Jun 04 2010 at 12:21pm

The challenges of running a webmaster forum

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…

Apr 02 2010 at 1:49pm

As it turns out, we did choose Drupal

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.

Feb 15 2010 at 3:58pm

Vancouver 2010 on the web: the good, the bad, and the ugly

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…

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