Growing up is optional

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?

from Gaping Void

June 21 2006 is Go Skateboarding Day. Get out and do it! There doesn’t appear to be anything happening here in Wellington, but if you’re in Auckland join AltTV on Queen Street. Anywhere else, search for event on the GSD website.

A 1989 Ford Telstar can travel 357800km before it becomes uneconomical to repair. My car of the last 7 year has died. It’s soul has gone. It’s body is on the organ donor list.

There is more value in its parts than as a whole. Unfortunately that means I give it away for nearly nothing, or have a immovable steel lump parked on my lawn while vultures scavenge. I could probably sell it for $50 as it is. If I took the mags of I could probably get $150-$200 for them, but have the problem of disposing of a car.

Now I’m shopping around. I’m traditionally a Holden guy, but I’ve whittled down the list of cars in my price range with the specs I want (Station wagon, European or Australian, bigger than 2.0L) and it’s come to a decision between 2 Fords: An AUIII Falcon (4L Straight 6) or a MkII Mondeo (2.5L V6).

There are advantages and disadvantages to both: The Falcon is newer (2002) and bigger, but will be quite thirsty, which is why they are considerably cheaper at the moment given the current price of fuel. Also it’s the base model: it only has a single CD and electric front windows. The Mondeo is older (1997) and smaller, but will use less petrol. It is the Ghia, which is fully electric, even the seat adjustments and has a 6 disk CD player and full leather upholstry.

Given that the price of each is similar, what would you choose? Why?

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

I wrote this a while back. What y’all think? I disagree with a lot

A while back on the WSG mailing list someone asked about correct markup for legal documents. Having worked for the Department for Courts/Ministry of Justice I had often thought about this, so it was of some interest to me.

Simply put, legal documents, such as judgments have numbered paragraphs throughout, with heading spaced in between them e.g.

<h3>Section 1</h3>
<p>1.  Paragraph 1</p>
<p>2.  Paragraph 2</p>
<h3>Section 2</h3>
<p>3.  Paragraph 3</p>
<p>4.  Paragraph 4</p>

While this displays alright, semantically speaking its not very nice, and is a pain if you decide to move a paragraph from one section to another while editing the document. However, it does have the advantage that once a documment is finalised the numbers are tied to the content.

Next I thought what about

<h3>Section 1</h3>
<ol>
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<h3>Section 2</h3>
<li start="3">Item 3<li>
<li>Item 4</li>
</ol>

While I think it’s better than the first example, if you want to use it you are forced to use a transitional doctype as start is not a strict attribute. Also, it has the disadvantage that the numbering is not inherently tied to the paragraph, which it the big plus of the first example.

In the CSS2 Recomendation, W3C have included automatic numbering. Unfortunately UA support is limited

What do y’all think?

I can’t wait for my shortboard to arrive. A longboard is just not right in the pool.

This weekend I managed to get Ubuntu Linux running on my PC, along side Windows XP. In the past I have tried to get away from MS products, but the hurdles have just been too high. There are still some hurdles with Ubuntu, but they’re not show stoppers for me. However, since my wife and kids use this PC, I can’t ditch Windows totally. This is a major source of Microsoft’s great power.

The two things that stop me ditching MS are office macros and kid’s games. Open Office is great, but there are still some issues between it and MS office. Our dependence on some spreadsheets means that we need to stick with Excel for a while. And the kids games are windows-only. I may be able to get them going with WINE, but haven’t tried yet.