I’ve got a few little projects in mind that I think Cocoon would be a good fit for and one system already in production that uses Cocoon (badly) so I’m thinking I need to work take some time and really learn how to use it properly and what the best practices are for using it.

So, oh great Cocoon guru’s who hangeth outeth at planet apache (and those who don’t), what’s the best way to go about learning Cocoon?  Book recommendations, article recommendations etc?  Where do I learn best practices and get a good overview of all the parts etc rather than just how to do specific things?

Wikis were invented to make it easier for people to contribute content.  They do this with two key features:

1. In browser editing.
2. Users don’t have to learn HTML.

That sounds awfully familiar.  It is in fact two of the key things that Ephox provided as we helped create the in-browser WYSIWYG editor industry which is now a key feature of most content management systems, knowledge management systems, document management systems and most other enterprise systems that people want to encourage contribution to (or reduce the complaints from people who are forced to contribute).  As a side note, I’m not sure whether the inventor of EditLive! had heard of wikis or not when he started his work and I’m not sure which was created first but it really doesn’t matter.

I probably should title this post, Why Big Media Is Dominating Podcasting, because I suspect that there are already more listeners of “big media” podcasts than there are of “little guy” podcasts.  I don’t have figures to back that up though so lets not worry too much about what the current state is and look to the future – will podcasting stay true to it’s roots and be a way for the “little guy” to have his say or will big media take over?

Scoble pointed to a random blog posting of someone saying they prefer Windows over Mac OS as he’s paid to do.  Usually I skip them but for some reason I read this one.  It really struck me as odd that in a post that’s meant to be pro-Windows, it’s really more about how to get by with Windows:

There are a few things to remember about windows. Turn on automatic updates and put everything on a broadband connection behind a router. They can be picked up for about $40 bucks. Don’t install every crappy shareware program or file sharing software that comes along .

A while back, Benjamin commented about a problem his parents had organizing photos:

Watching my mother trying to use Windows XP to locate her holiday snaps makes it clear to me that tagging is the right way to interact with personal documents. The traditional “one file, one location” filesystem is old and busted. The scenareo begins with my mother learning how to take pictures from her camera and put them into foldlers. Unfortunately, my father is still the one managing short movie files. The two users have different mental models for the data. They have different filing systems. Mum wants to find files by date, or by major event. Data thinks that movie files are different to static images and that they should end up in different places. The net result is that Mum needs to learn how to use the search feature in order to find her file, and is lucky to find what she is looking for.

I’ve finally got around to changing over most of my mailing list subscriptions to use my Symphonious.net address instead of my intencha.com address.  I think I’ve got them all…  My intencha.com address will continue to work indefinitely though so it’s not a big deal if I’ve missed one, it just means that from here on in I plan to try and send everything from my symphonious.net address so any mailing lists that haven’t been changed over may get caught up in moderation.

I noticed Evan made a side-comment about Ephox licensing which I wanted to clarify and since he doesn’t have comments enabled but does have trackback on I’m posting it here.  Ephox products are available both in limited seat licenses as well as on per-server terms with unlimited users.  The server licenses make it much easier to deploy in big organizations as you don’t have to deal with the overhead of ensuring you have enough user licenses etc (which is what Evan was originally talking about).

Symphonious.net has now moved to it’s own virtual server hosted by eApps.  I think everything is set up right but if you see any problems please let me know.  Sorry for any disturbances caused.

Also, a massive thanks to Iain for letting me use his server up until now (the header image is his too).  The service was excellent – you’ll have to come round for gratitude beer and nachos soon.

Headed down to Tweed Heads with SWHO (she who is happily obeyed) and took some nice photos, here’s my favorite.  Click for a bigger version – give me a yell if for some reason you want the full 2048×1536 version.

Most people have probably already worked this out but if you’re new to rails or new to rails login components, you probably want to use Login Generator and avoid Salted Login Generator like the plague.

Login Generator is extremely quick and easy to get up and running with, is made up of a small amount of clean code, has no dependencies and works with Ruby on Rails 0.13.

Salted Login Generator on the other hand is crap.  Sorry to the author of Salted Login Generator for putting it so harshly but it really is a mess and has caused me a huge number of headaches.  The feature creep seems to be what killed it – the localization is particularly problematic and makes all the code horrendously messy but depending on a firstname and lastname field in the database is bad too (should have just had login and let each application decide how and if to store the user’s real name).  If it were trimmed back so it just focussed on handling authentication it would probably be a lot better for it.

So Sam Ruby is pandering for links in a vain effort to tell Apple that iTunes’s RSS support is horribly non-standards compliant.  Of course this effort will fail horrible because Apple doesn’t do anything unless there’s a Radar issue created and Radar issues created by internal staff carry far less weight and get far less priority than Radar issues created by external parties.

That’s right, you can create Radar issues yourself.  Apple has a bug reporter which is the official and the only official way to tell Apple anything.  Don’t like the fact that Apple only acts on things that have a Radar issue?  Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don’t like the bug reporter? Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don’t like the way iTunes works with RSS?  Log a radar issue telling them so!

Compatibility Matters

Funny, funny, funny.