Jun
04
2010
at 12:21pm
Running a webmaster forum is a difficult thing to do. I’ve been running The Webmaster Forums for almost 5 years, and moderating for 6 years before that. It’s a part of me. The problem? We get a lot of spam. In fact, I spend at least half an hour every morning taking care of spam. The outright spam needs to be removed. Links pasted within posts need to be edited out. User IP’s need to be checked to make sure these spammers don’t have multiple accounts. Some users need to be sent a private message with a warning about breaking the rules. Our moderators spend time on this too. It’s endless.
This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users. I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house. Read more…
Posted in General, Personal, Web Culture
Apr
02
2010
at 1:49pm
Back in September I wrote about an agreement by the University of Waterloo to use the Open Text Web Content Management system. Well, as it turns out, that decision was “revisited” in February and UW will be using Drupal as it’s official web content management system.
I have been on maternity leave since October so I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for this decision. I know that some people went for training on the Open Text system in November and found it to be very cumbersome and difficult to use (something I thought was evident from the beginning, to be honest!). I think there were some other issues as well but I don’t know too much.
Needless to say, I am thrilled! There is a tiny bit more information on the Kitchener Waterloo Drupal User’s Group, as well as in the UW Daily Bulletin.
Posted in Drupal, Open Source
Feb
15
2010
at 3:58pm
With the Winter Olympics underway I’ve been spending a lot of time on Vancouver 2010 website as well as those from some major Canadian media sources. Some have really impressed me with clean, grid-based design, strong features, and good usability. Others, not so much. Let’s take a look.
I will be looking at four major Canadian Olympics sites:
For each site, I will look at the home page, the event schedule, and a sample sport page (Nordic Combined, since I always forget what that is), as well as a few other standout features or things I come across. Read more…
Posted in Design, Great Websites
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