JAFDIP

Just another frakkin day in paradise

Archives for December 2017

Thoughtful Thursday

C.S. Lewis“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

So 28 December 2018 marks the last Thoughtful Thursday of the year. And oh what a year it has been. Let’s take a look back at what this means. I started Thoughtful Thursday shortly after joining twitter in 2009 but here’s the pin from last year. The whole initiative is a chance for those of us who care about the world around us to challenge the status quo and fight back against the mechanisms that strive to dived us.


Why is it important to join the fight?

The internet may be the great equalizer but it is also the great divider. At no point in history is the world more divided. We have far too many narcissistic outlets and people spend far too much time taring each other down. Ultimately there’s too much negativity in the world these days.

Why was Thursday chosen?

Thursday is probably the saddest day of the week for many. It’s not the middle of the week nor is it the end of the week. For a rare few it might be pay day but you still have Friday to get though. In fact when you break it all down Thursday’s only claim to fame is that it’s not Monday.

How can I participate?

Simply share a positive tweet with the hashtag . Monitor the #tt stream and retweet the any message you find moving uplifting. Anything you find insightful or positive should be shared. Invite your friends directly by sharing this post with them. Spread the word on this and every Thoughtful Thursday. Follow me if it makes it easier because I share hundreds of thoughtful nuggets every Thursday. Life’s far too short to live it negatively.

Nothing but empty platitudes…

Sure depending upon your personal state of mind the nuggets of wisdom or positivity may not lift you up but they will lift someone. And helping just one more person be less negative is enough. It is really your vapid cries that solve nothing. They add nothing of value to the conversation and the choice is yours to be part of the solution or step the fuck aside and let those who chose to help; help.

Perhaps this positivity will spread over into the physical world and people might start being kinder and nicer to each other.

Perhaps it’s all for not but what really do we have to loose from trying?

As a result of technical challenges things will kick off at 0000 EDT, this is not because of a thin myopic view of the world. Next year I will be better prepared to start this off as Thursday actually starts with my friends over seas.

Thanks,

m

We want to do what we want to do and we want to have a good time

What should and should not be shoehorned into the CMS?

If Content is King, What is Content?

In the past connect meant everything on the printed page. This meant articles, images, ads et cetera are all considered content, as a result of this content, like template, is one of those very generic encapsulating terms. This naturally lead to the printed page paradigm attempting to impose itself on our digital ecosystem, and it has failed utterly.

The bigger problem with terms like content and templates tend to get overused and means change depending on who’s references them. Today we tend to think of content in terms of the data that a end user navigated to the site to consume. That data might be an article, music, podcast, video, or even an image like a cartoon; however, no user ever navigates to a site simply to see the ads. I note this because many marketers wrongfully think of their ads as content. Frankly users think of ads an an obtrusive annoyance that must be tolerated in order to attain access to the real content they wish to consume.

In simple terms I think the line in the sand can easily be drawn between ads and everything else. However, when thinking of what should or should not be stored in your CMS there’s another consideration and that is infrastructure specialization requirements. In the early days of dynamic content when everyone and their brother tried to shove all types of content into the database. The problem is that these databases became bloated and really were not suited for holding large binary objects like mp3’s, videos or even images. The only one in this model who succeeded were the database sales people who earned larger than imaginable commissions for support contracts  The best practices it turned out was to let the filesystem hold those types of content as discreet files and only store the URI pointing to those types of media. The bigger problem with stuffing everything into a single CMS is that you loose the ability to scale or at any rate increase the risks when you do.

Fast forward to today’s CMS’s and you’ll see that because of the rise infrastructure necessary to successfully stream video and music those types of media have moved from our local file systems to specialized systems designed to handle the extreme loads that they require. In addition we’re seeing images leave the local filesystem as well to be hosted on highly optimized CDN services designed to keep up with the user demand. In all of these cases only the URL and rendering specifics are stored in the CMS for these types of content.

At this point the only thing typically stored in a CMS is the editorial text and page markup because it is no longer efficient to have the biggest ship. We now see many sites, having in essence, a fleet of smaller faster and far more agile vessels ‘right sized’ to deliver the appropriate content to the destination as required by the user experience desired. A perfect example is the following video presentation from WordCamp NYC 2014 by John Eckman. I have simply embedded the appropriate reference information (test) pointing to the source of the video.

In contrast I would strive to limit the content stored in the site’s CMS to just what is required for the editorial process. Text copy, specialized media and the appropriate markup necessary to hydrate a page. The goal should be focused on the the user experience related to that content and not the ad impressions. Marketing efforts need to improve leveraging clever high quality solutions to drive higher value and not just game the users into generating reputation deflating impressions.

Just as we strive to encumber the editorial process we need to lift the ads out of the way of the user experience. I am not saying we should abandon all hopes of ad sponsored media, but we need to step back and make intelligent user experience focused decisions. Strive to give the user the illusion of freedom in their content consumption while still hitting our goals and of course paying the bills.

One of the most clever marketing solutions I have ever seen is provided by <a href=’http://www.wirewax.com’ >Wirewax</a>. They have a technology that allows video producers to add targeted marketing embedded directly into the video. An example is an end user being able to enjoy a video about how to build a bike shed and there are hot links that they can select to buy the hammer used in the demonstration or the brand of paint used to coat the walls.