I between migrating my company’s primary web site onto a non-broken server, this weekend’s activities have included a wander around the French market that’s been resident on the Green over the last few days and a token appearance at the Jazz enclosure in Walpole Park (next year, we’ll make a day of it). Perhaps not quite as impressive as last Sunday’s promming adventure, but it’s better than bumming around the flat.

Also, I’m now more than half-way though the Da Vinci Code. Thankfully. The single-threaded story and the lack of barely any background beyond the cobbled-together history behind it is starting to become a little tiresome. As is the relentless pace at which Dan Brown seems intent on telling the tale and his unapologetic yet frequent mis-spelling of the English language. Only two hundred more pages to go… 🙂

It’s back again.

Laurie – I’m really grateful to you for holding the reins for the last twelve months (scarily it’s almost a year exactly since I buggered off around the world and left Planet Afterlife to fend for itself). But it’s time I stated taking some responsibility myself, once again.

The feed list has been optimised and the design improved. Further changes are in the pipeline, too. But for the moment, it works :-).

…And a really crap blogger at the moment, too. But more on that again.

Tonight I got back from work slightly later than I’d intended yet again, almost walking on some post as I walked in the main door. Shuffling through it to make sure that nothing had arrived for me or the flatmates, something caught my attention. In amongst the numerous circulars and other crap that our neighbours seem to receive was a large brown envelope marked RETURN TO SENDER.

This was no ordinary envelope. It was strengthened by a peice of card which formed the back of the envelope, and printed on the paper front near the bottom, in red ink were the words Do Not Bend. Across the central portion, a smaller white pocket-style envelope had been affixed horizontally, presumably in order to allow the larger one to be reused. Hand-written across this space was the following address:

MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE CASEY
(OPERATION BAGHDAD)
THE PENTAGON
WASHINGTON DC
U.S.A.

Subsequent wikipedia-ing to satisfy my curiosity as to who this rather familiar-sounding gentleman was led me to an article on General George William Casey Jr. (note not a Major yet, it seems) who it transpires is in charge of the entire U.S. Army presence in Iraq.

So back to the envelope.

Bordering the address on the front of the envelope were various markings – both hand-written and stamped – indicating that this particular item of correspondence should be returned to where it came from. Three UK first class stamps had been attached on the top right, and thoroughly post-marked by the Royal Mail. This letter had obviously gone somewhere before being sent back.

The last two vital clues, which were roughly equal in size were to be found on the back of the envelope. The first contained the name and address of the sender – who I shall identify only as JE – in the form of a British Heart Foundation self-adhesive label. Obviously not meant for use on international post, the word ‘ENGLAND’ has been scrawled in the white space at the very bottom of the label, seemingly in the same pen used to write the recipient’s address. Second was a red stamp indicating the date on which the item had been received by the Pentagon as well as the date on which some check or other had been carried out upon it. Both dates were the same – 28-06-2006.

But despite passing its security check, it seems the message had failed to penetrate much further into the heart of the U.S. military bureaucracy before it was sent back unopened to the strange man that sent it, who LIVES IN OUR BLOCK OF FLATS. And there it lies still – at the bottom of the stairs by the front door.

Jeff Waugh on how Ubuntu got it’s name and avoided getting named after that funny station at the wrong end of the Picadilly Line.

Incidentally, Dapper rocks! It seems the team have really used the extra six week period at the end of the development cycle to really add a lot of polish to the OS. Whoever thought brown could be so preeety? 🙂

I feel amazing this morning! It seems getting a proper night’s sleep really helps in not feeling generally crap and unproductive the next day. Who’d have guessed it?

Being tired from my run last night and having satisfied my daily urge to watch a bunch of people in a house in North London fall out with each other on TV, I went to bed at 10.30.

Does that make me not cool? Or just slightly more responsible that I once was? 😉

According to the suberb Benno’s Map Tools that I randomly discovered tonight, I ran 4.62 km the other day on my little route down to the Glaxo building and back. Surprisingly, that figure’s amazingly similar to the 4.5-ish km I came up with previously using a bit of cotton, an A-Z and a great deal of patience.

I’ve no idea who this Benno bloke is, but you’ve saved me a hell of a lot of time next time I measure out a running route! Who needs a crappy pair of trainers and an iPod to tell you how far you’ve run when you have Google Maps and a clever bit of hacking?

I’ve made more progress on the web content templating in Alfresco this week. I’ve really gotta think of a better name for it than that, but I’m dubious about dubbing it web content management as it’s missing quite a lot from the set of WCM functionality that’s coming to Alfresco later this year.

Anyway, the templates now support full previewing of content from within the application, just by applying a special web page template to a space. Here’s some screenshots of this in action:

This is the top level web content space, so the various sub-spaces simply mirror the UNIX directory structure of our current production site. So, each page is represented by a space and the individual files within each space are then used to build up the content of the page. If you really wanna know the details:

• page.properties contains various metadata about the page, like its name (used in the navigation elements), title and meta tag information
• site.properties is a special file that exists only in the top level of the site and – logically enough – contains information about the site itself, like it’s URL and the default templates to be used
• Here front_content.html contains the main content of the page, which is everything except the page header, navigation and footer elements. In other pages the files main_content.html and right_content.html are used together to form a two-column layout

From here, you can select View Details from the More Actions menu to bring up the details screen.

The best thing about this preview is that you can click around within the page and load up other pages straight from Alfresco. This takes all hyperlinks, images and other such stuff that it finds in the page content and points them back into Alfresco, via the template or download servlets – true WYSIWYG previewing!

There’s a few things still to do before the system’s fully production-ready.

• Integrating the news template that displays the x-most-recent items on our press releases page
• Building a template that parses an iCal file on the server and displays a list containing our forthcoming events
• Making a template that performs a Lucene search on the web content and displays a list of matching pages

Other things that would be useful:

• Have an alternative ‘Print this page’ template available
• Make the revision history of each page available via a web page or an RSS feed
• Support logging in to the site, and having restricted content magically become available!

Soon enough, we’ll be 100% powered by Alfresco 🙂

One of the most eagerly anticipated features soon to be part of Alfresco it would seem, is our web content management capabilities. This functionality isn’t just something that our customers are asking for, it’s something that we desperately need internally too.

Our two sites at www.alfresco.com and dev.alfresco.com currently run on an Apache/PHP server, which despite being nice open source software is a pain to keep up-to-date. Who wants to install a complete development environment and trudge their way through sections of PHP code just so they can add a news item to the site?

Well now we don’t have to. By combining the power of Alfresco’s forthcoming 1.3 release with the flexibility of the Freemarker templating engine we have a robust platform for WCM that we can use to store our web content securely, yet in a manner that drastically cuts down the time to make changes. Automatic versioning, access via CIFS, FTP, WebDAV and the web client – we’ve got it all.

It’s taken about a week’s worth of hacking to get an initial version of this up and running, most of that time having been spent building up Freemarker templates, but with some additional work to code a PHP proxy that recieves requests for freiendly URLs and feeds this request through to Alfresco, which generates the complete markup. Now try doing that with your average proprietary CMS. No? I thought not :-).

In the last 24 hours my poor little blog has received around 200 spam comments. I guess that means the just-installed-new-blog-software honeymoon period is finally over…

Thankfully, because WordPress sucks infintely less than Movable Type, all those comments are in moderation but it’s still a pain for me to scroll down the list to make sure nobody I know has landed in there by mistake before I trash them all. The Akismet plugin looked like it might stop the deluge, but apparently I need an API key in order to use it and the registration email that WordPress allegedly sent me never arrived. Bah.

On the plus side, this week’s TV has been top-notch, with way too much Big Brother coverage than can possibly be healthy for a person to watch having been absorbed (currently I know that Shahbaz is in the diary room talking to Big Brother about whether or not he’s going to leave – or at least he was 18 minutes ago, which is the current lag in the “live” coverage), not to mention the fantasticness that is Eurovision tomorrow night!

I’ll tackle the comment spam another time…