Contentions
How well do CMS vendors "eat their own dog food?" That's the question some analysts and bloggers have been asking recently. Do vendors use their own system to run their Web sites, and further, how do their sites stack up to various tests from best practices such as standards compliance in page markup? A recent test run by Kas Thomas highlights one issue we faced here at Percussion when the "dog food" question came up for the new Percussion.com site. To his credit, Kas understands the scores he came up with are fraught with caveats, but in our case, there's an ironic twist about the reasons why.
As a vendor, we already had plenty of customer sites that could show things like accessibility compliance, high performance, or platform flexibility. Because of our architecture, Percussion is best known for our technical expertise at optimizing site load in the delivery tier, XML, and standards compliance. In fact, because of that technical XML heritage, some reports raised questions about how easy it would be to do the "unstructured" or non-compliant type things using Percussion.We realized our site needed to be a showcase of not simply the types of things web sites need to do to be effective, but a showcase of HOW those features can be accomplished with our system.
So we decided to make our site more open to investigation of "how" and specifically to use third party tools in an open "as is" manner. In short, we decided to take "eating our own dog food" to another level - by making our actual live site our demo site as well.
To do that, we had to make trade-offs between optimizing things and leaving them more bare so visitors could see how it was done. The JS libraries we used and third party tools in particular are left open and un-obfuscated. They are not consolidated and are placed more for easy decomposition than for optimization. We faced similar trade offs on compliance and markup - show best practice, or show it can be done however you want it? In the end we did a mix. Some areas of the site score very high, others not so much. Taking the "dog food" concept one step further, we even put a "how and why" feature in to help get visitors exploring the features in more detail - not in a separate demo, but right on the live site. It's a feature we intend to expand with even more detail.
At Percussion, we believe Web sites should be tailored to specific business objectives. As a vendor, our goal is to help you see how the Percussion CM System can deliver this for your site. Relegating that to a separate "demo" site would miss the mark. In the end, "eating our own dog food" meant doing some things the way our customers would NOT do them. We felt we could make the trade-offs between the openness that we sought without compromising the resulting load times. So far, that has been the case.
Who knows, maybe next we'll do a special dedicated "optimized site" that hides everything - kind of a demo site in reverse!
The death of Email is how one of our friends would describe a recent survey. While I certainly don't argue with the trends, there's only one problem - the emergence of these "new" forms of communication only validate that the purist original form of Email had it right all along.
If you missed the era when Email was pure - roughly, up to about 1995 - you missed the good old days. Email back then was short and off the cuff, free of any obligation. You read them in a simple text-only reader like Pine or Mail and answered only if you felt like joining the discussion. There might be pensive introspective musings or frivolity like what you planned to have for lunch. Sound familiar?
Then Email became popular. Lawyers and software vendors swooped in. The law twisted Email from it's original "talking with a keyboard" intent into the "electronic office memo." Are you sure you want that "in writing" was the question, and if you did, you better save it, archive it, and answer for it later. Then there were the software vendors, who in their mad rush to "differentiate and add value" piled everything one could imagine into helpless innocent Email - loading it down with calendars and to-do lists and transforming it forever into an "office productivity application." Not long after formal memo style Email took over for good, followed by spam, until now we even spam ourselves with giant space hogging mandatory signature files complete with legal disclaimers. Looking at my Email client today, about 15% of the screen is the actual content, and it's completely lifeless.
It is no wonder then that IM took off just as Email began to decline. IM was the natural replacement for that spontaneous human interaction we loved. But IM has problems - it has no history and no time, only the relentless interface that screams - YOU MUST DROP EVERYTHING AND RESPOND TO MY IM RIGHT NOW! HEY I'M STILL BLINKING!
Thankfully, we have evolved again, to the non-invasive, to the asynchronous "read it if you want, reply if you want" approach that is the paradigm of Blogs and Tweets. Which of course, was the paradigm of Email way back when. We've come full circle. Email is not dead, it's back. We just had to rebuild it as it once was, and give it a new name to throw off the lawyers. It's fun - again. It's social, and off the cuff - again. It's no strings attached, simple and quick communication, like what you're planning to have for lunch today, so don't sue me.
Of course, this means the lawyers (and software vendors) will inevitably get hold of Twitter, Blogs and Facebook, and these too will someday "die" the same death as Email. But don't despair. To paraphrase a line from Jurassic Park, communication "finds a way." These too will be reborn again with some other even crazier new name, and the circle of life will be complete. And some old stooge like me will tell you how Floozecasting is really just like Tweeting was before the lawyers ruined it.
P.S. I've already trademarked Floozecast, so don't even think about it. I'm going to make millions!
