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Update

Joe — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:45:34 +0000

Been skating a bit; not as much at I would like. Got a few new boards (pintail, pool, slalom, dervish). Went to a race at the mount. Another race coming up in Wellington.
Stopped playing online poker. Was profitable, but the time was a drag. It paid for a few skateboards though. Still have a small bankroll for live games.
Changed jobs. Working in the Health sector, still for government. Basically I’m a project manager, but there’s more to it and the explanation is really long so I won’t bore you.

Last exam ever

Joe — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:02:46 +0000

I’ve had my last exam ever. …unless I decide to do some other qualification. Only 1 research paper to go.

In other news: I finally ordered some slalom gear. It should be here next week. Now I just need to find some more people…

Instant traffic

Joe — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:31:27 +0000

The fastest traffic peak I’ve ever had on a work website happenned today. The site I built to promote fireworks safety this Guy Fawkes was metioned on the front page of the New Zealand Herald, New Zealand’s biggest daily.

Still, not as big as when I released a PHP-Nuke module to parse RSS feeds which made the PHP-Nuke homepage.

Help with website management research

Joe — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 22:18:17 +0000

I’m working on my Masters of Management through Massey University. I’m currently trying to put together a literature review of my chosen topic. However, I am having trouble locating any academic or even practicioner research in this area. My topic is (verbatim from my draft research proposal):

Determinants of effective website management in New Zealand government websites.

How are websites managed and how does this affect their effectiveness in achieving the outcomes for which they are maintained?

In this research I will examine different types of government websites (e.g. informational, educational, transactional) looking at how they are managed (including governing structures, authorship models, development models, history), and determine if there is a relationship between these variables and their effectiveness.

I have narrowed the topic to NZ govt sites just to stop the research getting too huge, but any research on website management with a sound methodology in a different domain (e.g. ecommerce, activism) would be a good start for me. I’ve hunted around all of the academic abstract databases etc I can think of but with no luck. Everything I have found is focused on the technology and functionality, rather than the people side of website management.

Do you know of any research, theses, papers or anything else remotely related to this topic?

The busy post

Joe — Thu, 25 May 2006 08:18:05 +0000

Long time since I posted; been too busy

Going to Webstock, met some people I’ve chatted with online for a while. Putting faces to names. Heard some legends. The heads of the two biggest browsers are speaking tomorrow. (IE, firefox)
My new board arrived (very late)
Been cited in an academic paper for the presentation I gave on Semantic HTML, and it’s on page 1 of Google
Soccer season is up and down

B+

Joe — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 20:46:50 +0000

I’m not so happy with this mark, mostly with myself because I know I could have done better, although most people tell me it’s not that bad considering I work full time, have two small kids and study 50% FTE.

Enough excuses. Next year it will be 2 more papers:

Final B

Joe — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 20:35:25 +0000

Got a B for my final exam. Not as good as I hoped, but it’s better than I thought it would be. Should end up with a B+/A- for the paper overall. Anyone need Strategic Governance analysis done? Directorships on offer?

Quick Update

Joe — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 03:39:45 +0000

Lazy post about what I’ve been doing:

Been studying heaps. 1st assignment is in, working on 2nd.
Playing with Pandora – very cool. Let me know if you want an invite and I’ll see what I can do.
Can’t find a builder to do up my bathroom. Can find every other service though.
Work’s really busy.
Thinking about the general election. Still undecided centre vote.

Being a Student

Joe — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 01:38:18 +0000

Well it’s started. I’ve received all of my course material. It looks like a fairly hefty amount of reading, which is OK for the time being. The hard part comes when I have to do critical analysis of what I am reading and reproduce it in the form of assignments. Recommended study time for this course is 25 hours per week. I’m way behind so far. I guess I should track it to get some idea of how well I’m doing.

Because of this work load my blog posting will be relatively sparce over the next four months. I’m sure that my vast audience will forgive this, or just unsubscribe.

The problem with having a science based education, and being lazy, is that I always try to write as succinctly as possible. That’s great for a scientific report, but in a management paper where you have to demostrate understanding as well as convey facts my writing style can work against me. I guess I’ll see.

Using the Yahoo! API

Joe — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:21:22 +0000

I’ve got the Yahoo! API powering the search on my work’s website. The programming was easy. Using it is easy. The change process is hard.

I’m using PHP to convert the XML into a multidimentional array, and then looping through the results. To limit the results I was appending site:http://mysite to the search string.

The one difficulty I had was with handling big search strings with lots of OR operators. It seemed to drop the end of the query with the site: parameter and our site would then serve results from anywhere. To get around this I prepend it to the query. Also I added an extra check to confirm that the results are actually from our site.

Results are very good. Thanks Yahoo!