Category: Technology

Authoring Proceedings

One of the things that dis­tin­guishes the XML con­fer­ence is the fact we pub­lish pro­ceed­ings that are open to the pub­lic a few months after the event, and avail­able to all con­fer­ence attendees as soon as they’re processed. 

The speak­ers often com­plain about writ­ing them, but the attendees, lib­rar­ies, stu­dents, and tech­no­logy his­tor­i­ans always appre­ci­ate the effort. I fig­ure that if it’s worth going through a peer-reviewed sub­mis­sion pro­cess, pre­par­ing the talk, fly­ing to the con­fer­ence and speak­ing to lots of people, then it’s worth archiv­ing what you said in a way that people can still under­stand 6 months later (which isn’t the case with Power­Point or equi­val­ent slides, which simply lack the con­text and inform­a­tion to make sense out of all those pretty graph­ics). Pro­ceed­ings also have a lot more room than a 45-minute talk, so people can add all the appro­pri­ate ref­er­ences, add more tech­nic­al dis­cus­sion, or bring in odd facts that they don’t have time for on the podium.

The ques­tion is how to make it easi­er for people to cre­ate their papers? It’s always sur­pris­ing how many people speak­ing at an XML con­fer­ence seem to have dif­fi­culty in writ­ing papers in XML and how often we get the request to just let them use Word (hmm, shades of what I used to hear when work­ing for SoftQuad, but from XML-savvy people). One poten­tial answer is to get more author­ing tools vendors to make their tools avail­able to the speak­ers, as a way of mar­ket­ing their tools’ abil­it­ies. We’ve done this in the past, with a cus­tom DTD. This year we want to encour­age more vendors to make tools avail­able, so we’ve decided to cre­ate a sub­set of Doc­Book to be used for the con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings. If you are involved with an XML author­ing tool pro­du­cer and are inter­ested in provid­ing a cus­tom­iz­a­tion for the Doc­Book sub­set and being lis­ted on the con­fer­ence web­site, send me an email.

I’m being immensely helped in cre­at­ing the sub­set by Norm Walsh, Eve Maler (both Doc­Book gurus), Ben­jamin Jung (who does the final pro­ceed­ings pro­cessing), and Philip Mans­field (who cre­ated the style sheets for the pro­ceed­ings sub­mis­sion sys­tem and will have some tools for cre­at­ing pro­ceed­ings papers this year).

We’re work­ing on the sub­set now; it will be announced on the con­fer­ence web site when it’s ready. We already know it will be close to sim­pli­fied Doc­Book, with article as the top-level ele­ment, author inform­a­tion in articleinfo, and cooked bib­li­o­graph­ies, for those of you who want to get star­ted on your pro­ceed­ings papers or your tool cus­tom­iz­a­tions early ;-).

Losing Data

In all the dis­cus­sions about weblogs.com clos­ing down, it’s good to see that people are going to be able to get their data. And that lots of people are step­ping up offer­ing to help con­vert that data into oth­er formats. This is a ser­vice not always avail­able in the com­mer­cial world, unfortunately.

The first (non-blog) ver­sion of laurenwood.org was hos­ted on a com­mer­cial ISP that was sold to someone else, then someone else, etc. Since I’d paid a year in advance (silly me) I did­n’t really notice until it was time to renew, and then I could­n’t find out who to pay! The whois registry gave me a phone num­ber, the people at the end of the phone claimed to not know who I was or what my web­site was, or even the name of the com­pany I’d ori­gin­ally signed up with. It was no sur­prise when that site even­tu­ally just dis­ap­peared from the web. For­tu­nately I’d copied most of the data by then, and now I either host myself or make reg­u­lar backups of sites (such as textuality.com) that are hos­ted elsewhere.

Under Construction

Updat­ing to Word­Press 1.2 at the moment; the site may not look so pretty until I get my style sheets sor­ted out and the tweaks put back.

Update: I now have most of the tweaks in place and the site should work much the same as it did before. I’ll intro­duce some of the new fea­tures over the next little while, so expect some changes on the site.

Updat­ing to Word­Press 1.2 at the moment; the site may not look so pretty until I get my style sheets sor­ted out and the tweaks put back.

Update: I now have most of the tweaks in place and the site should work much the same as it did before. I’ll intro­duce some of the new fea­tures over the next little while, so expect some changes on the site.

Using Blogs for Project Management

I chaired the RSS and Web­log day at Sey­bold San Fran­cisco 2003 (I’d put in a link but there’s noth­ing use­ful there that isn’t pass­word-pro­tec­ted). One of the pan­el­ists was talk­ing about using blogs for pro­ject man­age­ment, espe­cially when new people are expec­ted on the team. The idea is that new people can come up to speed quickly and don’t need to have mega-mounds of email for­war­ded to them. Sounds good, but in prac­tice I’m find­ing that people have a hard time adapt­ing to using more than one meth­od of com­mu­nic­a­tion. So many people use email for a simple todo-list track­er and pro­ject man­ager that they send email first and think about maybe doing a blog entry “if they have time” afterwards.

I chaired the RSS and Web­log day at Sey­bold San Fran­cisco 2003 (I’d put in a link but there’s noth­ing use­ful there that isn’t pass­word-pro­tec­ted). One of the pan­el­ists was talk­ing about using blogs for pro­ject man­age­ment, espe­cially when new people are expec­ted on the team. The idea is that new people can come up to speed quickly and don’t need to have mega-mounds of email for­war­ded to them. Sounds good, but in prac­tice I’m find­ing that people have a hard time adapt­ing to using more than one meth­od of com­mu­nic­a­tion. So many people use email for a simple todo-list track­er and pro­ject man­ager that they send email first and think about maybe doing a blog entry “if they have time” afterwards.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Using Blogs for Pro­ject Management”

What WordPress Does Right

There’s been a flurry of interest in Word­Press ever since it was announced that Mov­ab­le­Type will be mov­ing to a fee-based mod­el. There already was a sub­stan­tial amount of interest in Word­Press. That’s because the people run­ning it (mostly, from what I can see, Matt Mul­len­weg, and there’s a longer list at About Word­Press) did quite a few things right. So here’s Lauren’s Product Man­age­ment 101, using Word­Press as the example.

There’s been a flurry of interest in Word­Press ever since it was announced that Mov­ab­le­Type will be mov­ing to a fee-based mod­el. There already was a sub­stan­tial amount of interest in Word­Press. That’s because the people run­ning it (mostly, from what I can see, Matt Mul­len­weg, and there’s a longer list at About Word­Press) did quite a few things right. So here’s Lauren’s Product Man­age­ment 101, using Word­Press as the example.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “What Word­Press Does Right”

Technology Works?

I’ve been slowly work­ing on a tutori­al for using entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs that I prom­ised the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion Tech­nic­al Com­mit­tee (ERTC) I’d do (I chair the TC). As befits a prop­er tutori­al, I figured I should test out the bits as I’m writ­ing them in more than one imple­ment­a­tion, just so I can warn people of the poten­tial pit­falls. This has proved to be a frus­trat­ing exper­i­ence for me, and I can see why so many people say tech­no­logy is just too hard.

I’ve been slowly work­ing on a tutori­al for using entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs that I prom­ised the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion Tech­nic­al Com­mit­tee (ERTC) I’d do (I chair the TC). As befits a prop­er tutori­al, I figured I should test out the bits as I’m writ­ing them in more than one imple­ment­a­tion, just so I can warn people of the poten­tial pit­falls. This has proven to be a frus­trat­ing exper­i­ence for me, and I can see why so many people say tech­no­logy is just too hard.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Tech­no­logy Works?”