It’s been about 2 weeks since I last posted and my god it feels like an age. I’ve been a touch busy lately and the first thing that falls by the wayside is my blogging usually followed by my twittering.
So, what’s been going on?
Well, a few weeks ago I swapped jobs. I’ve moved out of a scientific department in into a corporate IT role. Same company but different people. To be honest the size of the place means it may well as be a new company. It’s only a secondment lasting 10 months but it’s a step in the right direction for me. It puts me closer to social computing, it puts me closer to SharePoint and it means I can start to bite off some big things rather nibble around the edges when I get chance. The first few weeks have been going well, I think anyway.
At the minute I’m delving deep into some SharePoint functionality. I’ve mentioned before I have a love hate relationship with SharePoint and that is continuing. The problem is when it comes to anything E2 related. SharePoint just doesn’t cut it. The blogging is getting better and there’s a couple of tag cloud work arounds that mean you can start to employ folksonomy rather than those terrible categories that SP blogging relies upon. The wiki is just a bit rubbish, nowhere near as good as any other wiki. After spending a lot of time in MediaWiki I also find it weird to move back to a WYSIWYG editor. Once you get used to wiki markup I actually think it’s quicker and easier than WYSIWYG. No deciding on what font or size a title is going to be, no figuring out how indented your bullets are. There’s other things I’m not to keen on in SP wiki but I’ll not go on.
Then we get onto SPs strengths and there are quite a few. The best one is the content web editor. With it you can do some wonderful things to dress up a lot of dull stuff. So far I’ve used it for simple instruction panels and also to embed video into sites. Then there’s the functionality it offers out of the box. Task scheduling, notification, meeting workspaces etc are all a massive step forward compared to what used to be available inside the corporation. Integration with InfoPath is pretty impressive as is the way you can manipulate your document management systems to work with both folksonomy and taxonomy. The way I’m looking at SP is that it’s a stepping stone. It’s starting to get people out of the silos they so enjoy and out into the open for the benefit of everyone. At first I actually hated the access control but it’s so bad it’s good. People hate it so much that they try and avoid it like the plague. The easiest way to do that is just to leave everything open.
Outside of work I’ve been messing around setting up my own site. After a few teething issues I finally got www.danielsiddle.co.uk and www.danielsiddle.com registered and I got myself some hosting space. At the minute I’m trying out streamline.net but I must say I’m not liking them too much. Any suggestions would be welcomed before my free trial runs out! The plan is to sort that out as my wordpress blog and move all the action over there. I don’t want to do that until I get my theme sorted and until I get onto some hosting that I like. The theme could take a while because I’m learning CSS from scratch and want to write my own.
Other than that my massage course is going OK. Haven’t had much time to practise, much to the disappointment of my girlfriend. I start my case studies soon though so that means I’ll be getting my teeth into it. If anyone wants to volunteer as an Indian Head Massage test case then just drop me a line.
That’s all for now.
