Dennis Dam tag:blogs.onehippo.org,2009:/dennis//7 2006-06-01T19:53:54Z Movable Type 3.35 Experiences at Lostboys tag:blogs.hippo.nl,2006:/dennis//7.35 2006-06-01T19:07:27Z 2006-06-01T19:53:54Z Lately I've been sent to Lostboys to assist a team of programmers in setting up a Cocoon website for a big house corporation. It's quite entertaining to have some students under your wing and throw them in the deep :)... Dennis Dam http://blogs.hippo.nl Lately I've been sent to Lostboys to assist a team of programmers in setting up a Cocoon website for a big house corporation. It's quite entertaining to have some students under your wing and throw them in the deep :)

]]> It's amazing how fast they learn on the other hand. In spite of the very tight deadline we managed to set up the basis for the website quite fast. One of the main reasons for this fast progress is a new basic structure of the site, which allows us to set up new functional parts of the website really fast: add a folder, add a sitemap, write one or two pipelines, and a little XSL: voilà that's it! And all that with a minimum amount of duplicate code.

One of the potential problems in this website is personalization. Visitors can login and change the way the website behaves in their "profile". Currently, this profile is stored in the session and made persistent using Jpox and Spring. Our current approach is to maximize caching possibilites by deferring the visitor-dependent content (like login information and additional content which may appear anywhere in the page) to the end of the pipeline by using the session transformer in combination with the JX transformer just before serializing. We didn't have a real opportunity to test this method under heavy load yet, unfortunately.

Okay , so far the technical intermezzo. The differences in work environment I experience at Lostboys with respect to Hippo are mainly concerned with project management: every week there are two scheduled meetings with the whole team (in total about 8 people), there is a detailed planning (although quite optimistic) and we often have a talk-through of the current status with the site developers. In short, I feel like there are really a lot of reports back to management ;) Which is good in it's own way, to stay focused on the goals you're pursuing, but I had to get used to it in the beginning.

For the rest, the working atmosphere in Lostboys is a lot like Hippo. Music, a dart board, a lot of young people, and even a game machine near the coffee machine (might be an idea for Hippo (: ) .

]]> Schijndel Website is "Drempels Weg" tag:blogs.hippo.nl,2006://7.16 2006-04-12T09:21:21Z 2006-04-12T11:30:34Z The Municipality Schijndel website has been declared "Drempels Weg", which means something like "Remove All Limits". Adhering to this standard allows e.g. blind people to surf the website in an accessible way. Ofcourse an important issue for a political organization.... Dennis Dam http://blogs.hippo.nl The Municipality Schijndel website has been declared "Drempels Weg", which means something like "Remove All Limits". Adhering to this standard allows e.g. blind people to surf the website in an accessible way. Ofcourse an important issue for a political organization.

So how can this be achieved? First, take a cup of coffee. Think about how much torture you can stand before you break into tears. Then if you think you're up to it, go to the Drempelsweg website (sorry, this is in Dutch!). Basically it comes down to making your website XHTML (Transitional) compliant, and tagging HTML elements with enough information (titles / alt tags / caption / summaries), so e.g. a browser for blind people can function properly. Most of the text on the website is generated from Hippo CMS, more particularly the HTMLAreas in the Editor. This should be easy for the website developer (me), since this should move the responsibility for adding meta information to html elements to the CMS user. Alas! CMS users are no robots. They can be lazy. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to force CMS users to add accessibility information to html elements inside the htmlarea (might be an improvement?). So that means we need some backup mechanism in the frontend. This comes down to providing downloads like names like "election results.pdf" with ALT texts like "Link to election results.pdf". Does this really help the blind man, I wonder? :).


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