Olly Hodgson has a great article up pointing out how important it is to think about the usability of your CMS, not just the websites it creates. I’m even more impressed that he realized the editor is the key point of usability in the CMS and gave advice to go about configuring it properly.

Most people think a CMS lives or dies by it’s repository design, it’s content reuse potential or some other fancy backend feature. The reality though is that content management systems are really all about creating and editing content and that’s done with the editor. Most of the user’s time is spent using the editor and so their perception of the whole system is very much dependant on how good the editor is.

It’s been interesting watching the blog adoption cycle here at Ephox. For a long time I think I was the only person actively blogging, and just from the positive effects of blogging that I’d experienced other people got interested. Our CEO was pressured into getting back into blogging again1, the engineering team started up an internal blog to share some of the cool stuff we found which never really took off and then the CEO started an internal blog2 which has helped the rest of the company get more of a grip on where he’s going. Andy started a blog and we had a couple of hires who had blogs lying dormant that they were then pressured into getting back into and suddenly there was a critical mass of people blogging – enough to have a conversation between us on the blogs.

It seems every blog post today last fortnight1 has to use the word “malaise” so I might as well chime in. What tipped me over the edge was seeing the comment:

Scoble and Mike – get a life. You peaked.

What’s really amazing about that comment isn’t just that it’s mean and inconsiderate, but that I came across it by reading Robert’s link blog. He’s actually publicizing criticism of himself. Frankly, I wouldn’t be big enough to do that. Maybe A-List bloggers are as stuck up as people tend to assume they are, but I suspect most of them are just normal people that everyone else keeps putting up on a pedestal. I certainly found Robert friendly and approachable when I met him the other week. People need to stop assuming that a link from an A-List blogger is going to make or break their business. The fact is, getting a link from an A-List blogger isn’t as big a deal as you think and it just takes the fun out of it for the A-List bloggers:

Probably the most commented on experience from Mac OS 9 was the fact that once one application crashed, they were all in trouble; generally, you were in for a complete system reboot. At last OS X came along and solved all that, finally providing protected memory and the ability to force quit one application without affecting the others. People rejoiced as they left their computers running for days on end without needing reboots and uptimes soared.

Two very interesting things I’ve learnt today:

1. Ousted is a real word.
2. Suneth has a blog.

Apparently Andy discovered him within a few hours. By the time I got back to reading feeds this morning both he and Brett had ousted him. Of course, I’ve now added him to Planet Ephox.

Opensource projects tend to have a well-earned reputation for being poorly documented. Originally this was caused by the fact that most of the people who knew the codebase were developers who didn’t have the skills or interest in writing the documentation. With opensource becoming more mainstream and more people getting involved I think that reason, while still having an effect, has become less of a problem. Despite that the quality of opensource documentation hasn’t improved – if anything it seems to be getting worse. More and more projects don’t even have half-decent reference information and just a few scraps of information on where to start.

Where is it? Clearly I’m missing something here. There’s a wiki with some good getting started overview stuff and some other chicken scratching but I’m yet to find an actual reference telling me what’s actually allowed in struts.xml. Shouldn’t that be pointed to in a big neon sign? The struts.xml page on the wiki isn’t exactly comprehensive and while the DTD is listed on the examples page it’s not exactly commented..

Oh and did I mention that wiki’s are a horrible way to write documentation?

Robert Scoble posts about saving Pandora:

…Tom talking about how the business of Internet Radio is under pressure due to coming changes in how the music industry wants Internet Radio stations to pay for the distribution of music (basically the costs will triple, if the proposed changes go into effect). After we talk about the challenges that Pandora’s business faces if the fee changes go through Tom gives me a preview of their new Sprint/mobile service.

Every so often something comes along that completely changes the way I use a computer. My new MacBook Pro has provided one of those: two finger scrolling. The concept is just so simple; to move the mouse you slide one finger across the track pad, to scroll you slide two fingers across the track pad. You can scroll vertically or horizontally so it beats a scroll wheel mouse hands down.

So for the record, if you have a textarea in Safari that is set to display: none; You can’t set it’s content via JavaScript unless you show it first. So:

edCanvas.style.display = "inline";
edCanvas.innerText = body;
edCanvas.style.display = "none";

Really annoying. For those Ephox people using the latest version of our EditLive! WordPress plugin in Safari, that’s where your content went. Pull an update from subversion soon and the issue should be fixed.

I’ve been in our San Mateo office the past week working with the sales and marketing folk which has been great, but also challenging and often frustrating. The challenge is in getting a grip on my new job as product manager, the frustrating from the initial objections we often get from clients as they try and guess what the reaction will be from their users instead of actually finding out. It’s fair enough, that’s all they have to go on but it’s frustrating to have to try and share the experiences that we’ve seen with users giving our software rave reviews. It’s also frustrating to hear negative things about software you’ve written – I always get so attached.

While most of the Ephox folk use EditLive! to edit their blog entries, there are some poor saps who are using a blog hosting service and can’t (we’ve got some interns working on a standalone blog editor with EditLive!, but that’ll take a while yet). This morning Antony learnt the value of a great editor the hard way when he copied and pasted from Microsoft Word into Typepad’s default editor:

Now I understand why so many of our users think our Microsoft Word filtering is so good…