blogging

To paraphrase Groucho Marx – I don't like to speak ill of the dead but in the case of our old Wordpress blog site, I'll make an exception.

Merely four postings ago I declared that I was quite unhappy with our blog web site and that we'd be moving away from Wordpress and towards a Drupal platform. Well, four months later I'm happy to say that this has (finally) all come true.

I could say a few things about why it took so long but I'm not going to do that here. Instead I'm going to use that as the basis for a number of future posts about the power, and usability weaknesses, of Drupal.

Drupal is a very well established, open source content management system. I came to know it in a sort of 'back-to-front' way because my first experience with it was by tracing through the bowels of its engine and finding out what made it tick. Compared to Wordpress innards (very scary in its haphazardness) Drupal's core looked like the work of a genius (which perhaps it is).

Shedding a Tear for Our Wordpress Blog

Last week I attended the MESH conference for the second consecutive year and once again the issue arose around evaluating the use of social media technology by a commercial enterprise.

It's been just almost a year since I focused my professional attention onto usability for web applications and launched this web site. I've known for about eleven-and-a-half months that, as a hybrid between a blog and a business web site, this site has significant issues. My goal was to see if I could mix my personal perspectives with a professional profile. The experiment is over and I'm not afraid to say it's a problematic mix and change is required.

A curious bit of personal history came to mind after I read Rachel Clarke's blog post about an online game (SaveMyHusband.com) which is based on a fake kidnapping. Rachel picked up on my 'We Were Framed' post in which I explain how we use 'frames' to distinguish the real from the fake.