"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Monday, February 18, 2008

More PSPS Links

There's a good description of the PSPS weekend from Leslie Hawthorne (Google Open Source). Also, Christian Scholz has been staying on top of the best links, including a Drupal Association look at Limi's "18 things" posting from January.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

The Great Backyard Plone Count

Sorry to have overslept on this one: The Great Backyard Bird Count is underway this weekend. You've got until the 18th of February to spend at least 15 minutes somewhere counting the greatest number of each given bird species that you see at any one time. Then enter your results at the website.

What's this got to do with Plone? Well, straight off, GBBC's website is powered by Plone. Once again Plone is empowering the not-for-profits.

Secondly, it occurs to me that this might be a useful approach for surveying Plone sites. Lakomy's automated survey for the UK and Plone.net's listing are fascinating in their own right, but there are gaps. Lakomy doesn't distinguish between live and derelict sites; Plone.net relies on self-submission and (understandably) cherry picks the best sites to showcase Plone's capabilities.

A Great Backyard Plone Count could actually provide useful information on the number of active Plone sites, ownership, activity level, geographical distribution, and so on. I'll have to give this some more thought so that the design is correct, the process repeatable, and the results understandable.

Meanwhile, get out those binoculars and start counting birds....

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The PSPS Posts Start Coming In

It didn't take long once the participants were back on their home turf for the PSPS news to start rolling in. Here's my collection of late-breaking news and after-action reports from this weekend's soirée at the Googleplex:
It sounds like the PSPS was a resounding success and I look forward to all the follow-on activity. Thanks to all who made this what appears to be a historical event for Plone and for open source in general.

In other news today at noon the Albuquerque Plone Developers Group got together to trade notes and update one another on their various projects. High on my list of things to do is get the gang to New Orleans for the June North American Plone Conference (sorry PA, love to take part, but Louisiana is just a single $200 hop from ABQ on Southwest Airlines).

CMS Matrix Revisited

In the wake of the strategic summit I thought I'd toss my two bits into the "where Plone should focus in the future" discussion. Back in my Jan. 30 posting, I developed a metric called "Ahead," which counted the number of CMS listed on CMS Matrix who were ranked higher than Plone in a given category and had a higher vote count as well. This removed high ranking sites that had only a handful or less of advocates gaming the ratings.

Today I'd like to look at the places Plone did not do so well and argue that those areas need improvement. The categories with high Ahead values and hence having several to many CMS ahead of them in that area are:
  • System Requirements
  • Performance
  • Commerce
System requirements gets to my favorite complaint--memory intensive, long running processes. This and the perception that LAMP service providers can't easily and cheaply include Zope and Plone in their packages contributes to the lack of low priced hosting.

Performance has been the downfall of only one of my professional portals and, in conjunction with political back games, was cited by the American Bonsai Society as the rationale drop its Plone portal. That was 2.0 and we've seen steady improvements in performance, so this one I consider topic under control, just don't take your eye off this ball.

Finally, commerce. I'll hold off on that discussion for another day.

Meanwhile, the search for strategic summit blogs, reports, and commentaries continues.

Technorati Profile

Monday, February 11, 2008

Plone Strategic Summit Output

Been looking for posts by attendees of the Plone Strategic Summit held this past weekend. Haven't seen anything yet, but I'll be patient. Meanwhile, checkout the demographics at Jon Stahl's pre-summit survey.

Also, don't miss the new Plone logo.
_____________

Late breaking midday update: I found a few recent references by searching in Technorati. Guess the search engines haven't gotten to the weekend's blogs yet.

There's a summary from Friday at Plope and a twitter from Chistian Scholz. Probably the best was "The Silent Summit" piece and the remarkable comment threads from Stahl, Aspeli, Gottlieb, and others.

It is interesting that the first Plone Strategic Planning Summit turned to good ol' human interaction, big white tablets, and the "graphite manual interface". I'll be very curious to see the outputs in the blogs and on the boards at Nabble.

And finally, I'll put in an unabashed plug for my other blog, children's adventure stories of a teddy bear that travels with me. I've had a related website since 1999, so it covers some interesting time, like working in Vienna with the IAEA and sending web servers to Baghdad for the UN weapons inspectors back in 2002.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Plone Metrics Searches

Who's been visiting Plone Metrics and why? Conveniently, Google's Webmaster Tools provide a way to answer this one. Top of the list is the search string "wacsi," which links (among other things) to our Civil Society portal. But within the realm of Plone-relevant searches, "Plone advocacy" and "Plone review" are high up the list.

Another common keyword search is "measures of effectiveness," which surprises me. When you start thinking about search terms for metrics, this isn't the first one that hops to mind.

Still another interesting search string is "'Plone Professional Development' pdf." It appears that some site visitors were looking for a pdf copy of Aspeli's recent book. The good news is that Packt Publishing is now offering it as an e-book. Perhaps some are looking for a free online copy in the way that McKay's "Definitive Guide to Plone" is out there, but you'll have to wait for that.

Not surprisingly, a few visitors are searching for "Drupal," "Dot Net Nuke," "Netvolution," and "Mojoportal." So there's a fair amount of interest in software comparisons, even if a few like key players like Joomla! are missing.

Finally, in closing I'd like to point out my favorite oddity in all this: "moribund." I used the term to describe software with no stable release and no development activity in the last year. For some unfathomable reason, Googling for "moribund" brings up Plone Metrics in the number two slot. Go figure....