CMS or Portal?

I have a question for all you university web pros lurking out there: if you were to somehow secure the resources to implement one enterprise-level project, would you choose a CMS or a portal? Lots of you out there have experience with one or both of these— care to share? Although I haven’t actually secured the resources needed (sigh…), I am starting to prepare for that magical day. And I keep going back and forth about which one would be best to go for first. Both of them have their advantages, and both of them are major projects that would be tough to pull off well. I like the idea of the uniformity that a CMS could give our site, and I also like the idea of having a framework that would allow folks with no web development experience to update their sites easily. This is what all the CMSs promise, but I guess the cynic in me finds it hard to believe that they can actually deliver on it. Plus, being a Standardistatrix, I have yet to see a enterprise-level CMS that outputs the kind of code that I am comfortable with. I would love to be wrong about this, so please tell me if I am! As far as a portal goes, I would love the idea of the functionality and targeted content that it could provide. I also like the idea of diverting on-campus users to a portal, and using the main university home page to target exterior audiences. I think it would be a relief to serve fewer target audiences on our main page, as I talked about here. I wonder, though, if folks would actually use the portal. Would they drink if I led them to water? Plus, there I have same standards queasiness with portals that I have with CMSs. So what would you do? Any insights to share?

My New Domain

I am once again master of my domain, having picked up a new one this weekend. I thought I’d let the cat out of the bag before Steve explodes. The inspiration came from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which I am about 3/4 of the way through reading, so no spoilers please. The following passage made me go into convulsive giggle fits on the plane. You’ve got to love anyone who can combine biological nerdery with a description of the protagonist lying on the floor after being punched in the face for trying to hit on a girl in a imperfectly understood foreign language. All within the context of information technology nerdery, and with the kind of jaunty tone that I can never get enough of:

Some sort of commotion is happening up in that remote plane of most people’s heads, five to six feet above the floor, where social interaction traditionally takes place. Mary’s date is being hustled off to the side by a large powerful fellow— it is hard to recognize faces at this angle, but a good candidate would be Rod. Rod is shouting in Qwghlmian. Actually, everyone is shouting in Qwghlmian— even the ones who are speaking English— because Waterhouse’s speech-recognition centers have a bad case of jangly ganglia. Best to leave that fancy stuff for later, and concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be a vertebrate again. After that, quadrupedal locomotion might come in handy.
A perky Qwghlmian-Australian fellow in an RAAF uniform steps up and grabs his right anterior fin, jerking him up the evolutionary ladder before he’s ready […]

That Post-Conference Buzz

I don’t know how it happens, but whenever I go to a conference, I come back 5 years younger. This lasts for a couple of weeks, before I go through an accelerated aging process and end up back where I started. But right now I have that post-cenference buzz (I don’t mean this post-conference buzz, but that one was good too…). I have so much energy that my head is spinning, so I needed to write this brain dump before I write a more serious post about the E-recruitment conference. Man, SXSW can’t come fast enough for me right now. So here are some disjointed thoughts, in random order:

• I have offically determined that the optimum number of pairs of shoes to take to a conference is six. This is the number I took to SXSW last year (remember, Chris?), as well as to this conference. Both times, I ended up wearing shoes that I would have cut if I had decided to lighten the load. Given the direct link between my kick-ass shoes and my self-confidence, I guess this is no suprise.
• The LiquidMatrix and Datatel folks are fun, generous, and talented. Michelle, Matt, Graham, and David all need to go to SXSW because I didn’t have enough time to talk to them in San Diego. Plus, we need a stronger educational component there— there’s is great stuff coming out of that arena.
• Graham may have convinced me of the merits of blogrolls. I may have to do some experimenting with one around here.
• I didn’t hate speaking as much as I thought I might. I was nervous, but it turned out OK.
• Matt did six presentations! Ranging from usability testing, to web standards to unobtrusive javascript. Truly impressive.
• I got all the way to San Diego, started unpacking my bag (that I had checked on the plane, mind you) and realized that I’m never going to be able to get rid my life of redwood leaves. Maybe I should change my logo.
• It was interesting, and I must say a bit refreshing, to think about universities from a business point of view for a few days.
• I learned some corporate secrets, but I’ll never tell. Mwah ha ha!
• I read a passage in Cryptonomicon on the plane ride home that made me laugh my head off, and led to me buying a new domain name last night. More on this to come, since it merits its own post.

E-Recruitment Mastery Workshop Wrap-up

I am now home from the E-rectuitment Mastery Workshop, which was a great success. Thanks very much to the folks at LiquidMatrix and Noel-Levitz for organizing a great event, and for asking me to participate. Here is a pdf of the slides from my presentation, which I am releasing under a Creative Commons License. I’m not sure that the slides stand on their own very well, since I tend to not put a lot of what I’m saying on my slides, but you can get a general sense of the presentation from them. There was a good discussion after my talk about the benefits of providing strategic planning information to adminstrators to help them understand everything that is involved in the maintenance of University web sites. I mentioned a thread on the Uweb-d list that talked about estimating the total cost of University web sites; unfortunately, I have found that there is no easy way for me to link directly to archived threads on the list. I am going to try to get permission from the participants in the thread to republish their messages here. In the meantime, if you are interested, you can join the list or log in to your account here.
Then, search the archives for the subject line “Total Cost of Web”. This will get you to the thread, which talks about potential ways to estimate the cost of a University’s web site, and has some preliminary numbers that some folks came up with. These numbers are large, and could probably help making a case for the purchase of tools or development of strategies to reduce those numbers. I also discussed the idea setting up a Web Council on campus, as a way to bring together the decentralized web developers on my campus. The idea is to meet a couple of times a semester to share resources, ideas, strategies, and generally make sure we’re on the same page and not duplicating efforts. Later on in the conference, a participant mentioned that she tried this on her campus, which has a centralized web structure, and it was a disaster. So I wanted to ask all of you out there if you have any experience with a similar type of set-up, or insights on this to share.

The Punchline to a Really Geeky Joke

This title was supplied by Brian, who very patiently listened to me go on about how my feeds were broken and I had no idea why. When I told him I finally figured out that it was because of some extra whitespace in my comments.php file, he said “That sounds like the punchline to a really geeky joke.” And it pretty much is. Anyway, my feeds are fixed. I leave tomorrow to go to the E-recruitment conference, where I will be speaking. The preparation has been pretty torturous, and I’m dreading the punchline to come. The plane ride may be a good time to ponder what Chris just wrote, as I delve more and more into marketing and try to figure out how to balance all the separate and conflicting pulls at my expertise. I’m looking forward to meeting folks in the same boat, so say Hi if you’re there, and maybe we can have a margarita or some coffee. I’ll put my slides up here this weekend when I get back from sunny San Diego. Til then, you’ll have a (much needed?) break from my really geeky jokes.

The Zen of Textpattern

Just when I think I couldn’t love Textpattern any more, it gets better. I spent some time this week implementing the newly created live comment preview plugin by Nils Herrmann. This in itself is an important milestone: I now have a perfectly hack-free Textpattern install, that’s doing everything I’ve been able to throw at it with the help of a few mighty plugins. While I was in there messing with the comments, I also shamelessly ripped off Jon Hicks and used a plugin to remove some of the fields from the comment form for folks who have commented previously and chosen to store a cookie. No need to clutter up the comment form with the Author, Email, and Url information if Textpattern already knows it, is there? And since getting rid of my comment hacks actually allowed the cookies to start working again, everything is golden. Playing around with this new setup, I started to focus on a feature of textpattern comments I never really thought about before: the Forget check box. And I started really liking the idea that by using Textpattern comments I can just check a box, submit, and forget things. See Figure 1 for an illustration of this magical feature. I have big plans for this, let me tell you. I mean, who doesn’t have things they would like to forget with a simple check and click? Freshmen year of high school? Forget. The time I spilled wine on Brian’s department chair’s wife? Forget. The time I spilled coffee all over the entire Oceanography department in one meeting? Forget. The fact that there is a disturbing pattern here of me spilling things on people? Forget. The fact that I bought a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine this afternoon, ate them all, and enjoyed it? Definitely forget. You are welcome to use this as well— it’s right over there in my comment form →. If you haven’t commented or stored a cookie before, you will have to make an initial comment checking “Remember”. Make sure you think about something good when you do this— your fist kiss, that one time you were able to dunk a basketball, the time you didn’t spill anything on anyone… Once you do this, you will get the “Forget” button. Have fun, and don’t forget to check out Textpattern.
——-