FUblog

Moving On

Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As you can see, there's not much activity here anymore. You can find more of Nat's wisdom at webapper. Erik is now blogging at psykel. Happy Trails, grumps

commonspot admin bl0wz

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 11:57:00 -0400

If you're in the business of making a web application, you really owe it to yourself to check out CommonSnot's administrator. You will learn exactly how *not* to create an admin. Pop-up windows all over the place, "hidden" action windows, slightly differing color schemes which "help" deliniate admin areas, little dingles to click and horrible messaging/feedback all await the unlucky CS admin. Oh and of course all the little messages say "CommonSpot is processing your request. This may take a few seconds. Please wait," and you sit there for ten minutes. How many seconds is that? More than a few.

importing pages into commonspot 3.2

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 15:24:00 -0400

New to Commonsnot 4.0 or 4.5 or something recent is the ability to programmatically add and update pages via a "documented" api. Too bad for me that came about 18 months too late. Early last year, I had Cameron C build an importer to suck Greystone health topics into Commonsnot for OHSU Health. Today I had the pleasure of dusting off and running that 18 month old code on a new set of health content for the new Doernbecher Children's Hospital website on a new library of health content. And you know what? It frickin worked like a charm. So if you have a CommonSnot site running 3.2 and you need some pages imported (like 1000 or so), let me know. I'll let you use Cameron's code for one meellion dollars.

CommonSpot bl0wz

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:41:00 -0400

I'm not a fan of CommonSpot. Given the choice again, I would never recommend anyone use CommonSpot. Replication bl0wz on CS. It works for months, then dies when we had to replicate 700 new pages. PaperThin support keeps me on the phone for *hours*. Ugh. Ridiculous. Then they want me to upgrade to Jrun Updater 5. Telling someone to update to the latest version of a particular platform is laaaame. "I don't know the problem, but if you update, it will go away." p.s. Cameron told me to use CommonSpot