Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

I enjoyed reading David Diamond’s new book Metadata for Content Management. He’s covering everything a DAM system or CMS customer needs to know about metadata fields, contents and policy and how they affect search, workflows and interoperability. The book is written for practical use, in plain and fun language and with excellent examples for every…

Our company, Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendor Digital Collections, is looking for a Web developer based in Hamburg, Germany. Of course there’s a conventional job offer over on the company Web site, but since you and me will be working closely together, I’d like to add some thoughts – nothing official, just my personal opinion.…

Most software systems are incredibly complex – think large monolithic software, distributed systems, or systems composed of microservices (or self-contained systems). When something goes wrong or the system needs to be changed, developers and administrators have a really hard time figuring out what’s going on inside it. According to the Economist, David Gelernter once said…

We’re currently designing our DAM system’s next generation user interface (UI), and one of the things I’m thinking about a lot is how to present content, and how to navigate it, in a way that makes sense to the people using the DAM. Mental models For the DAM vendor, it’s natural to view a DAM…

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…

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…

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…