Category: Digital

Web Content Management (WCM) is growing by leaps and bounds: 

It's that promise that's driving growing interest in WCM. Gartner Latest News about Gartner estimates the market for the software will move past $2.5 billion by next year. Other analysts say linking other enterprise content management (ECM) with Web-facing solutions is the key to unlocking more investment in WCM, with Forrester predicting that overall ECM demand will far outstrip overall growth in the software market, growing 19 percent per year to reach $4 billion by 2008.

Read full article: Web Content Management Tools Help Close the Deal

It can be helpful to have a suite of 'cheat sheets' on hand if you do web design or programming. Some cheat sheets available on the web include:

• Photoshop CS2 Shortcut Cheat Sheet
• Dreamweaver MX Cheat Sheet
• CSS Cheat Sheet
• PHP Cheat Sheet
• Adobe Illustrator CS2 Cheat Sheet
• MySQL Cheat Sheet
• mod_rewrite Cheat Sheet
• .htaccess Cheat Sheet
• Hex Color Cheat Sheet
• Javascript Cheat Sheet

If you can't find what you are looking for here, then check out these other pages full of cheat sheets:

• Our Favorite Cheat Sheets
• Cheat Sheet Roundup

A very nice article on using Google to the Max: 

Whenever you search for more than one keyword at a time, a search engine has a default method of how to handle that keyword. Will the engine search for both keywords or for either keyword? The answer is called a Boolean default; search engines can default to Boolean AND (it'll search for both keywords) or Boolean OR (it'll search for either keyword). Of course, even if a search engine defaults to searching for both keywords (AND) you can usually give it a special command to instruct it to search for either keyword (OR). Google's Boolean default is AND; that means if you enter query words without modifiers, Google will search for all of them. If you search for:

XML Java "web Services"

Google will search for all the words. If you want to specify that either word is acceptable, you put an OR between each item:

XML OR Java OR "Web Services"

If you want to have definitely one term and one of two or more other terms, you group them with parentheses, like this:

XML (Java OR "Web Services")

This query searches for the word "Java" or phrase "Web Services" along with the word "XML." A stand-in for OR borrowed from the computer programming realm is the | (pipe) character, as in:

XML (Java | "Web Services")

If you want to specify that a query item must not appear in your results, use a -.(minus sign or dash).

XML Java -"Web Services"

Read full article: Google MyWay - How to search Google efficiently

An excellent discussion of how to make your web site 'printer friendly' at A List Apart. 

For robust content management, my favorite product is Expressions Engine (for complex web sites such as news sites) and WordPress (yeah, it's a blog, but it's easy and does all the content management most simple sites need). Both are PHP/MySQL based, and easily extensible by plugins, custom code, API tags, or simply hacking the PHP source code. Drupal is also a contender that sits somewhere between Expressions Engine and WordPress in functionality.

Willing to go beyond PHP? Here are three alternative open-source CMS's worth taking for a spin:

• Bricolage -- Perl based (read review)
• Plone -- Python based, using Zope's transactional object database
• Magnolia -- Built on the Java Content Repository Standard (JSR-170).

Willing to spend some money? Check out these commercial tools:

• RedDot
• PaperThin
• CrownPeak
• QuantumArt

Have you ever wanted an easy way to use Firefox on both a Mac and PC, while keeping everything easily portable between various machines?

With this solution you can store your Firefox settings on almost any storage device, including a portable USB thumb drive.

Read More 

This bold move by Massachusetts bears watching:

The state of Massachusetts has laid out a plan to switch all its workers away from Microsoft's Word, Excel and other desktop software applications, delivering what would be one of the most significant setbacks to the software company's battle against open source software in its home market.

Two years from now it will be interesting to see if they regret this decision, or feel vindicated. 

Read full article: Massachusetts set to switch off Microsoft

Last night I finally figured out a workaround to a frustrating Google Maps issue in Internet Explorer.

I've seen IE have problems with perfectly valid HTML in many other cases. Here's the latest IE issue.

You can't enclose a Google Map within a <div> tag and have the Google Map render correctly in Internet Explorer. I think even enclosing Google Maps within a table has issues in IE. Using the <div> tag works correctly in FireFox and other browsers though.

Here is someone else who had the same issue. 

The workaround is to use tables or other elements to format you page instead of the <div> tag.

Here is the working Google map that shows all of the Eastern Orthodox parishes in North Texas. Very cool! 

The new beta from Zimbra™ looks promising. They make extensive use of AJAX technology -- the power behind Google Maps that makes server based applications behave more like desktop software.

Zimbra™ Collaboration Suite Open Source Project Beta Launch Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology. Currently, this technology is available as a beta version. At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.

View the Zimbra™ Demo

Some recent stats on RSS technology: 

A recent Jupiter Research study found that only 3 percent of the 4,000 internet users surveyed actually use RSS. A research study from Forrester Research claims that only 2 percent of all online households in America are using RSS. A Pew Internet & American Life Project report notes that only 9 percent of Americans online have a good idea of what RSS feeds are.

So does that mean RSS is not important? Not at all. Consider these facts:

Right now 87 percent of influencers, such as journalists and analysts, are using RSS to collect key information and are adopting RSS as an information gathering and tracking tool, according to a recent Nooked survey. Furthermore, Microsoft has already announced full RSS support in the upcoming Windows Vista operating system and Internet Explorer 7, which will ensure mainstream RSS adoption.

Read full article: RSS Marketing Studies