Submitted by David Hobbs on 4 January 2008 - 10:39am
The following seemed noteworthy and interesting enough in 2007 to highlight (although most were not new in 2007):
- APIs and Mashups.Ever since the Google Maps API came out, web APIs appeared to have a lot of promise. This year this really seemed to take off, with more sites publishing APIs (see Programmable Web's list, although Programmable Web also notes that almost 50% of mashups are using Google Maps) and richer tools for using/mashing them (see Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly).
- Microformats. What a great idea: instead of waiting for a grand unified theory of the semantic web to totally transform websites, just make small changes to your existing markup to describe common, high-value information like locations and contact information. References: the book, microformats.org, wikipedia page on semantic web, the firefox Operator and Piggy Bank extensions, Can your website be your API?,and Bill Gates talking about microformats.
- Drupal. Drupal drives this site, and I have been especially impressed by its clean architecture for adding new features/modules and by the strong community supporting it (hence the clean as well as powerful out-of-the-box experience). I wasn't as impressed when I briefly played with Drupal a year or two ago, so I sense that Drupal really now has a critical mass behind it. References: my post about my first month using Drupal, the Drupal development book, and drupal.org.
- Sophisticated analytics for the masses. Although tools like Omniture SiteCatalyst are still more sophisticated and customizable, Google Analytics is really amazing, especially for a free tool: very nice user interface, sensible defaults, campaign tracking, user-defined dashboards, good reverse DNS lookup, and fast. See the Analytics Talk blog for more on Google Analytics.
I also see a lot of opportunities for improvement in 2008:
- Continued performance improvements. Ajax and more widespread javascript (such as pulldown/popup menus rather than having whole new pages load for many menus) has helped many sites speed up, but let's face it, in general using web sites is fairly slow. One example site that's particularly slow in the UI is Rhapsody, which I use every day but the performance has just got to improve (an aside: basic cellphone call quality still isn't at acceptable performance levels in my opinion, but they keep improving year by year). Hopefully Adobe AIR (previously Apollo) or some other runtime environment like it will help deploy applications that interact directly with local files and with less server trips for a dramatically faster experience for our usrs. Also see Yahoo's Exceptional Performance resources for ways to speed up existing pages.
- More sophisticated offshoring models. The naive view of offshoring goes something like this: if someone costs $X per hour in your country and $X/3 per hour in another country, then it would seem to obvious to give the work to the offshore resource. Sometimes this works. Highly repeatable tasks are the most obvious (for example call centers). Also, it often works when you can hand off a specifications document and then wait for the implementation, although this Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) on the outsourcing problems of the 787 points out interesting issues there too: like your outsources suppliers outsourcing to their own suppliers, quality control/process issues, and taking for granted expertise/background built inside Boeing when handing off to suppliers. If the task isn't highly repeatable or very tightly specified, then the overhead of communications/management is very high. I would also expect that places that are currently considered "offshore" will be developing innovative products themselves (see this blog post: State of Innovation in India).
- Improvements in single sign on and passwords. If I go to Amazon and then B&H now, I have to log on twice. Worse, if I go to very small sites I have to create a separate username/password (it's one thing to trust Amazon with my password, but why should I trust a very small site with that information?). I plan on adding OpenID for accounts on to this site, and I would encourage others to add it to theirs (many platforms such as Drupal now support this). OpenID allows the user to decide who they trust to keep/authorize their account information (notably password) and you chose what information to give to different sites. Once you log in once, you don't need to provide your password again when you go to a site using OpenID. Hopefully at least smaller sites will start adopting OpenID, but it would be great if this was adopted by larger players as well. I'm still hoping for a replacement of passwords entirely, perhaps by graphical methods, (how archaic is remembering a bunch of passwords, or, worse, if you force users to use "strong" passwords and change them a lot, then they'll just write them down?), but at least reducing the number of accounts you have would help.
- Mashup building for the masses. Although APIs and mashups have taken a big stride forward, I hope to see some standardization in APIs and enhanced mashup editors that allow less technical people to create their own interesting (not only with maps!) mashups. See my Enabling the Interaction Publisher post.
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Submitted by David Hobbs on 1 December 2007 - 11:40pm
Now that I've been using Drupal for a month (Drupal is driving this site), I thought it would be a good time to write up my impressions of this open source CMS. Obviously this is before I know the tool in depth, and also before I become jaded or a zealot. For reference, over the past seven years I've worked with a couple custom CMS systems, both driving very large and small web sites, and I also have used Wordpress (not a CMS) for two other personal blogs. Also, my emphasis using Drupal for this site has been as a blog so I haven't fully explored all the CMS features. I really like Drupal for many reasons including:
- Very easy to add features to a site. You download a module, set some parameters, and then you have a new feature (instructions). Examples of useful features that I've added easily to this site: feedburner redirects (Feedburner module), CAPTCHA checking for form submission to block robots (CAPTCHA module), email forwarding posts (Forward module), SEO and human-friendly urls (pathauto module), links to digg and other services (Service Links module), and full name listing as author for blog posts (Authorship module). That's not counting the really useful core modules that I've enabled for the site like the ability to pull in / aggregate other feeds (Aggregator module), comments (Comments module), automatically pinging services such as Technorati (Ping module), search (Search module), some web access statistics (Statistics module), the ability to create different taxonomies/categorizations (Taxonomy module), and the ability to automatically have features of the site turned off under high load (Throttle module).
- Built-in performance and throttling. You can set how aggressively you cache, and selectively set which features get turned off under higher load.
- Upcoming features. Since Drupal has gained some momentum, one feels the inevitability of new features being added as time goes on. Also, since it looks to be easy to add new modules, you could add a module yourself if you wanted.
- Nice modularization. I haven't read the documentation on how to develop modules, but, just seeing how modules work when installing them, the pluggability of modules seems very nice. Once installed/enabled, modules aren't just stovepipes. For example, when in admin mode the CAPTCHA module shows a message next to every form on your site asking if you want CAPTCHA there. Also, it appears that modules can easily write to the log screen, and are all controlled from the same core administration screen. When writing a post, the different options are embedded right on one page (for instance, the pathauto module automatically indicates, and lets you override, the alias it plans on giving your post).
- Flexible themes. I'm using the Garland theme, and I liked how you can set your own colors and other things are parameterized like your logo.
- Multiple taxonomies. You can create easily create your own category lists.
Perhaps above everything else, it just seems that the details have been done very nicely in Drupal. Overall a site in Drupal appears to be easy to administer. These are some items that weren't as smooth: a) didn't get the Backup module to work quickly enough (was faster just to use scripts to do it rather than get the module to work), b) still don't fully understand the file upload/download environment (especially for counting the downloads), c) by default you're in raw html editing (yes, you can install a web-based HTML editor, but the ones I tried so far don't seem very useful), and d) getting the transparent logo needed for the Garland theme working quickly. A note to people currently working in a large, complex enterprise content management environment: I highly recommend playing with Drupal to get the creative juices flowing and also to work in a less constrained environment. Also, it's nice to work from a clean slate on a new site (although I've already bumped into a place where I wish I had set up the site differently in the first place). But of course working in an enterprise environment has a host of other requirements that have to be dealt with (for example standardized look across sites, security, single sign on, integration with internal repositories, existing systems, and standardized administration).
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