Over at Mambo we are currently planning changes to the User Interface. Most GUI (graphical user interface) screens use icons to graphically represent the function or action a user can take. But choosing the right icon, that has the same meaning across languages and cultures can be a real challenge.

Programmers are not know for their interface design expertise and unless a volunteer, open source project has GUI experts donating their time, creating the perfect GUI can be a hit and miss exercise. I took responsibility for preparing a plan. As a result, I am spending a lot of time reading, studying up, and analysing GUI in action in various applications.

All over the Net, on every open source CMS forum, you will find people asking whether or not they should use that CMS. The answer is not an easy one, but can be given in a two-word sentence, “that depends”.

If you are new to content management systems you may find it difficult to understand just what a CMS actually is. The problem is, the term has become used in so many different ways that almost anything can be called a CMS these days. If you search on Google for “what is a CMS” you get thousands of results returned. A quick scan of those results shows that the term CMS is used to describe many different things. We have Asset Management Systems, document management, records management, and the enterprise grades of CMS, as well as the subset of all this which is really where most Open Source CMS’’s fall - Web Content Management.

Those of you who visit here regularly will have noticed there have been a few changes. The site name has changed - no longer, “Lynne Pope, City Councillor”, the site is now “discourse and data”. The words are self-explanatory. I did not seek a third term as a city councillor so on 13th October, my time as an elected public figure came to an end. I continue to serve my community, but no longer within the council chambers. For a long time I have kept my public life and outside interests separate and used this site to keep in contact with the people I represented. Now that I am just me, citizen again, I am going to use this blog to talk about the other things I work with.

As you can see, I am updating my blog to give it a fresh new look. Whether its the weather (try saying that quickly!) or the fact that I am just too busy to mess around with browser bugs - too impatient to be patient - I am currently having visions of drowning everyone responsible for Internet Explorer. I remember back in the 1980’s when computer gurus promised we would be seeing Standards and were soon heading for cross-browser compatibility. Is it unreasonable to think that 20 years is a long, long time to wait?

On 26th June, I was working on this website when I noticed some strange things occurring. Something was going very wrong and it took me a few minutes to suspect what it was. I just happened to be on the site when hackers managed to get into the server. Over the following hour, while I was running checks to ascertain whether my suspicions were correct, three more of my sites were hacked. I had server technicians onto it immediately but before they were able to stop the attack, hackers had managed to take out over 100 websites.