Saturday, September 16, 2006

Blogger Enhancements and Tizra AgilePDF Boasting

Now we're cooking! Last week I upgraded my Blogger blogs to the new Blogger Beta...This new beta adds a couple of new features that I consider to be crucial for a useful and rich blog.

  • You are now able to add tags to my blog entries (have you checked my right navigation bar since then ? ;-) ) thus effectively achieving category grouping of these entries.
  • You can now create private blogs. And why would I want that you may ask ? For small teams it is often useful to have a repository of shared information and/or comments. While for some things the use of a Wiki (see Wikipedia entry for Wiki) fits the bill of storing and sharing knowledge, for others the use of a blog can be more appropriate (not impossible to do via a Wiki, just a bit more awkward). Recent news of interest, cool interesting things out there, these all fall more into the info better usable in a blog.
  • It provides a drag-and-drop interface for blog template management, provides an enhanced set of blogger tags for simpler layout management.
  • It provides an enhanced user interface for some of the blog's visual components, take a look for instance at the new archive navigation tree, pretty cool.
At this point I will have to boast a bit and put in my shameless plug...;-)


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Defining page layout structureIf you like what you see in terms of control of the appearance of your blog, you should *really* see what we are doing at Tizra...We are building a web tool for pdf content publishers, the AgilePDF product, that gives the admin user total control over all aspects of their site including presentation, content management, search, access control, creation and selling of admin defined products. The layout definition component in particular is a component that currently really overwhelms what the Blogger page editor is offering, if you liked that one, you should see ours! ;-) It offer the means to change the presentation of the site by providing a pretty nifty drag-and-drop interface for site structuring definition and CSS definition interface.

Publishing ContentThe Publishing experience makes use of currently available rich client technologies thus eliminating the typical "Push and Pray" experience of a good number of publisher applications out there making it possible for people to *actually know* what is going on when interacting with the system.



Published and looking just like you wanted!At the end of the day, a nice looking (actually as nice as you might want to make it! ;-) we offer nice looking canned solutions that might get you started towards a nice looking site but you are free to do whatever you want with it, including make it look ugly if for nothing else to make a statement! :-) ), site is out there with your content properly presented, giving you a nice web-like experience to content that usually is not very web-friendly.


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If Blogger was already a nice tool for bloggers and small companies, it becomes even more so after these nice enhancements. I'll keep drilling through the new beta...blogging...

Friday, September 15, 2006

Computer Science Talks

If you are looking for some computer science talks/presentations, Research Channel is a nice gathering place for a whole number of interesting presentations on a number of different topics (and other non CS related topics for that matter). The University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering site also presents a pretty cool list of colloquiums available for public viewing. Spanning a whole slew of CS subjects, from Distributed Storage Systems to Google's Linux Cluster, the list is just too big to reproduce here....

All in all a pretty cool resource for getting to learn a bit more....Fair warning: you could be in there for some serious time...;-)