Ken's blog

Aside from "architect," I think the most overused word in web development is "producer." Perhaps part of the problem is that the title means such different things in different industries. In film, a "producer" is someone who was able to raise money to make the film, whether or not they have any actual film-making skills or even any involvement in the work (the two names listed as "producers" on every episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" financed the original movie, but had nothing to do with the series).

The product development process is, among other things, the method by which the creative tensions between designers, developers, and business people are resolved into a coherent product. It's similar to a political process, which is a way to resolve the tensions in society into a coherent form of government. Well-functioning organizations funnel those tensions into a commonly accepted process, and make decisions using an established process that everyone supports.

It's not often that my years of messing about with text encoding comes in useful in my life as a harmonica player, but once in a while it happens. The harmonica is one of the many instruments for which traditional music notation doesn't always give you enough information about what to play. Any note on the staff can be played on one and only one key of a piano, for instance, but can be played in any of a dozen or so places on a guitar. So guitarists often use tablature that places numbers on lines representing each string, telling them which string to play and exactly where to fret it.

A little while ago I wrote a recommendation for a client about some content-reuse issues, and ended up writing a section entitled "First Principles." These might seem obvious, but a surprisingly large amount of time and money are being spent on systems and designs that don't take these principles into account. If you want to avoid paying someone like me a lot of money in a few years, think about these things before you invest in a CMS.

The American Lawyer published their Corporate Scorecard package today, including more than 50 charts of complex data about how law firms ranked in the many areas of the industry (IPOs, bankruptcy, etc). The charts look good and are easy to read, and can be resorted, scrolled or paged as necessary. The editors have a fully-functional data CMS that allows them to edit, format, filter and combine data, share it with each other and with outsiders, and then publish it quickly.

Some projects are more fun than others. Our latest is one of those -- the web site for author Leigh Anderson's new collection of "low-tech games for highly social people," The Games Bible. It's a collection of games to play with your friends, ranging from simple games you can play with pen and paper while waiting for a movie to start, to card games, to intensely complicated strategy games.

Press+ launched its first newspaper affiliate today, Lancaster Online, the web site of Pennsylvania's Lancaster Intelligencer and New Era, based almost entirely on Harmonica's software and project management.

The fifth edition of the AIA Guide To New York City is in bookstores now. I own every edition of this book, and I'm very proud to say that I was involved in the creation of this edition. You may remember me writing about this last year. Co-author Fran Leadon is a close friend of mine from the bluegrass scene, and I designed and built the content management system he used to handle the many thousands of photographs, and took quite a few of the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights photos myself.

I am very happy to announce that Lauren Kelly is joining Harmonica as Project Director, starting on March 1. She will be responsible for project management, operations and client support, testing and documentation, as well as UI specification and development.

My former WSJ colleague Jason Fry, whose Reinventing the Newsroom is a must-read in my world, today discusses Alan Mutter's survey of news publishers and readers, and highlights the headline we've all seen: