The Zero Room

If you are planning a non-trivial website, this twenty-five minute presentation by Paul Albert, Digital Services Librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library which compares Drupal, a free Web Content Management System and Application Framework, to FatWire, a proprietary Web CMS, should be required viewing.

Many of the arguments presented here in favour of Drupal also apply to any of a number of popular free systems, and most of the arguments against FatWire apply to any proprietary system. In this case the systems were evaluated for their suitability for use by a Medical Academic Library, but any situation where management of a great deal of information via the Web is required might be considered broadly comparable. The staff at Weill Cornell Medical Library found that:

• Drupal is and will be cheaper
• Drupal is robust, extensible, and enterprise ready
• Other departments in their college are already using Drupal, as are other colleges and libraries, and many are dropping equivalent proprietary systems
• Drupal supports "perpetual beta" (continuous improvement of a site)
• Drupal has a much more active support and development community, and "a culture of sharing solutions"
• Drupal has been paired with other technology in proven ways
• Drupal has a gentle learning curve (compared to other development environments)

We make a point of providing our customers with the tools to easily update their own websites, and encourage them to do so on a regular basis.  Web developers' magazine "A List Apart" has an article titled "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web", which is a goldmine of useful advice for anyone who publishes online.

According to web designer Amber Simmons, keeping your readers' attention is a matter of earning their trust. Her tips for becoming a "faithful writer" are:

Do you know your web site has become dated and unmanageable, but are scared of a major overhaul? Perhaps you are right to be; even changes unquestionably for the better can alienate and anger some of your users.

In "the Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch" usability consultant Jared M. Spool explains how even major web sites with millions of users can make radical changes over time that hardly anybody notices.

The VP leaned forward and asked me, "How do we orchestrate a re-launch on a site this big without upsetting our customers? Any change is going to be so dramatic that people are definitely going to complain. How do we do this?"

I leaned back in my chair, paused for a second, then dropped the bomb. "You don't, " I responded. "A re-launch is a very bad idea. I highly recommend against it."

The secret is out: your anti-virus software is in all likelihood virtually useless.

Researchers at the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) have found that the leading anti-virus applications miss an astonishing eighty percent of new malicious software ('malware'). This is hardly surprising, as no software developer, malware authors included, would release a product without ensuring that it works as intended, which in this case means testing agains the virus detection algorithms of the major anti-virus applications.

Lest we be accused of scaremongering, here is the good news: there is no such thing as a 'computer virus'. Seriously.

Every piece of malware targets specific security flaws in particular pieces of software. If you aren't using the vulnerable software the malware is harmless. For instance, the latest piece of malware doing the rounds is not a 'computer virus', it's a 'Microsoft Office virus' (and yes, technically it's a trojan rather than a virus if you want to be pedantic).

Web analysts Onestat report that globally the Mozilla Firefox web browser has increased it's market share to 13%, in Australia nearly 25%, and in Germany a whopping 39% of web users.

The OpenDocument juggernaut rolls on, with the announcement that the OpenDocument format is now an ISO/IEC standard.  The decision about which format to trust for storing your documents is now even easier.

The Committe for Economic Development, an eminent American conservative think tank / lobby group / nexus of sinister conspiracy to rule the world, has released a new report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness.  This conclusions of this report are highly supportive of open standards, lukewarm but generally approving of free and open source software, and quite keen on "open innovation", which might be more informatively labelled "free data" (projects such as Wikipedia and open courseware projects are cited).

It is heartening to see that even an organisation representing the biggest of big business recognises that "Digital Intellectual Property" is a "Special Problem", to paraphrase an earlier report.