From the shores of the Muddy Branch

My subscription on typepad was coming due and with the small amount of blogging I do, I could not justfied the cost.   Decided to move to wordpress 2.6 and the process was faily painless.  After installing WordPress 2.6, I exported my posts from Typepad using their standard features and then uploaded to WordPress.  As images were not transfered, I had to upload them into WordPress.  Since I had all the originals on my computer I did not bother with exporting the images from Typepad.  Next I did some minor corrections on some internal links that still referenced the old site.   Once done and validated, I switched the DNS and my new WordPress site appeared.    While WordPress has many plugs-in and themes, I tried to keep the two sites the same for now, including adding my Recommended Reading list using the Amazon Showcase plugin.  Also matched the Google Adsense and Analytics.  If I begin to blog more again, then I may update the theme and look for additional plug-ins!

Oh – as soon as I was done, WordPress 2.7 was released and I went ahead and upgraded.  No problems there either!

Happy  New Year!

I have been extremely busy the last few months and my blog was placed on the very back burner. I hope to post more regular in the future on BPM, our open source Robohelp2Wiki software, some recent projects, and new ventures.

Adobe has released Robohelp Version 6.  Not too many changes in the product which has caused a lot of debate (con) rebutal (pro).

The GUI is the same, only a few new features and most important to us (at this time) is the XML Output files are the same. As far as we can tell there were no changes to the XML tags or the directory structures. The project meta data in the project files are also practically the same. I did test the new user defined global variables feature worked and they worked and converted correctly to MediaWiki.  See the diff file after conversion below.

Mediawiki Diff Example

March 15, 2006 was the first DC area Web 2.0 event put together by Stowe Boyd and Dion Hinchcliffe. Two local web 2.0 players. The meeting was sold-out and well attended, I would say about 50 people. The meeting had three parts, one the state of web 2.0, the organization of the DC 2.0 group, and demos of some “local” companies. Where local was from Baltimore to North Carolina.

Demo Highlights (in order of presenting)

Greg Greshman from Blogdigger. Blogdigger is providing structure around blogs to create local communities and groups.

Greg Narain of SyncPeople.com presented xposted.com. xposted is a market exchange for content. Writers and content providers can upload articles and pieces for buyers to find. Content can be public or private. Target market is associations and small businesses who need related content. From the xposted website: provides resource-starved conference staff with a vibrant marketplace to browse, negotiate, and purchase content for their increasingly important blogging presence.

Zi from ZiWiki. ZiWiki which allows individuals to build and edit a website using wiki type technology. Themes and modules allow for customization.

Andrew Brooks and Matt Howard from SMBLive. SMBLive is a hosted service to provide users Intranets, extranets, or Project Portals. Their software is built upon Microsoft SharePoint, so it integrates nicely with most organizations, Microsoft Office applications.

Clarence Wooten from CollectiveX was very slick. It enables groups to quickly setup a collective workspace for file sharing, shared calendars, and discussions. During the presentation, I heard from another attendee – why can’t we get ours to work as nice.

Near-time a hosted service combing blogs, wikis and other modules. It was the first wiki that I saw that started to add additional structure to the wiki pages. Each page can be tied to a Category and a Tag.  I have been looking for a Wiki with structure for my requirements gathering and validation project. More on this later.

I have been swamped on several projects and my blog has suffered considerable. I kept some notes on items I wanted to blog about and will try to post a few of them, even if they are dated a bit.

In about an hour of posting my Salesforce.com was down entry, I received a call from Stacy Cowley of IDG asking for an interview.   The article was posted on Computer World Australia and TMCnet about an hour later.  The saleforce watch reference and I are the only two sites to be mentioned?  Anyone else out there effected? 

As mentioned in the article – service was restored for me about 4:40 p.m. EST and I backup and synced my data.

Salesforce.com has been down for most of the day.  No information at all on the outage.  Only one other posting from Sales Force Watch.  Why can’t the company put up a simple web page with update information?

Typepad (which I use for this blog) was out earlier this week and was quick to provide information and updates.   While I can live without typepad for a day or several, it is hard to work without Salesforce.com.  Today, I was doing follow-ups to the good folks I met at Syndicate last week. 

Is this the fate for all of Web 2.0?   Productivity losses tied to other companies failures?   

Stefan Hayden wrote in iCal technology and webcal protocol and their lack of support:

Another feature to bootstrap the iCal technology is a (new?) web protocol called webcal. With this you replace http:// with webcal:// and this gets your browser to launch your iCal enabled calendar to add the event. I don’t know much about webcal since there is little written about the protocol. While Firefox recognises the protocol IE has no idea what it is and just refuses to do anything. It reminds me of another protocol where you replace http:// with feed:// to denote a xml feed but even my up-to-date firefox doesn’t know what to do with that and I don’t know exactly what program does. Even Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have anything to say about either feed:// or webcal://.

Here are some answers:

The Official Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) SCHEMES, such as, HTTP and FTP, are registered with IANA.   Webcal was initiated by Apple for use with the Apple iCal application and has become the common standard for accessing calendaring information via WebDAV.  Apple has never registered the protocol with IANA, so browsers and calendaring applications that support the webcal protocol are just making life simpler for users accessing the thousands of calendar files posted on the Internet.

Other Calendaring Protocols:

CalDAV is planned to be the offical protocol allowing calendar access via WebDAV.  However, the CalDAV draft does not call for using webcal:// or CalDav://.  Instead it calls for using Http:// using the HTTP Option feature to indicate the information is in a CalDAV format.

The Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) has been approved and CAP:// will be the Official Uniform Resource Identifier registered with IANA.  While approved, the process to receive the RFC number and IANA registration takes times.  CAP specifies how to query, create, modify, and delete iCalendar components over the wire.