Design

First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows, perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site - sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

Gadgetopia pointed their readers to a website hosted by Michigan State University with a number of screen captures for how the Internet looked like in 1996. Almost a year ago, I posted a screen capture of the first site I did in that era. I'm somewhat pleased that the appearance of my site was no worse than the sites of well known companies. The author of the Internet '96 article brings up the point that you have to consider the technology back then to why sites looked the way they did.

Confession: I never knew how much there was to Photoshop until my wife, the photographer, decided to move over to the digital age. During the course of our marriage, while she has excelled in the art of digital photography, as well as Photoshop, I have remained the amateur.

Luckily, Corrie Haffly at Sitepoint has started a series of articles for geeks like us who still think all we need on our Websites is any of the eight colors we learned when we were five. (By the way, I got a star on my paper in kindergarten...red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown, and black!)

The visual style that has come to be associated with the term Web 2.0 has exploded in popularity; everywhere you look, corporate sites, web service sites, ecommerce sites, and even personal blogs are making use of clean, minimalist design coupled with fancy graphic effects. If you'd like to jump on the bandwagon, this is the article for you!

Josh Clark sent an e-mail to us the other day saying that his Web content management system, Big Medium 2, is availabe for public consumption. While he sent the usual press release, I thought I'd go ahead and paste his full e-mail to me. Sometimes it's good to note that it's not just a "company" pushing a product but instead to actually see the people developing the software pushing their own products.

Bryan,

First off, thanks for all you do. You offer such terrific coverage of the CMS space and the challenges facing practitioners. Super-professional but with a personal feel. I love it.

I posted a comment on one of your posts introducing Big Medium 2 a couple of months ago and now, at long last, it's out of beta. I'm passing along the press release below in hopes that you'll find it of interest to your readers. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and thanks again.

All best,

Josh

 PARIS, DEC 17, 2007 -- Josh Clark and Global Moxie announced the release of Big Medium 2, a web content management system aimed squarely at web designers.

As we mentioned more than a month ago, Firefox 3 is expected to sport a new look. Some of the more popular online magazines are starting to take notice and helping to fan some excitement on the new look. On a blog at Wired a Firefox 3 related post can be found, Catch a Glimpse of Firefox 3's Sleek, Sexy New Digs.

Some of the changes planned for the final release of Firefox 3 include a complete visual makeover with platform-specific skins designed to integrate the look of Firefox into your OS of choice.

I have had this itch to change the theme I'm using for CMSReport.com.  I decided to scratch that itch.  I'm currently playing with some freely available themes out there for the CMS I'm currently using (Drupal).  The theme in use at CMS Report this week is LiteJazz by RoopleTheme.

So what do you think about the LiteJazz theme and is it an improvement over the theme we've been using the past year?  Feel free to use the comments section below to voice your opinion.

I'm especially interested in two things:

John Newton, Alfresco co-founder, is a man I have never met.  Regardless of this important fact, I feel like I have gotten to know a small part of him through his blog.  While Newton's blog may focus on Alfresco, his posts offers a wide range of insights on subjects such as commercial open source, content management,  enterprise software,  business processes, and information technology.  So if you have any idea of who I am through my own writings  it should be no surprise to you that I enjoy giving thought to some of

Here at CMSReport.com, I use a slightly modified version of the Zen theme.  Jeff Robbins is currently working on expanding his ideas via a series of default templates and variables added for the PHPTemplate engine.  This work is currently under the project name Zengine.  Lullabot.com recently underwent a new site design using Zengine and I guess there has been a number of comments for the site's new search tab.   Lucky for us, Mr. Robbins has decided to share with us how to code in the search tab.

This is a busy week for me with an all-day software load scheduled this week for my work's operational systems. Translation...you likely will not see many original posts from me for a few days. I will however continue to post some links and excerpts  on CMS news items that catch my attention.

On Planet Drupal, there have been a number of posts lately about the difficulty project leaders and developers have in  saying "no" while working on a project.  As much as Project leaders want to please both their client and their team members, real leaders understand the responsibilities they have in saying "no".  More specifically, I'm talking about Boris Mann's post, "Susan Mernit on the role of "no" in product development" as well as Laura Scott's own post You've got to know when to 'no' them.