Preparing for LIFT(off)

4 comments January 31st, 2006

Bricolage 1.10.0 is Out!

Bricolage, the perl open-source content management system we use at SAPO for boosting up some of our sites (like it’sHomepage, the help/support site, two major national newspapers:DN and JN, etc.) have reached an important stage with a new version just released today! As you can attest by reading the offical announcement, there were a lot of improvements and house cleaning, To me, as bricolage system administrator and developer they are a few, very important ones, I would like to summarize here…

• A revamped user interface: the old interface had major usability problems, so it’s in my opinion one of the most important developments. The new user interface, is XHTML compliant and now fully supports CSS styling, it now uses much more screen area than the older interface base on tables. The new interface is also powered by javascript, allowing some functions to be made using Ajax technology and allowing for instance the edition of documents without reloads.
• Bricolage, now supports PHP templating, thanks to the PHP::Interpreter, that allows you to use the PHP5 interpreter from within the Perl interpreter, giving developers easy access between them. This feature was made possible thanks to the support given by SAPO on this development as an open-source sponsor.
• LDAP Authentication is now support, but most important is that to allow LDAP, Bricolage now supports a pluggable authentication allowing it’s developers to built and use they’re preferred authentication methods.

Seems also, an unfortunately for me (heheh) that there was also room left for some normalization, so some of the names changed, but I actually think might pay the effort of converting our templates and scripts, since the old namespace used had lots of tricky things and could became quite confusing at some point.

Well for all the effort, congrats David of this successful release!

10 comments January 24th, 2006

Interview for LisbonLab

It was just published an interview I gave to Hugo, from LisbonLab, about myself, my blogs and my goals. Thanks Hugo for the opportunity!

Add comment January 23rd, 2006

Del.icio.us Director

Lately I’ve became quite a fan of del.icio.us, just a little more since António showed me a prototype of an Ajax Interface alternative to the one del.icio.us provides by default, it’s called Del.icio.us Director, and besides being a super cool usage of Ajax technology it does raises the user experience, even using it becames as simple as selecting a bookmark!

Note: For those of you who (still) don’t know del.icio.us, keep reading for a brief, and personal explanation about it..

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Social as in: allowing you to share your bookmarks organized by tags. It also allows you to search other users bookmarks.

The results can be quite excellent, simply put when we search in Google for a specific term(word, tag, etc..), one normally gets a (huge) list with links to pages that might (or might not) contain such term, and although Google results can be quite accurate, when you make the same search on del.icio.us, you end up getting links to pages, this links represent bookmarks from other users, which they “marked” as having something to do with your query, typically with a particular term, or tag.

The returning results tend to be (in my humble opinion) more valuable than a simple search on most search engines. I believe it as to do with the human factor that you get from del.icio.us: someone (as in human) actually related a page with a tag or multiple tags, giving me some extra value for this link, since this relation might not come from the simple analysis of this page content, or referring links.

Give it a try!

1 comment January 19th, 2006

eBay Developer Challenge 2006

eBay is promoting a developers challenge together with O’Reilly they’re offering $5,000 for the best innovative development.

As encouragement they remind us that, what we know today as eBay, was made during a Labour Day weekend by a single developer back in the 1995!

The challenge begun on Nov.14 but the submission deadline is up until the the end of this month, on the Jan. 31 2006.

1 comment January 18th, 2006