Jahr: 2016

I’ve been advocating schema.org for DAM interoperability for a while now, but mostly from a theoretical perspective – I didn’t have any implementation experience to back my claims up. This is supposed to change now as we’re trying to base parts of our new DAM UI on the schema.org vocabulary. But of course, where the…

Just a short collection of essential links for people new to Digital Asset Management (DAM). Other (and more complete) DAM resource listings: DAM Ready Reference by Deb Fanslow The DAM Directory, founded by Deb Fanslow and Emily Kolvitz MCN (Museum Computer Network) DAM SIG resources Blogs and news sites: DAM News, edited by Ralph Windsor…

This week I dived into product management: gathering requirements for our DAM product, sketching and specifying new features, taking screenshots and writing discussion documents. It’s an important process (here’s an outline) – we don’t want to build stuff our customers don’t need. But I’m getting lost tracking the documents and files produced during this process:…

Turning HTML into (unformatted) plain text seems simple at first: PHP has <a href=“http://www.php.net/strip_tags“>strip_tags()</a>, XSLT has <a href=“https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#value-of“>xsl:value-of</a>. In practice, though, you’ll frequently find that words are glued together which should have whitespace between them. Take this example – extra weirdly-formatted to get the point across: If you select and copy this text in the…

Adam Ard – Why Scrum is the Wrong Way to Build Software: “1. Because all product decision authority rests with the “Product Owner”, Scrum disallows engineers from making any product decisions and reduces them to grovelling to product management for any level of inclusion in product direction. 2. Scrum, in accounting for all the engineer’s…

I’m currently learning the PHP framework Symfony 3. The Symfony documentation is excellent for a quick start, but the first serious HTML form I wanted to build touched some ill-documented parts, made me file a bogus bug report (sorry guys) and took me about 20 hours to implement. So here’s how I did it. I…

Gerry McGovern – If the customer really was king: “Are the most powerful people in your organization those who interact most with your current customers? Are these people the most respected and highest paid? […] The customer isn’t just king in a digital economy; the customer is dictator. Those organizations that deliver an excellent experience…

In addition to my software development and architecture tasks, I’m growing into the “product manager” role – though it’s not yet clear what that means: bookkeeping of customer complaints and feature requests, coordinating product decisions and making sure everyone in the company has a say, or pushing my own ideas? Probably a bit of everything……

Rick Yagodich (@think_info) on the Contentful blog – The Author Comes First: “Any time a big company buys an enterprise CMS, they are easily spending seven figures on the licenses and then another six on subscription fees. To customize this CMS to do something even vaguely resembling what the buyer wants is another seven figure…

While we’re gathering ideas for the next generation of our DAM product’s user interface, we’re taking the opportunity to reflect on the system architecture of our DAM software. It’s currently a monolithic architecture: All of the user interface and back-end features are implemented within a single software system, and based on one large database. This…