I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Australia for my baby sister’s wedding and while I was there I worked out of Ephox’s Brisbane office where our engineering team is based. It’s been nearly 18 months since I left there to move over to the UK and this is the first trip back since. What was most striking about the trip is just how awesome the team is down there. Technically speaking they are one of the most talented groups of engineers you’re ever likely to come across and pull off some seriously amazing stuff, but more importantly they are a truly great team.

Engineers are known for being anti-social but you don’t see any of that in the Ephox team – they all get on well, love the work they do and work as a team, not just a group of individuals. Everyone in that team should be seriously proud of the culture they have built up in that team.

For those non-Ephox folk reading this, you too can join the team as Ephox is currently on a serious hiring binge in a number of areas. Check out the jobs page for details.

Every so often while using NetSuite, it pops up and asks me to fill in a quick little survey – basically how likely are you to recommend NetSuite and why? This is annoying when your in a rush but on balance not a bad way for them to ensure their customers are happy.

There’s just one catch – every single time I tell them that I’d never recommend NetSuite and that they should improve product quality, specifically they should handle escaping XML tags correctly. As a company that makes HTML editors, we quite often send and receive emails that talk about HTML tags rather than just including them. Unfortunately, NetSuite for the past 5 years or more has happily messed these emails up and we’ve had to come up with complicated ways to get the original email text back out. We’ve reported this to them on multiple occasions and at one point had to actually put in a XSS exploit to get them to understand how big a problem it was. Over time they’ve shifted where the correct HTML will appear in the system, but never actually fixed it entirely.

So, coming back to the survey – what’s the point of interrupting users to get their feedback when you go and ignore it anyway?

As promised, a few days ago IBM shipped the OEM edition of EditLive! It’s available to all existing WCM clients on Portal 6.1 or later from passport advantage.

Mostly for my own benefit of having an easier place to find this, it’s version 6.5.3.55 of EditLive! which is a little older than I was expecting, but still quite recent. Enterprise Edition clients (direct from Ephox) have access to the 6.6.2.6 release from early March, which includes a bunch of new features like the inline table toolbars, but my understanding is that IBM will be providing updates fairly regularly which is nice.

Congratulations to all involved in making this happen, both from Ephox and IBM. It’s been an incredibly fast turn around from the signing of the deal to a shipping product.

UPDATE: Actually, it’s more recent than that even. The download is mislabelled as 6.5.3.55 but it actually contains version 6.6.2.6 of EditLive! – the latest official release.

Sam Ruby notes that the White House feed contains a fair bit of debris:

Also noted in the process: the feed itself contains a fair amount of debris.  A sytle attribute?  A meta tag?  o:p is common in content carelessly copy/pasted from Microsoft Word.

Ah the good old o:p crud from Word.  I know a fantastic html editor they could use that would fix that up for them. Clean copy and paste from Word is probably the most popular feature in EditLive!

Our support team live and die by the logs we get from clients.  It’s simply the only way you can work out what happened and get complete and reliable information on the environment and usage of our products in the moments before a problem occurred.

I always knew EditLive! was quite verbose in debug mode – deliberately so, but I was a little surprised that in 30 minutes of usage we output 45362 lines of debug output, totalling 5.2MB. Mostly, that’s because I was running up a lot of instances of EditLive! rather than just using a single instance for a long time so in more normal usage that would be a lot less.

On OS X all that output actually goes to the system.log, so it’s preserved for a few days in rotating logs. On Windows and Linux it only gets sent to the Java console so is lost when you close the browser.  It’s definitely handy to have a record of how I’ve used EditLive! for the whole day when you suddenly notice something’s gone wrong though.