Author: Marcus

What are the golden plates of our time? A thousand years ago, if you wanted to make sure information was going to be around for your children’s children’s children, you took out your chisel and started hacking away on metal plates–preferably golden.

What are my options today? I have several thousand digital pictures, a digital journal, a weblog and pretty much every hour of work I’ve done for the last 5 years are all in digital format. From what I’ve read, I can expect a hard drive to last maybe 10 years, CD?s not much longer… what else is there? Are all my captured memories, all my work and all my writings going to be around for my grandkids? Should I stop using a computer and start learning how to etch metal?

Maybe I sound nostalgic, but really… how do you make sure something digital lasts longer than the medium it’s on?

Tonight I?ve spent the last couple hours converting a Photoshop image to HTML in Dreamweaver. I read a lot of places where Dreamweaver takes a lot of slack from those who only code in notepad, or who are anti-WYSIWYG editors; personally, I don’t understand this. I started using Dreamweaver back at version 3, before I knew much of anything about HTML. Since then, I’ve never bought a single book on HTML or really sat down to dedicate myself to a couple hours of studying HTML, but I feel I know it as good as most and better than many.

Rather than keeping me away from the code, Dreamweaver has helped me learn it. I’ve almost always used it in the split view where you see both design and code (part out of curiosity, part out of necessity). Being able to see exactly what code is written for every thing I do has helped enormously. I’m a visual thinker, seeing a block of HTML highlighted when I select a table cell helps ingrain in my mind exactly what the code is supposed to look like.

I’ve gotten to the point now where I could feasibly write all the HTML that Dreamweaver writes for me without Dreamweaver, but why would I when I don’t have to? I suppose there’s the argument that it’s more fun that way; and to a point, I’ll agree–sometimes it is more fun. I find however, that when pressed with a deadline, fun is secondary and Dreamweaver helps me get it done faster. I have not had problems with Dreamweaver re-writing my code or re-formatting it (there are settings to control how much, if any, of that it does) and I’ve found that the HTML Dreamweaver writes is generally pretty clean.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 also does a pretty good job with supporting most aspects of CSS. For static sites (do people still make those ;)) the templating system in Dreamweaver is great. Site management is good for that as well (uploading to and from the server, version control etc.) For dynamic sites, I use Dreamweaver to get the basic HTML set and then apply the code.

On the PC, the interface is nothing short of brilliant. Macromedia has steadily improved the UI with each release and with MX 2004, space is utilized almost perfectly. On the Mac, it’s a different story. It doesn’t look bad on a Mac by any means, but you still have the floating panels and you don’t get the tabs to quickly see what you have open & switch between documents.

Needless to say, I’m a fan. I think Macromedia has left very little room for improvement with Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Today we decided to use the new “Projects” feature in Flash MX 2004 Professional to manage a fairly large interactive piece we’re doing at work. We started setting up the project in Flash after reading about the benefits of using Flash Projects to control versioning and make sure the files are in a central location. It didn’t take us long to discover that Flash Projects have a ways to go before they are usable for the type of project we’re doing.

Basically, the only thing we wanted to do was create a project that would keep track of several Flash files on the server and allow us to check them out, work on them locally, upload them automatically to the server when we checked them back in and then publish them based on our settings at one time. Simple enough, right? That’s what we thought.

This is where Projects fall flat. If I create a file and add it to my project, anyone else who wants to use the same file has to manually add it to their project, there’s no way for new files to be automatically added to all the participants project. This wouldn’t be a problem with a 5 or 10 file project, but once it gets bigger than that, adding every file manually gets pretty tedious.

In addition, there’s no easy way to have the same folder structure in the Flash Project as on the hard drive and/or the server–you have to manually create folders in Flash to manage that.

Those are the obstacles we could get around. The one that we really didn’t like was the fact that the only way to add a file that you didn’t create to your project was to use the Finder (mac) or Windows Explorer (PC) to browse to the server, download the file to your local hard drive, add it to the Flash Project in Flash then start using it. If you didn’t do that, you could get the file from the server, but once you went to check it back in, Flash complained that it couldn’t check it in because the file didn’t exist on the local drive.

We didn’t even get far enough to get into the publish profile settings… by that time, we’d had enough.

The solution? We set the entire project up as a Dreamweaver site. Everything works perfectly there, in addition, we can use Dreamweaver to edit text files, external ActionScript and XML files without opening up another application. If you’re thinking about using Flash Projects to manage a large project, I’d suggest you wait until it matures a little. Right now, Dreamweaver seems to be the tool that will work for us.

Lately at work we’ve had some “issues” trying to figure the best way to get content from the hands of content developers (the people who write the tech manuals) to instructional specialists (the people who develop training or other courses) to the Flash programmers and Graphic Designers who are developing multimedia training pieces as the final product.

Currently, there are no existing tools (that I’m aware of) that allow you to “storyboard” content to hand over to a Flash (or Director or Authorware) programmer and have them be able to recognize what interactions need to take place and what content needs to go where.

Depending the size of the course we’re developing, this can go from being a minor inconvenience to a show-stopper. There needs to be a way for the content to be organized and easily retrievable, but at the same time easy to input and provide some way of previewing what the final output might look like so the instructional specialists can get a better idea of what they’re working on.

We’ve developed a tool in Microsoft Access which does basically what we need, but leaves much to be desired due to the inherent flaws in Access (trust me, there are lots of them). I’m interested in learning more about what other people are doing to solve this problem, or if there is a tool out there that had been fine tuned to this process.

A few useful links to sites that will help you decide on a Content Management System. I used these today at work.
· OSCOM – Open Source (free) content management information.
· CMS Review – “The mission of CMS REVIEW is to give you the resources you need to choose the best content management system for your organization.”
· CMS Matrix – Allows you to view the features of, and compare, several top Knowledge Management systems.
· Cylogy – Cylogy is a company that specializes in CMS consulting. These are the people to pay if you’re willing to pay big bucks for both a recommendation for a CMS and the CMS itself.
· CMSWire – CMS Wire provides commentary, news and product information on several content management systems.
· CMS Watch – CMS Watch is a site that provides analysis and reports about web content management solutions.

Most of these sites link to other, similar sites, so if you’re in the process of researching content management, better create a new folder in your bookmarks.