Mar
29
2005
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Twiki pain

In the bid to up the customer communication stakes, I spent my bank holiday customising my first installation of Twiki – http://www.twiki.org – the rather good wiki package. I’ve been using Wiki’s for a good number of years now – mainly of the Zope variety, hooked up to a bug tracker. Projects without a wiki – are well outside my comfort zone.

Having installed twiki – I can now understand why we’re still awaiting the mass uptake of this tool for collaboration.

My gripes:

  • It took much time to get all the pages on the wiki password restricted. The help pages are littered with speak about ‘wiki’s are about open communication’ – well yes – but this is an internal wiki in a hosted environment – I need to issue login details
  • I had to install a patch to the core twiki system to enable sessions. Everytime I clicked on a page, I needed to re-key my username and password. The patch fixed it – but why doesn’t the system come with sessions by default – maybe I’m spoilt by Zope?
  • Sessions had to be tweaked to stop them locking against a single IP address. I understand the security implications of locking a session to an IP – but AOL users bounce between proxies like a pinball machine – and just as we do with phpBB – we switched that off.
  • I also replaced the jump to page box with a global wiki search box. Newbie wiki users will want to search – the way that twiki divides the wikis into seperate ‘webs’ is a bit of a pain

    • apart from that – Twiki is really cool. I’ve installed the java based drawing tool – so I can sketch out basic ideas on a web browser and collaborate on drawings….. how cool is that. I’ve yet to play with the action organisor and the calendar. The spreadsheet and table functions look useful too. As a basic wiki – it really works – I think the toys will make it a run away success…. once I’ve got people logged on and passwords generated at the command line with htpasswd :-(

    Written by Guy in: Cosmic |
    Mar
    26
    2005
    2

    Coffee, Sun & Analytics

    Web analytics blog

    Aparently, Xavier Casanova is a guru – only time will tell – nice articles with a good measure of common sense.

    Written by Guy in: Cosmic |
    Mar
    26
    2005
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    MSN’s adCenter

    More Control and Better Results
    coming soon – another ppc platform – but lets you decide the age and sex of audience.

    Written by Guy in: Cosmic |
    Mar
    11
    2005
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    Which Colour?

    Think different – choose your own colour

    Nice paint job for your boring mac. The imacs look rather nice – just too many colours to choose from.

    Written by Guy in: Noise |
    Mar
    07
    2005
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    Yahoo! Netrospective

    Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web
    Yahoo’s take on the last 10 years of their existance. Very American – but nice to start with a photo of the founders – which did make me wonder what I was doing at that point… cos I was working on commercial web sites in 1995…

    Looking back though, we did sell a directory website of uk sites that had about 30 sites listed, to Internet Magazine a few years later… How crazy were them days eh? We got 6 months of magazine advertising in exchange for the web site.

    Written by Guy in: Cosmic |
    Mar
    03
    2005
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    Search Engine Marketing – Shocking News

    InternetRetailer – Search Engine Marketing Results

    Are marketing people still so ignorant of the net these days that they need a report to work this stuff out?

    In a nutshell….

    • Those that spend money on making their sites more visible, sell more goods online.
    • Those that spend money on advertising, sell more goods.
    • Natural listings on search engines, produce more sales than adverts
    • Those companies that have both an inhouse and external team working on advertising and site visibility, out perform those that only use either

    Please tell me you could work this out for yourself…….

    Written by Guy in: Noise |