Recently in Fimcap Category

As I have been blogging for 10 years now, I thought it would be a nice idea to look back at almost 1000 posts on my sites. Today an overview of the year it all started: 1997.

Though I already had a personal web page for some years, I didn't spend a lot of time on it. My main interest these days were Jong Nederland and Fimcap. In November I had a great weekend with all JN volunteers on a national level, and in December I joined a Fimcap meeting in Rome. Though the meeting was only a weekend, I spend the entire week in Italy.

I could simply write here that I am too busy to write on Brain Tags, but I guess it is more interesting for you to read what I am doing currently. So this is a short list of my most interesting current projects:

New web site for Fimcap
This is a project on which I have been working for a long time (not always as active as now) and which should have been finished a long time ago. I am now finishing off the new design, after which we can finally show the world the work we have been doing. Working on a graphical design is quite an adventure for a technical person like me. I can easily tell whether I like a design or not, but to make one yourself is a whole different thing.

Renewed site for Brytenet
Hopping along with the Fimcap redesign, I am also reworking the site where I station my side-business. Both sites are built on eZ Publish, so I use the experiences on ons site to advance on another. I am also working to leverage some of the karma I got with blogging to new profitable projects under the Brytenet umbrella. You will read more about that when these plans have crystallized a little bit more. Anyway, currently the Brytenet site is off-line while I restructure the content, but before next week I hope to be open for business again.

There is still one room in our house where we didn't do anything since we moved in, the room where our visitors sleep. Those who have visited us can confirm that the beds in that room have had their time. So we are going to use our holiday in November to get rid of the current furniture and paint the room. In the mean time we are already looking for two new beds and a wardrobe to provide our guests with better rest and ourselves with more storage room.

Teaching sells
And finally I started an on-line course about making on-line courses (?) called Teaching Sells, which will probably help me getting all that information I have been absorbing over the past years out of my head and into my wallet. I am sure some very interesting new projects will arise from that course.

Blogging
The blogs are still there, and will stay, though I am considering stopping to write on the Wizard of POS.

Just like most other weblogs, this site has its ups and downs, and you might have noticed that it has been down lately. I am quite busy at the moment, working parallel at several projects.

The company I work for is preparing for the SIMO trade show in Madrid, where we will present the new versions of our products. Though I won't be present at the show (my responsibilities lie outside Spain) I do have a lot of extra work concerning translating and testing the new software.

Then I am working on the new Fimcap web site. This weekend we are going to finish the forum functionality and start working on the design. We already did some brainstorming and I am happy that we are all more or less on the same line. Once the design is finished we will start using the first parts of the new site, and gradually transfer more functionality.

Once in a while I also work a little bit on BryteNet hosting. Little by little the customers are coming in, but as everything is running smoothly and automated, I don't have much work on it.

And finally there is the blogging thing. I am planning on taking it more seriously, using Brain Tags for playing around, and doing the real blogging at The Wizard of POS. I am rethinking my work flow to crank up the posting frequency --now once a week-- and have a more diverse range of articles. Furthermore I am working on a new weblog in Spanish about GTD.

You see, I have plenty of work, so I better stop writing and get something done!

It has been very quiet on this site, and that usually means that I am working on something. And indeed, I am working on the new site for Fimcap. Besides that, the temperature in Lleida ---almost reaching 40 °--- makes that I don't want to spend too much time behind the PC, but rather stay in the water of the swimming pool. As you might be worried what is going on here, I deceided to write a little bit about the new fimcap site.

After I left Harmelen four years ago, I also stopped participating in youth activities. Of course I have done some work for Fimcap as their webmaster, but I never visited or participated in any activity.

Last weekend we went to Vall d'Aran to spend 24 hours in a Roundabout camp. Roundabout is a Fimcap project in which two groups from different countries spend their summer camp together. This Roundabout was between three groups (Germany, Malta and Catalonia), and this was the third year of the project. Since we knew the Maltese animators and most of the German animators very well, we visited them to meet our old friends again.

Because the group had been together for already a week and the participants knew each other from former years, we decided to stay on the background to not disturb the group dynamics. That gave us many possibilities to analyse the activity, and compare it to our own experiences. People active within a youth organisation already know that there are huge differences between groups within a single organisation, let alone the differences between different organisations from different countries ---this is one reason Fimcap is so interesting.

Anyway, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and everybody was enjoying the activity. And we? We were very happy to meet our old friends again, and get up--to--date with all the gossip.

A while ago I mentioned Big Medium as a possible CMS for the Fimcap site. Today I finally had some time to lurk on the Support forum to find answers to some of my questions. Already after reading only a few messages I found out that Big Medium is not what I was looking for. :-(

• The user interface of the produced site has some hard-coded English texts; so internationalisation (I18L) is out of the question;
• Big Medium only supports two document levels: the category and the subcategory. Only with an ugly hack it is possible to go deeper. This is also by design, and won't be solved in the near future;
• The text editing area is too much a 'guestbook' styled page and not enough a text processor. For use by people without any HTML knowledge it is absolutely necessary that the interface has the buttons to change the text properties (bold, italics, headers,...);
• There currently is no search feature; so I'll have to implement a separate search script. It is a big pity that you can't search directly in the BM database;
• To edit a document you'll have to go to the management interface and look up the document. I would prefer to have an 'Edit' button right on the page if my machine contains the BM cookie with the appropriate rights;
• Another thing I miss is the plug-in flexibility of Movable Type. Since BM does not support plug-ins, I'll have to wait for a new release to have extra functionality.

Most of the point mentioned above are on the roadmap, but in general I miss the flexibility of systems like MT.

Imagine that I would have a lot of spare time. And imagine that I still remember how to program applications, and know all the ins and outs of Perl, PHP or Python. Imagine all that...

If all that would be true, I would create a Content Management System. A CMS is an application in which you can enter your texts in a very easy manner, and after that the application does all sorts of things with permissions, rules and templates to create for example a web site and/or a PDF document. One example of a CMS is Movable Type, which I use to create this site. I only have to enter the text of my article, and MT creates a page with this text and a comment form, adds a summary to the main page, updates the monthly archive overview, etc.

The buzz started with the redesign of Adaptive Path by [stop]design and Jay Allen. They used the Movable Type blogger software to produce a commercial site. And not only as a CMS to publish their 'Appearances', 'Essays' and 'News', but also to manage the static content of the site! Jay Allen posted a description of how he set up the Adaptive Path configuration.

Other people already had the same idea or started working after reading the above story. Doug Bowman of [stop]design started managing his portfolio with MT, Matt Haughey explains how to use MT in alternative ways, like creating an About page and using the database fields in different ways. He also lists some sites using MT this way. And finally, master MT-hacker Brad Choate explains how to use the MT-categories to place static content in directories. Managing static content with MT is definitely THE hype of this week!!!

I have been reading all this with a lot of interest. Already for a while Sebastiaan and I are thinking about a CMS for our Fimcap site, since this site is at this moment completely maintained by hand at HTML level. We do use some Server Side Includes (SSI) to handle general content like the page headers and footers, and NewsPro for some content, but mostly we have to change the HTML code. This makes it also really difficult for others to contribute to the site, since they first have to understand HTML and the organisation of our site. We have been looking around a while ago, and the best fit I could find at that moment was Plone, but since Plone is so completely different from what we are doing now, this would involve a really steep learning curve.

But now it looks like we can do it in MT. We can manage our static content, create templates, and store our dynamical content. The only thing I have to figure out is how we can implement the site in three languages. I guess I will just set up a demo and start playing...

The car has been thoroughly checked, my colleague has been informed of ongoing issues at my job,... I guess I am almost ready for holidays. There are only three things left to arrange before I will dissapear for two weeks.

First at home. Tomorrow I will clean our house and do some shoppings (we only have yoghurt and beer in the fridge!). I also have to ask our neighbours to take care about our plants; they are very thirsty with this weather.

Then I have Fimcap. I need to finish the on-line edition of the Link magazine June edition. Besides that I need to activate a page I already created on which you can read live news from the World Camp, a Fimcap activity for youth animators in the Philipines. During the world camp, participants will write their stories on this page. Photos will be added later by the webmasters (of which I am one), since editing pictures, uploading them and creating the right HTML code is too difficult. I could have used some advanced blogging tool, but decided that for the moment NewsPro will do the job.

And finally I have to prepare the trip. We decided to go by car to Croatia, with a stop in Milano to visit Roberto. And that is about all we decided and have prepared so far. We don't know which road to take, what we can visit and where to stay in Croatia. I hope that MJ was able to buy a copy of the Lonely Planet guide, because than I will have good faith in our trip.

Anyway, I am almost ready. The next two weeks it will be very quiet on this web site!

Fimcap? You stopped the youthwork when you left Holland, didn´t you? No, I didn´t!

I am still involved in Fimcap as a member of the working group for e-media. At this moment we are preparing the launch of version 2 of the Fimcap web site. On February 1st the world can finally see what I have been working on all these hours the last year. And the address? www.fimcap.org. Go have a look after next week!