on my brain a bit. I didn’t mind at all. What a smart guy. Scott – this is one you’ll want to watch. A good session just wish the slides had bigger fonts. Rob is great fun. Here’s some quick and possibly incoherent notes to remind me of the talk:

Membrane is used to create highly custom membership relationships

Remember is the implementation of membrane and is a more complete solution. It uses default plone member features. The beta will be released in 4 weeks.

There will be a migration piece to move from CMF member to Remember for Plone 2.5. Remember does not convert default plone membership yet.

B-Org is membrane based as well and has properties fro departments, employees and projects.

11:20

Graduating from Spagetti to Sushi: Plone for PHPers

Spirited talk from Sean Kelly who I was able to talk to briefly after the Icebreaker session. This is a real geek out PHP session – Alysia you would love it. Man I’m really glad this is being recorded. He’s going on quite a bit on how much PHP sucks which is hilarious – nice slide set too. Oh wow he just talked about doing something quickly and pleasing management and getting asked for more and more till it all blows up. ha! This talk is cracking me up. Alysia and Scott – this is definitely one to watch although I’m not sure how quickly they’ll get the video up.

Sean is now mixing cocktails! Excellent – I’ve picked the right session! He threatened to card me… that was pretty cool. lol. Cocktails were tasty.

OK that’s it for the morning sessions. Off to lunch.

Well a bit of time passed since my first entry. Had a lovely, yet unpaid vacation in Seattle (curse you, contract work.) So this blog entry is about the length of five.

The other day someone mentioned that Web 2.0 sites are successful because they follow a “producer model” meaning that one person does everything on the site and makes all of the decisions (ie has the vision). While this is potentially true for single person blogs, it falls apart when applied in an actual business setting for complex sites.

The fact is that the Web 2.0 publishing model is not much different from the Web publishing model that most of us have been following for over ten years. This model is both precise & flexible. It’s precise in that there are specific tasks that must be done. It’s flexible in that these tasks can distribute differently depending on resource talents, resource availability and funding level.

In order to bring up our three Web 2.0 sites we needed:

Hardware

• Hardware specs
• Set up
• Management
• Infrastructure roadmap for growth
• Budget management

Back end software (there’s prob a better term for this but I’m going to continue to call it this till someone corrects me)

• Specs
• Installation and set up (ranges from OS to applications to metrics packages)
• Management
• Budget management
• Programming

Front end work (in brain dump order)

• UI design
• Information Architecture
• Accessibility
• Graphics
• HTML, CSS coding
• Scripting
• SEO
• QA
• CMS management
• Training for CMS use
• Document creation/formatting in CMS
• Process development
• Coding standards
• Publishing standards
• Site roadmap
• Ad rotation
• Budget management
• Site management
• Research
• Documentation
• User support (increased need because of interactive nature of sites)
• RSS feeds (a Web 2.0 addition)
• Moderation (a Web 2.0 addition – to deal with all the comment and trackback spam and the occasional nasty comment)
• Blogger training (yet more W2)

Metrics

• Choose a metrics program(s) (often more than one if you need click tracking or special reports for media)
• Pull reports
• Interpretation of reports (some of this will be done by other areas)
• Media stats

Content

• Acquisition
• Editing
• Writing
• Editorial standards
• Site editorial vision (ie what types of content to pursue at what time)
• Editorial calendar
• Budget management
• Podcast production, scheduling & communications (Web 2.0 addition – this is a beast)
• Research
• Interpretation of social tagging and what it means for editorial (another W2.0 addition)

Marketing

• Ad or sponsorships
• Media kits
• Google AdWords
• Process development to move money brought in to Finance area

Finance

• PO processing
• Distribution of budget to different groups

Users (a Web 2.0 addition!)

• Social tagging (site participation)

Media (podcasts are a Web 2.0 addition for our sites)

• Recording
• Host for interviews
• Audio editing
• Music
• Media hosting

(I’m definitely missing things esp. under marketing. But that’s not my field and I’m just happy when a marketing person brings in money and tells me that some ad space sold.)

An example of the flexibility can be seen in what we are doing for hardware and back end software. Traditionally, you would probably put both hardware & back end software (in our case Apache, Linux, Zope, Plone) in the hands of IT. But due to overload in our IT shop, that just wasn’t even vaguely possibly.

So we came up with a different plan. Hardware specs, budget for hardware and back end software, infrastructure roadmap & PO processing are done by our “audio” guy, Tom Parish, because he has the strongest background in it and has a side company that can deal with the paperwork chaos. The hardware itself is outsourced to a USA hosting company who also monitors the servers (hardware only). The loading and monitoring of software as well as additional python programming is done by a Ukranian group called QuintaGroup (they rock) who are experts in Plone and Zope. QG also monitors server performance and does reboots and other adjustments. Sometimes, we pull QG into front end work because they have a great CSS/graphics guy there who can help us out during front end resource crunches.

So two areas of specific tasks that you might think would be housed in one place for responsibility are actually housed in three for our group. And it works just fine. Mainly due to who we’ve chosen as our resources and their skill and reliability.

So if I were a corporate person prone to making org charts, the one I’d create for crafting a Web site would look like this:

You can throw out those hierarchical org charts when it comes to the Web. They will never reflect the necessary empowerment of the leads in each area or the connections required between the areas to make it all flow. Each lead has a vision for their area and works hard to integrate that vision with all the other leads for the good of the site, the visitors and the company.

I do see a few differences between our “old” Web publishing model and what’s required for Web 2.0 sites. Many of the main areas (front end, content etc) have expanded duties to encompass the increased demand that community Web sites require. Media might even be considered a “new” channel even though we’ve had the base capabilities for years – now we have the addition of finding the “right” media hosting service and getting our RSS feeds in order. (And one day I’ll tell ya a little story about that.) Another new one is that users can be considered an active partner in these sites now due to the participation level you hit after you’ve gained their trust.

My punk rock side says that this is an over analysis of a working model that in the best situation “just happens” (rather like magic). I constantly see confusion around who does what because of the flexibility of this model. When I showed the graphic to a content manager at my work she told me it looked like a weather system. Well, welcome to the hurricane that is the Web!

First a theory….

if you are a Web developer (and by this I mean mid to senior level front end developer with perhaps a dash of scripting in your pocket) and you are good at your job, you have probably experienced the phenomenon that I lovingly term “Magic Web Fairies.” OK… I can tell you’re not feeling it – especially you guys that are not bonding with the implied glitter and wings aspect. Stick with me for a bit.

Consider – you have been given a project or a specific task (code, graphics, UI design, IA – anything Web related). It’s not rocket science, it’s not new, you’ve been doing this for years. You give the typical projection of how long it will take while padding appropriately for the well known (to you) chaos that could pop up on any given day (oh no! the servers are all down!). You then go about completing the task/project – you probably come in a bit early. Maybe you can in right on time but it was just a bit better than expectations. Everyone’s happy.

Be Afraid! You are on the verge of stepping into Fairy Land!

Next task comes – same cycle. Repeat ad nauseum. Suddenly you’re surrounding environment begins to mysteriously change. First, you start to get push back on due dates. “Well you did it *last* time in 2 weeks.” (uh this time you’re asking for 3 extra things that you didn’t ask for last time.) Or perhaps “well this is OK but wouldn’t it be better if you did this instead?” (no it wouldn’t, that breaks standards/accessibility/usability/all manner of rational thought etc.)

Add to that, after a time the Web site you’ve worked so hard on has become so commonplace that every one thinks it’s like the coke machine. It’s just there when they need it – and magically always full and functioning. They know (in theory) there’s some guy that comes and does something to the coke machine but don’t want to be bothered with the details (like what a pain in the ass it is to drag up enough soda to take care of an entire floor’s caffeine addiction etc.)

Suddenly you realize that you’re like the “coke guy” only you’re the “Web guy” (or girl). You’re just kinda there. No one knows what the hell you do. They may even ask you “and what is it you do here?” (The exception is that when something goes wrong with the Web site everyone will suddenly recover from their amnesia and remember that you are the person to send irate emails.)

What’s happened? You have become invisible. When someone in management wants a change all they know it that it just happens. You have become the Magic Web Fairy.

The illusion has somehow been created that the Web is easy. Part of the reason this illusion becomes so pervasive is that it’s not entirely wrong. Many aspects of building and maintaining Web sites are easy in and of themselves. It’s the complexities of the “big picture” that is the reason why the Web takes work and we get paid to do this. (I first misspelled paid as pain. Nice Freudian slip via the fingers.)

Sure, I could add a new navigation link. That task itself is easy. The time it takes to do it rates in the seconds. But the bigger questions take time and thought. Should we even add a link at the level or position suggested or does it really go somewhere else? Will it make the user experience better or more chaotic? What if it doesn’t have any effect at all and is scanned over? Is there something else we should now remove to ensure clear navigation paths? Is there real content behind this link that doesn’t suck? What is the priority of that content to the company? Even more important, what is the priority of that content to the user? Is the link worded appropriately? If a graphic, is it the right image and text, in the right place, in the best format?

I could go on with this list but I’ll stop now. You know the drill. Web people do this every day for everything little thing we do. But very few people in our companies know what the hell we’re talking about much less why we’re making such a fuss. But, at least, we know at the end of the day that we make the Web just a bit less The Suck by asking these questions and doing the closest we can to the best thing on our Web sites.

So, Magic Web Fairy Land is where I spend my days. I didn’t plan to come to this place and I’m certainly not setting up camp here. But the glitter is nice even if only I see it.