afongen

Note to self: when on a conference call with people you don’t know well (if at all), restrict use of sarcasm. Otherwise you’ll come off sounding a nasty little sonofabitch.

I’ve received some great feedback on my XML – CMS essay. Thanks to all who have written. I’ll write back soon, and then will write a follow-up article later this week that incorporates the comments I’ve received so far.

The Minnesota State Legislature is considering this week (today?) whether to ratify the MAPE contract. This was the contract that was agreed to after a two-week strike last fall, but it’s not finalized until the Legislature ratifies it, and things do not look good. What’s the hold-up? Domestic partner benefits, something that’s par for the course in most major Minnesota companies but apparently causes some serious conniption fits in our legislators. Unbelievable.

Matt Sergeant, the Perl & XML genius who’s brought us wonderful things like AxKit and XML::SAX, has released AxPoint, a Perl module for generating PDF presentation-type documents from XML sources. This will be perfect for a couple presentations I’ve got coming up. (More on that later.)

A little essay I’ve written: XML, Network Design, and Content Management.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about content management systems that we could use for our web sites at work. From the start, I looked at using XML. Initially this may have been because I was just learning about XML and was eager to put it to use. More than that, I knew that data stored as XML could be usefully transformed with things like XSLT into a variety of formats, which sounded like exactly what we needed.

Now that I’ve been actively working with XML for a couple years, I keep coming back to the idea of using it in a content management system. Why? Am I falling prey to the buzzwords and to the enticements of working with cool technologies? Does the XML hammer make everything look like a nail, or is XML honestly a critical part of a sensible solution?

More…

Hey, another SPAM hole in FormMail. There’s a surprise.

Bugzilla Bug 51015: Microsoft should use Mozilla.

I’ve fielded a whole lot of questions about Perl CGI scripts over the past month or so, largely from webmasters or designers who don’t know a darn thing about Perl but want the functionality that CGI scripts (or something akin to them) would bring to their site. Problem: a large majority of scripts in common use are insecure. Those freely available scripts from Matt’s Script Archive are not to be used, folks.

Finding CGI Scripts addresses this very problem, offering suggestions for finding secure scripts and finishing up by pointing to nms. nms is a project started by the London Perl Mongers to create secure, well-written drop-in replacements for popular CGI scripts. I’ve been recommending these to everyone who asks. Good stuff. The only problem that I’ve noticed is a distinct Unix bias, so some couldn’t be used on a Windows server without modification. That’s not insurmountable, though.

Been struggling with a really bad headache most of the day, hoping it will go away soon. ‘Course, last thing I should be doing is spending more time in front of a monitor to post here. Still, wanted to say that I’ve been working on some long-promised redesigns of this site, and some scripting clean-up. Soon.

Did I ever mention that I’m a huge fan of The Norm? No? Well, I should. I love this strip. It’s an important part of my daily routine. Michael Jantze (the artist) seems like a heckuva guy, too.

Back when I read newspapers, I read The Norm religiously. After I stopped reading papers daily, I still scrounged copies left on buses, solely so I could read this strip. You can imagine my delight at discovering The Norm online. Jantze is a pretty tech-savvy guy, too, and has built some great features on the site. Haven’t read it before? Check out the archive, the themed “E-Libraries,” and the Normathon (my favorite use of online time). Like what you see? Buy some stuff, or subscribe! This is online content I’m willing to pay for, especially since I don’t buy the local newspaper where it’s published.