I’ve said this internally to Ephox already but I want to give a big congratulations to the team on getting EditLive! 6.4 out the door. We have a lot of customers who have been waiting quite a long time for the features in that release and only a year or two ago they were thought to be effectively impossible given the Swing Text APIs that EditLive! is built on. It’s a testament to the team that this can be done at all, let alone with such high quality.
We’ve found a cheap little NetGear router that can roughly load balance and fail-over between our two internet connections to hopefully get a little bit more speed. Of course, the simplest thing to do is to set it up so that from the inside it looks just like the old modem and then on the WAN side set it up to look like a client using that old modem as it’s router. Of course, that means that the inside and outside of the router are in the same subnet (192.168.0.0) in this case and the new router’s internal IP is also the IP of the WAN router it forwards on to.
I’m setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I’ll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled “Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management”. Sadly it’s been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you’re around I’d really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it’s not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I’m really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners – they don’t tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.
For those who both use EditLive! and were very quick to upgrade to Leopard, you might want to grab the latest early access build of EditLive! With old builds on Tiger, our toolbar didn’t respond well to the darker background color:
(Click for full size version)
Tomorrow is a day I’ve been looking forward to for quite a few years. Dylan Just, one of my best mates from uni, is starting at Ephox. He’s not yet on Planet Ephox but I think we’re fixing that tomorrow morning.
Indeed that has been fixed. Welcome on board Dylan! Any other Ephox folk who want to start blogging – just let me know!
So it seems that our super secret project “EditLive! Dynamic” has been outed somehow. Apparently Andrew Frayling is on the case (twice in fact) but I have no idea where the source of the leak would have come from. Any bets on how long it will be until we get a “Ephox Rumors” (and the associated “Crazy Ephox Rumors”) site?
I got some really positive feedback on the various community/openness projects that I’ve been spearheading within Ephox from one of our OEMs today. Apparently they’ve discovered our early access program and are already trying out our brand new Express Edit functionality1. It’s really nice to actually hear from clients that these elements are useful as we haven’t really managed to build up a community, even if we are seeing gradually increasing traffic. For a while now we’ve had potential new employees commenting on Planet Ephox which is great, but we haven’t really heard from clients taking advantage of it, even if we’ve seen some of the indirect effects via analytics and support cases.
When I first joined the company it was tradition that the engineers (and often the CEO, CTO and COO who were in the same country back then) headed down to the Paddo tavern for a pub lunch. Sadly a while back the quality of their roast lunch started to reflect the $4 price tag and we abandoned the concept. With the new renovations to the Paddo and rumors of improved quality we’ve started heading down the street for a roast lunch and a beer again.
I was just thinking to myself this morning how good it is to see Andy really stepping up, taking responsibility and showing great initiative to keep the team moving forward. Turns out the rest of the business agrees – he’s officially acquired the “Senior” title.
Well done Andy!
A while back, Ephox restructured product management to better focus on developing new products and directions. As with most things, it rarely turns out the way you originally plan and we’ve morphed the team into something quite different to what we originally envisioned. It’s always good to adapt roles to best fit people’s talents, but while it’s happening it can make it difficult to know that you’re doing a good job or even the right job. We’ve reached the point now where what people’s roles are stable but involve a lot of “yeah I really should do more of that” kind of comments. Normally that means the things you’re not doing are either outside your comfort zone or outside of your interest – in my case mostly both.
The Ephox Weblog pointed me to James Robertson’s comments on Seth Gottlieb’s article, “Homebrew CMS” all of which is good reading. The key part for me is:
Editing environment. If the authors can’t easily and efficiently get their words onto the site, you’re toast. There’s a huge amount that goes into a good editing tool, including table support, CSS, images, spell checking, and clean cut-and-pasting from Word. Even if you chose to use one of the commercial editing tools (a good idea!), it still needs to be tightly integrated into the CMS.
If ever there was a problem that just wouldn’t die it has to be inter-project dependency management. If your code depends on external libraries, it’s pretty simple to pick whichever solution you prefer – either grabbing a version from a repository or checking jars into your source control. However, if you depend on a project that you control, it gets so much messier.