Weblog: Archive

The discussion on the matter continues on Slashdot thread "Making Things Easy is Hard".

With Midgard, there are several major issues affecting usability:

• Installation is horrible: solution would be to provide prebuilt packages for popular Linux/Unix platforms
• Site setup is difficult: we should integrate sitegroup creation, host creation from template, style creation, site initialization and VirtualHost setting into one simple "Create website" dialog
• Content editing is difficult: managing content is still quite difficult. However, the process on fixing MidCOM AIS usability flaws is going on

Fixes to Authoring Interface System

Usually the Midgard installation and setup is done by a technical solution provider, so the usability issues there are not as urgent. However, AIS is what the end-user sees, making it the prime usability fixing target.

Several improvements are being made, or discussed to the MidCOM AIS:

• Back to page: link returning from AIS to the "view" side of the site. With this we can get rid of all the ugly returnurl hacks
• Power User: hiding all confusing settings from non-power users. Power user setting should be shared with Aegir
• Consistent UIs: the user interface for managing all components should be made consistent. Buttons should look the same and behave similarly, and components should share UIs for creating and deleting pages, etc

Actually, it looks like I should write a Midgard Request for Comments on this.

Update 13:25: Started working on mRFC 0003, "MidCOM AIS User Interface Guidelines". I'll try to get Nico and Kaukola to collaborate on this.

We arranged a "HC Susi" contest with meep for the event. In the contest the teams had to arrange performances with themes like "Why Grey Wolves suck - view of the ordinary live-roleplayer" or "Headlines of Grey Wolves' gossip column for the coming years", and recognize obscure items and faces from the history of the association.

The prize of special "HC Susi" t-shirts and a huge bottle of Koskenkorva was collected by team "Kellareiden kasvatit", captained by Nino.

Feedback received for the contest was mostly very positive, and it apparently worked as a really good ice breaker between the different generations of Grey Wolves. Thanks to meep and Kerttu for making the thing work!

Best speeches were held by Juho and Yaroslav. I especially liked Juho's ironic speech:

"In the beginning the Gods created The Grey Wolves. They were told to oppose things like fantasy, live-roleplaying, cyberpunk, the modern age... <snip long list>

...While all these battles have been lost, the fighting still continues..."

Skoll also made a very improvised speech, ending with "I promised to say three words, but I'll only say two: Fuck you [all]".
Arwen was absent, and so her speech was read by Lettu.

The whole event was much more festive than expected, with all participants dressed in their best. Skoll and Luihu looked really cool in their white suits, and Jose in his tuxedo. A tuxedo is certainly something to consider for future cigar evenings.

There are blog entries about the event from Yaroslav and Juho (in Finnish).

After the main event, the party continued at Ateljé, Pub Pete and Highlight, ending somewhere around 5am. When making farewells, we decided with many people to meet again after another ten years.

Updated 2004-04-14: Finally had time to post my photos online. Rambo's photos are also available.

Now I'm reading Nicholas Griffin's "Caucasus - Mountain Men and Holy Wars".

Other books I've been thinking about include:

• Panttipataljoona (Jokipii, 1968) - Finnish volunteers fighting for German SS in Caucasus
• Hadji Murad (Tolstoy, 1904) - Story of a Chechen warlord fighting with and against the legendary Imam Shamil

Let me know if you have any thoughts. As usual, I prefer historical accounts over Lonely Planet.

The rare spots where I've been able to explain the benefits of RSS have been:

• Keiretsu situations - displaying the news headlines from partner companies on a website
• Intranet headlines - displaying latest news items from the public site, running on separate server

However, this is still quite far from getting people from bloated news site browsing to the lean and efficient World Live Web.

I'm currently subscribed to 51 channels with my NetNewsWire. I've found that since starting to get my news updates through RSS my actual web browsing has dropped to maybe 20% of what is was, while I actually get much more useful information than I used to.

Many of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are profilic Connectors, who specialize in sharing information on different IT and web topics. In addition, there are some special interest topics like motorcycling and Change Logs of software projects I participate to. I also follow some special areas like OSCOM and PHP by subscribing to their Planet combination feeds.

The RSS aggregator works on the background, refreshing information from the feeds on a regular schedule. Every morning or lunch break I can go through the overview of new posts, and read the interesting ones.

Quite many blogs nowadays provide the full post content in their RSS feed, so I can read it even offline. For those who don't, pressing enter or clicking the post title opens the story on a new Firefox window.

RSS and the newer Atom are very useful standards. OSCOM should do more to push their adoption in every Open Source CMS. For example, quite many MidCOM components already provide RSS output by default.

When most CMSs and news sites are providing good quality RSS content, getting users on the board should be quite trivial. However, as Jon Udell pointed out, there are still issues left to solve:

• Politics - End users are not interested in whether a feed is RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom. They just want to subscribe to a feed that works in their aggregator
• Subscription - subscribing to a feed should be easier. All desktop RSS aggregators should be able to support the same URL type for subscription. In addition, all feeds should be available under the same term or icon, regardless of their type. Maybe RSS autodetection and hooking up with the web browser will help here
• Explanation - The concept is new, and so we have to wait until mass media gets it explained to the general public. Before that the message will have to get clearer
• Software - Users will need to find a good, working aggregator for their platform. As Udell pointed out, the web based Bloglines.com service is a good way to get started

Now, if Yaroslav would just add RSS support to Miki, I might get to subscribe to some diary feeds from my old and new friends from Harmaasudet. Submitted feature request on this.

The original Linux Greenhouse class convened in Seoul, Korea in June at the Global Linux 2000. Nemein has been providing eRiding services to LGH since spring 2001.

The site design was made by Airton Jordani from loulouejordani.com.

The site design and development was done by Henri Kaukola and hosting is provided by Finnish Teleservice Center.

It was suprising how much he was able to communicate with simple pantomime and gestures. When the silence ended at midnight, he told us there had been only three occasions when he would've wanted to explain something but couldn't.

Of course, the sign language alphabet we learned back in commune days to irritate the rest of our flat mates helped.

Still back in 1999 it was a struggle to get my employer to run a Linux server. Two years later their own main product ran only on Linux.

However, "Year of the Penguin"? There have been many of those...

• 1999 - The Year of the Penguin
• 2000 - Could've been Year of the Penguin
  
• 2001 - Not the Year of the Penguin
  
• 2002 - The Year of the Penguin
• 2003 - The Year of the Penguin?
  
• 2004 - The Year of the Penguin

Good things are happening in the Linux community all the time, so partly it must be true. Could be difficult for the Chinese horoscopes, though.

Despite its critics, knowledge management (KM) has not been over-promised; rather, vendors have under-delivered. Blogs can address the gap between KM promise and requirements by letting local expertise emerge. Here’s a good background on blogs and how Lucent is using them in KM.

Updated 2004-04-15: Oops, the guidelines were not actually from AMA. Instead, they were response to AMA's instructions on the matter. Time to remember how to RTFA. ;-)

It has to be said that Daniel's team has made amazing progress with the administrative interface. The new UI looks very slick, and Tony Lee's logo design fits it very well.

The user interface is also using our NemeinLocalization library. As soon as the language strings are included in the build I will translate them to Finnish.

In addition to translations, the first glitches we've noticed have been the "This is the place where we will put a DocBook created HTML documentation for SpiderAdmin" message and some oddities with move commands.

All in all, very good work! I'll keep this updated on how our "living without Aegir" project with OpenPSA development goes.

A cool little factoid that the original project name "Odin" is still kept in use in SpiderAdmin internals. Very Midgard-like :-)

Work done today:

• Creating the OpenPSA project website at www.openpsa.org
• Setting up new, clean development database with Nemein.Net nightly build and SpiderAdmin
  
• Moving localization libraries from under NemeinLocalization to their correct module snippetdirs
• Switching old Evaluation Key system into Testimonials registration system
• Setting up the OpenPSA project at Tigris
• Started collecting beta participants
  

TODOs for tomorrow:

• Change all instances of Nemein.Net to OpenPSA in the application
• Make first CVS commit
• Add first documentation to the website
• Add first screenshots to the website
• Add initial product descriptions to the website
  
• Release first beta
• Subscribe the RSS aggregator on website to Kaukola's and Rambo's blog feeds

Updated 2004-04-15: We're still looking for some beta testers. Let me know if you're interested. OpenPSA requires a working Midgard installation to run.

This would make building any kinds of web stores or shopping carts require a patent license.

I guess European Union has decided to move Internet back to stone age, then. Competitiveness with American software business, indeed.

It is still not too late to do something.

Link via Kaukola and GNU Project.

With the label element, forms would look like:

<form method="POST">
  <label for="firstname">First name</label>
  <input type="text" name="firstname" id="firstname" />
</form>

This would make the connection between a field and its label machine-readable, enabling easier handling for accessibility purposes.
Also, this mark-up would be slightly lighter to download that the current <div /> solution.

Thanks to Nico for the suggestion.

Label resources

About.com HTML Guide: <label />
XHTML 1.0 schema: Label
DevGuru XHTML Tag: Label

There were some issues with getting the yamp Perl plugins to work with our UTF-8 encoded development database, but from now commits should work fine.

The Sailor's pub, situated in the trendy Herttoniemenranta suburb was a very good choice. We were able to sit in sunshine and watch the boats in the harbour, while enjoying our H.Uppmanns. Before going to the pub I also got to see my friend's new Fabarm shotgun.

After the pub visit there was time for cruising leisurely in the suburbs. I eventually ended up watching some aircraft landings at the Helsinki-Vantaa airport and then the exhibitions at the Finnish Aviation Museum.

The museum visit was very nice, with lots of nostalgic planes and photos from the pioneering era of aviation, and the second world war. I was the only customer and it was interesting to wander in the huge, quiet halls filled with all kinds of airplanes.

Having seen the museum, I continued my sunday cruise to the twisty backroads of Vantaa. After some enjoyable riding it was time to return back to Helsinki, and enjoy ice cream in the Seurasaari open air museum.

To complete the picture, I'm going next to the Tennispalatsi megaplex to see if any tickets are available to to premiere of Kill Bill vol. 2, and maybe watch Starsky & Hutch.

Some pictures from the ride are on the Routa MC site.

Here is the interview in English:

WebDevMagazine: Can you tell me ore about OSCOM. What is the organization aim?

OSCOM has two purposes, marketing and technical. On the marketing side, we aim to raise the public awareness in the availability and feasibility of Open Source Content Management Systems. This is what our first conferences focused on, and the reason why we maintain the CMS Matrix. On their own the different OSCMS projects do not have the weight required for reaching the mainstream users. However, with a central organization like OSCOM it is possible.

On the technical side we aim to improve the different Open Source CMSs, and get them to interoperate. We see that there are different phases of Content Management implementations, and at some of these phases a different CMS might be the optimal solution. Implementation of common standards makes it easier for users to switch It also reduces the need to waste effort by reinventing the wheel across all the projects.

The main activity on the technical side is arranging interoperability implementation events, Sprints, where people from different Open Source CMS projects come to implement some common standard or tool into their project.

To support this OSCOM also hosts some Open Source tool projects, the latest of these being the Kupu XHTML editor and the BXE XML editor. The criteria for hosting such projects under the OSCOM brand is that they must be useful across many or all CMS projects.

We also provide a news aggregation system focused on topics of Open Source CMS interest named Planet OSCOM.

WebDevMagazine: How can become a member of this organization and are you interested in covering new countries?

Members are selected from people participating actively in the OSCOM activities. The selection is done by the members of the association. To get involved with OSCOM, the easy first steps are:

• Subscribe the OSCOM mailing list
• Start providing an OSCOM topic RSS feed from your website for Planet OSCOM
• Participate in OSCOM events or projects
• If you work with an Open Source CMS project, start working on implementing some of the OSCOM-endorsed standards and tools

At the moment OSCOM mostly operates on an international basis. There also is a recently founded suborganization called OSCOM Germany, working to create OSCOM resources and materials focused on that language and area. Similar country organizations could be possible in other places as well, if there is enough interest.

WebDevMagazine: Is the Microsoft an enemy for you (OSCOM)

As the provider of a proprietary CMS system, they certainly are a competitor to all the Open Source Content Management System projects.

However, with the arrival of .Net and Web Services Microsoft also seems to be opening up to common standards and interoperability. If this trend continues, Microsoft could even become a de-facto partner of the OSCOM community.

WebDevMagazine: OSCOM meeting next year in Bulgaria, is this possible?

Well, we're certainly interested in finding good venues for the OSCOM Sprints and conferences. Eastern Europe could be a good place for such event, enabling us to tap into the large local Open Source developer community.

The key for arranging such an event would be to find a good local organizer partner, or arrange the OSCOM event as a track in an existing conference. This way we can keep the logistics at minimal and instead focus on putting together as good program as possible.

WebDevMagazine: Please tell me more about you (hobby, ...etc)

I've been working with the web since 1994, and for the last six years have been involved with the Midgard CMS project. In addition, I run my own Open Source consultancy company, Nemein.

My key to taking some time off the Internet is motorcycle traveling. We have a small group of friends doing some annual motorcycle adventures. Last summer we traveled in Western Russia and Estonia, and this summer's plan is to head to Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains. We maintain a website with photos and stories at www.routamc.org. I ride a British Triumph motorcycle

Updated 2004-04-26: Looks like the interview is now up on spisanie.com, but only for subscribers so far.

We went there in 2001 to attend the bull run festival held there every July. It was odd to see from Rodrigo's photos how empty and sleepy the city looks like outside the San Fermin festival.

Our interrail trip through Europe to the festival was one of the really good ones. We slept mostly in parks, and had lots of interesting discussions with strangers over beer. We even got thrown out of train couple of times, and crossed the Pyrenees in moonlight in a taxi, with Moonspell's Wolfheart playing.

A short-cut on the trip took us from Copenhagen's Christiania to Linz, Austria and to Verona. When finally in Pamplona most of our gear was stolen in the first night as we were sleeping outside near the back wall of the bull fight arena.

Losing our luggage was not really a big deal, and so the trip continued with less to carry. However, we learned the very useful Spanish phrase "Los ladrones cogieron mis calzoncillos" (the thieves stole my underwear).

After running with the bulls on two mornings, and spending several days in the intense festivities of Pamplona, we travelled to the small city of Plasencia, Extramadura to meet the local Korean martial arts teacher.

I have some pictures from the trip on my site.

Here's a quick list:

• OpenPSA Calendar
• Hide starting and ending hours for multi-day events of the start/end date is not the one being displayed
• Differentiate events that allow overlapping from regular events in some way (for example, blue instead of red bar in the week view)
• OpenPSA Sales
• Country and state/region are missing from Campaign CSV exports
• Add option to display persons that have been removed from a campaign in the listing
• Show additional attributes (like datamanager parameters) of the MidgardEventMember record in the listing and CSV export
• OpenPSA Core
• Make the auth_conf values host_override and prefix_override configurable to enable single sign-on between OpenPSA and other Midgard sites

Updated 2004-04-27: Patch to include country and state information to CSV exports is now in CVS

While many pieces of web software already support unicode and other character-encoding standards theoretically, their way of interoperating using them might be disfunctional.

Freedesktop.org runs the Project UTF-8, a resource for advocating unicode support in Open Source software. Maybe OSCOM should also do something in this space.

Joel Spolsky has published a short how-to on what every programmer should know about unicode. This is a very good starter on working with different character sets, as is Sam Ruby's i18n survival guide.

The Midgard CMS project has supported UTF-8 since late 1999, but still ships with latin-1 as the default. While this will change with the 1.6.0 release, a common habit of rawurlencode()ing document names can still lead to funny-looking URLs, as can be seen on the www.silja.ru site. This problem is fixed by MidCOM's requirement of stricter URL policy.

The solution was to use the convert utility from ImageMagick to automatically force all images to RGB color space.

However, even after this the thumbnails I generated were ridiculously big (500KB instead of 4KB). After some investigation I noticed that some color profiles had been included to the image files. Again, convert was able to fix this.

The options used here were:

-colorspace rgb +profile "*"

Bug has been filed on adding support for these to the image datatype in MidCOM datamanager.

As an addition, it looks like JPEG is now having patent issues, like the GIF format some years ago. Time for inventing a patent-free photography format?

B2B websites must support a more complex buying process than B2C sites. Three key goals are to make a buyer's shortlist, offer a downloadable advocacy kit, and build a reputation for great service.

Some of these ideas, combined with business blogging could be the way Nemein will communicate in the future. We're an Open Source consultancy, and helping potential clients convince their bosses on the viability of OS software is very important.

Daniel Carrera from the OOo team has posted a very good summary on the stories.

• IRC log: How open source projects can improve their PR
• Getting good PR for your Open Source project
• The Care and Feeding of the Press

This is very topical now that OpenPSA is going public on May 8th.

Motiva is using the yamp-based staging/live scripts and the filesystem cache engine from MidCOM 1.2.x. The site is available in three languages: Finnish, English and Swedish.

The server signature is also quite interesting:

Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) Midgard/1.6.0/Repository/MultiLang PHP/4.2.3

MidCOM provides many nice new features for the site, including:

• Clean, pronounceable URLs
• "Edit this page" functionality
• RSS news feeds
• New site components

The site conversion from the old NemeinNavBar system to MidCOM was handled by Henri Kaukola from Nemein.

This is a semi-public beta, in the way that the package can be downloaded by anyone, but we've invited some organizations to try it out. The software is available under GNU GPL.

We're mostly interested in the following beta testing areas:

• Installation hurdles
• Confusion with how to get started
• Possibly new translations

To get started with the OpenPSA beta test,

• Install Midgard
• Install OpenPSA
• Log into OpenPSA Manager
• Create a new company
• Initialize OpenPSA for the company
• Log into OpenPSA
• Create users and grant permissions
• Start using the system

It would be great to handle possible problems and questions on the OpenPSA user mailing list.