Resources

Here is some background information and resources about technologies which are important to web site design and communications.

Web Content Management
Content Syndication
Weblogs
Hosted Applications

Web Content Management

A Content Management System (CMS) is commonly used to provide a standard framework for the building of a web site and to make it easy to keep its content up to date.

Most commercially successful systems either focus on specific market niches or on providing a broad range of features for more complex sites. At the low end, many web developers have built their own "home grown" systems. Lately, open source content management systems are acquiring a substantial following, particularly as an alternative to "home grown" systems and to developers wishing to address particular market niches by building special features on top of open source products.

There is a great variety of available systems, some would even say, there are too many systems. The links below will provide more information, but not one resource can hope to be complete.

Links

OpenSourceCMS.com has a great collection of open source Content Management Systems available live. Start one up and see how easy or difficult it is to manage!

James Robertson keeps a list of CMS's which are avaiable in Australia.
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Content Syndication

Content Syndication, mostly called feeds is revolutionising the way web content finds it way to readers. Rather than having to regularly visit websites to follow their news, it's easy to keep in touch sites which supply RSS "feeds" of their updates. Using a news aggregator such as Bloglines or Reader, it's possible to subscribe to such sites. Originally developed as a way to keep in touch with various weblogs, RSS has clearly hit the mainstream in the past year.

Weblogs

While the world appears to have found out about Weblogs in the last few years, they've been around in pretty much the current form since 2000. There are a lot of Blogging tools and services available, we'll mention just a few here.

It's generally accepted that Blogger was the first Weblog tool. It was developed by Pyra and acquired by Google a few years back. Blogger is a free hosted service.

Movable Type is a tool for those prepared to manage their own blogging set up. IT is very flexible but probably better suited to the technical-at-heart.

A cousin to Movable Type (by the same company, SixApart) is TypePad, a hosted service with a number of options which should suit most users.

A number of open source Weblogging tools are also available, Wordpress is amongst the best known. Like Movable Type, it suits more technically inclined users.
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Hosted Applications

Another idea that's been around for years, but of which we're seeing some very successful examples now. Not only are there commercially successful hosted apps, like Salesforce.com, but technology has improved to such an extent that many services are genuinely practical alternatives to desktop or enterprise applications.

Another hosted application which we use is Jotspot, used for managing projects.
In the broader market, Flickr took off as a photo-site because of its open programming interface.
Web email is the another common example of a successful hosted application, Google's version. Gmail took off partly because of its nifty way of updating pages, a technique soon dubbed "Ajax", even though it uses technology that has been available for years (DHTML).

Web Services are a cousin of hosted applications, providing specialised, modular services which can be incorporated in other applications. Here is an interesting example of some by StrikeIron which even works with Excel.