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…

I spent some time today experimenting with Mozilla’s Sunbird calendaring app, trying to build up a comprehensive list of all the events going on within Alfresco. There’s a lot of stuff going on here at the moment but we don’t yet have a single place on our site where you can get a comprehensive summary of all these cool events.

So the solution? Publish an iCal file to the web site that people can subscribe to using their client of choice that will keep them informed about what’s going on.

Sunbird makes it dead easy to create the iCal file and add events to it, but publishing this to the site via FTP is messy and limits the subset of people who can contribute to the calendar to those people with FTP details for the site. Not so good.

So I stored the calendar file in Alfresco instead. Now anyone with write access on that file can contribute, and Sunbird can even update the calendar directly using the fabulous WevDAV support built into Alfresco.

You can download the calendar or if you’re a fellow-Alfrescan with an account on customers.alfresco.com then you can subscribe to it in Sunbird or the calendaring extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird. iCal might well work with it too, but I don’t have a Mac to test this on.

All in all, a pretty good example of what you can achieve in a couple of hours using open source software and open standards like iCal and WebDAV :-).

Hot off the press is our latest podcast, featuring Dave Caruana talking to our Chief Marketing Officer Ian Howells about Alfresco’s support for the standard. Dave is Alfresco’s Chief Scientist and is a member of the JSR-283 committee.

It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. Since then, we’ve launched Alfresco Blogs and it’s podcast-touting sibling Open Source Talk.

Meanwhile over in California, Esther Dyson has some dangerous ideas about the future of email. Trying to be pragmatic about the whole pay-to-send email debate and not subscribing to the idealist kind of beliefs that Esther claims everyone against the idea holds, I still find it difficult to believe how such a scheme could actually work.

Email systems are already complex enough, without adding another layer of complexity into the mix. We now have server blacklists, spam filters and sender authentication schemes bolted on top of the original SMTP standards but the only technology that’s made a difference to me lately has been Google’s Gmail service.

Just like they did in the search field, Google have done some really innovative stuff with email and the results are amazing. Now I rarely ever see a spam message in my inbox even though around half of the messages coming into the account are junk.

So perhaps if AOL and their like put some effort into making progress like this, rather than demanding money off people who mostly have no interest in paying for something they’ve had for free for years then we might make some progress here 🙂

Home alone in the flat this afternoon, with housemates having gone home for Easter, I decided I’d give opening the drawer at the end of my bed another go, having so far failed on all previous attempts. It was jammed in and had both handles broken, presumably as a result of someone attempting to use brute force to pull it open.

I thought I’d try a different approach. So after taking the mattress off the base and tipping the (bottom end) of the base up on it’s side, the problem was quickly identified: the drawer rollers had become jammed underneath the runners. Easily fixed.

Eager to take advantage of this new-found storage space (every bit matter when you have a flat this small) I returned the base unit to it’s original horizontal position and opened it up. I don’t think it had been opened in a while.

Out of that drawer came the following:

• 1 black VERDI suitcase on wheels – actually in quite good condition overall
• 1 ladies medium Levi’s top with the wording ‘Sun State Califonia’ across the front
• 1 medium Whistles sleeveless hoodie in navy blue
• 1blue GAP tank top with lime green detailing
• 1 cream coloured size 14 ladies jumper from Dorothy Perkins
• 1 turqoise (at least that’s the closest word that describes this rather unique colour) BHS blouse – size 14
• 1 ACTIVE fleece in grey and light blue – size 14-16
• 1 Body Shop fabric bag
• Inside said bag, 1 receipt for £2.55 from Isleworth Recreation Centre for ADULT SWIM, dated 17-05-02 and served by Sarah
• 1 small bottle of bright glittery pink nail varnish
• 1 suit cover
• 7 miscellaneous coat hangers

Now I’m sat here with a mattress lying on it’s side and a bed base covered with this random crap out of the drawer. Anyone know a size 14 colour-blind girl who might like any of the above? 🙂

Thanks to everyone who came to our lovely flat last night, it’s now officially been warmed!

This morning I’ve mostly been eating cold sausage rolls with onion and garlic dip. Woot for left-over party food.