Category Archives: develop

I liked a post on Robert O’Toole’s blog: The Ikea effect – why we should build a flat–pack V[R]LE

He’s talking about a V[R]LE which I’m assuming is much like a VLE. But I thought the aspects on how people like to build their own things, especially when it’s made easy, related well to our CMS project. 

Our CMS strategy is in two phases. First we are building some backend elements – we’re calling these Content Factories, and these will manage certain types of content to enable easy re-use. These Content Factories will provide content to a variety of web properties regardless of whether they are CMS-driven. So we could use them to inject content into Sharepoint, a Portal, and even a flat HTML page (because we run PHP over most of them).

Secondly we’ll be building a “CMS Kit” to hand out to our departments. This will provide them with a standard CMS web interface to edit basic flat content, but will also be pre-prepared to use the Content Factory feeds. 

So this “CMS kit” we’re planning is an IKEA flat pack.

I also liked the note of warning about people getting over-invested in the things they build. Our web authors are currently using some very nice Dreamweaver tools and snippets that we’ve developed over the last two years. Getting them off those and into the CMS might be hard. The solution is to make the CMS so much easier that they’d be silly not to use it.

Another inspiring blog from Seth Godin.

Seth’s Blog: What do you do when your systems break?

As someone who is vaguely involved in building systems, I really like the idea that we should be designing BROKEN buttons. 

It’s not going to be easy though. Systems are designed because A has to happen before B so that C is authorised and the logged as D so that an audit trail exists.

As I read it Seth’s BROKEN button cuts through all the checks and sorts out the customer’s problem. This is a good thing. But we still need to design the system to capture this in the audit trail, and acknowledge the fact that the agent/supervisor has just gone off-piste.

And what happens when the trigger that is C in the example above, which normally goes off to eight places to enable ‘things’, doesn’t get triggered properly. The customer may end up in a system which appears to have done what it should, but in actual fact is even more broken than before.

Thoughts welcome!

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/conchur/1054192789/

Have been looking into what a Virtual Research Environment is.

JISC has a programme which aims to:

• building and deploying VREs based on currently available tools and frameworks
• assessing their benefits and shortcomings in supporting the research process
• improving and extending them to meet the future needs of UK research
• developing or integrating new tools and frameworks where appropriate solutions do not yet exist

Two videos from JISC (WMV format) provide a useful and quick overview from a research point of view and then the technical solutions.