The Reclaim software is far from finished, so if you know anything about WordPress plugin development you can lend a hand to this open source project started by Sascha Lobo and Felix Schwenzel.

I like the concept, even though I don’t need it for myself: I have almost all of what I ‘produced’ right here on my blog (except for afew hundred not so interesting tweets from more than a year ago). But being able to keep a copy of what you publish is a good idea, in my view. Dave Winer proposes to author your stuff in a single tool under your control, then publish wherever you fancy. Reclaim proposes the inverse way: publish where you want, then copy it all into your blog. Conceptually, Dave’s approach has the advantage; in practice, many people may well find a tool like Reclaim Social simpler to use. And WordPress is a good platform for such a tool, if the reclaimed content can be a part of the normal backup/restore tool in WP.

If you read the story, you will notice that

• the authors started using familiar tools, like Python’s reStructuredText and Google Documents;
• they then noticed that those tools did not measure up to their requirements, and had to switch again and again – until they ended up with LaTeX, allowing them to clearly structure the content and only then apply the formatting and layout for a paper version;
• e-book formats are a world on their own, and it’s a complex world with many pitfalls;
• technical content is never finished, so it requires forethought and planning to keep up with reality during the lifetime of your document.

All this about a relatively simple thing as a book, and by that I mean no disrespect to the authors. But assembling and maintaining say a website with hundreds of pages will be even harder, since such an endeavour add factors such as user management, target audiences, multiple authors, possibly multiple languages, categorization of pages, an editorial policy, and more – and that’s not mentioning a series of technical aspects. Enterprise content management ups the ante again, sometimes by several factors. So, yes, Content Management can be hard, very hard, to do right.

* * *

And what about the book, you ask? Well, if I’m ever going to do anything serious with Django I’ll need a copy of “Two Scoops of Django“. The sample chapter was a bit over my head, since I’m an absolute Django beginner, but the patterns and tips seemed logical and well explained. The writing is clear and sensible. The only thing I did not like is the fact that code samples are sometimes being split over two pages. That should not happen except when the code is longer than what fits on a single page, and even then I would prefer the code to be rewritten and packaged in smaller blocks. But all in all, this looks like a worthwhile book.

Garmin Express fails to check the current OS X version before continuing…

Once again, Garmin software engineers failed to add a simple test to their product, leaving me in an installation procedure with no options. Sad, no?

Luckily for me, I have since upgraded the iMac to OSX version 10.6.8 – not yet perfect, of course, but a necessary step on the way to OSX Mountain Lion. So now I’m in the process of upgrading all Garmin apps (again) – I hope to conclude that operation without further hitches…

Working out a specific information architecture and writing down the corresponding governance rules isn’t limited to the content management that goes on – or should go on – within the enterprise. Both activities (as well as many others) must be taken in to account for any serious content management project.

If you want a quick intro to Bootstrap without going to a user group meeting, have a look at Matt Raible’s extensive Bootstrap overview (he describes the creation of this presentation app in his blog post of April 23, 2013).

But there are also significant differences with Dropbox.

First of all, SparkleShare provides not just the client side of the tool, but also the server part, where you’ll be storing your files. This allows you to choose where your files will be stored: on your PC at home, on a company server, on a server hosted elsewhere: anything is possible – as long as you can install and manage a Git instance on your repository server.

Secondly, SparkleShare is not a polished commercial product, but an open source project. The project has made client versions available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

But configuring the server may not be as easy as creating a user account, unless you will be using GitHub to store your files. I haven’t tried it yet, but the documentation seems scaringly thin for someone who has never used Git…


$.ajax( $("#prod").val() + ".jpg", {
  type: "GET",
  data: "{}",
  error: function() { $("#preview").html( "" ) },
  fail: function() { $("#preview").html( "" ) },
  done: function() {
    $("#preview").html($("<img>").attr("src",$("#prod").val()+".jpg"));
  },
  success: function() {
    $("#preview").html($("<img>").attr("src",$("#prod").val()+".jpg"));
  },
}


If it wasn’t clear: I’m trying to check the existence of a JPEG file on the webserver before showing it in a DIV with the id “preview”, where the JPEG is named after the OPTION value in the “prod” SELECT. The code snippet should be packaged in a function called when the user changes the product selection, of course. I have tried a few variants of the code, having started with “$.get()“, but none of them worked as expected.

I have found a few mentions of IE8 trouble with the “$.ajax()” function, like these: http://forum.jquery.com/topic/jquery-ajax-ie8-problem or https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/1418. I’m yet to find an clear explanation for what might go wrong with my simple HTTP GET, however…

Do I really have to give up on jQuery in order to get it running on the admittedly antiquated IE8, and apply the solution presented on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2659208/ie8-jquery-ajax-call-giving-parsererror-from-django-for-json-data-which-seem? Or is there a better solution without jQuery?

You want a market-driven healthcare economy? You’ll get it when the payer has as much clout as the biller does. And as Yglesias notes, the name of that payer is government…

(Source: Wired.com)