I guess in retrospect 2011 only differs from 2010 by one day – Mondays don’t change to Tuesdays and Fridays don’t come on Thursday. I also dare to say that the reason we do the whole new year thing is so that we can give ourselves a reason or the motivation to start from scratch, to try and rebuild where we failed previously and to give ourselves a reason (of hope) to feel that the new year will bring improvement and renewal. Obviously we may well be fooling ourselves because rightfully speaking we are just repeating the same cycle we have been doing all our lives and if you cannot change your attitude right now, today, then the 1st of January 2011 may not be any different. With that being said though, my wish for 2011 is that I change my attitude in various ways and that my focus is on delivering results and when I say this I specifically mean focussing my energy and attention on those that really love and care for me, and forgetting those that don’t. Its simple really, you cannot change people’s opinion of you by trying to be in count with them or by trying to persuade them to think otherwise of you – its just a waste of time and energy. Instead we must focus on building out the relationships we have with friends and family because if you don’t and you continually strive to seek recognition and attention from those that do not want to give it to you, you will end up regretting lost time. Time that could so easily have been better spent with those that tolerate your mistakes and faults – and who still love you. I believe you can achieve this partially by being disciplined in your work and by focussing all your energy on your work. By focussing on your work you achieve total single-mindedness and you tend to not worry much about what people may or may not think. I want to be ruthless next year in terms of the quality and commitment I put into my work – I need and want to be focussed and drive to achieve what only I know I can, and not worry about what others think or say. I also want to focus on building and nurturing relationships with people by being more tolerant and by changing my attitude. Attitude is a priceless commodity.

I see 2011 as a ASP.NET MVC year for me and a Ruby on Rails year, maybe Django and Python too. I am thinking of getting myself a Macbook Pro next year maybe and I might consider an iPhone. Not because I am leaving the .NET world but simply because I need to learn new things.

2011 will be a year where I love technology because work in itself is a place or state of mind where you can find bliss. I also see 2011 as a year where family and friends will be important to me.

Happy new year!

A recent conversation with a colleague around the nature of content management systems got me thinking about the nature of these systems and some of the trends going around. The first thing that seems to be a systematic “issue” is that a lot of systems are legacy systems and do not really seem to always consider current development practices, but rather focus on adding more and more features in the existing system. Often this approach leads to bloated systems that require more effort to maintain. Lets be honest about development practices – they change quite rapidly. I think we are no longer living in the days of classical analysis and design – but rather in a world where rapid (read agile) development seems the way to go. Rapid, agile, to me means that you spec a system one bit at a time and the focus is on getting those bits working. Thus if development practices change and the practice of developing a particular CMS used an older development practice then surely its no longer reflecting relevant thinking. It can also be said that relevant thinking is relative to the problem a particular CMS is solving, but the point I am making is that a key fact in defining a good CMS is in its ability to adjust the needs of today and not yesterday. Its also true that you cannot truly get to today possibilities without knowing what you did yesterday.

Do CMS’s only solve the matter of making sure websites are displayed or rendered consistently? Surely a CMS’s is more than that and should ideally expose one or more API’s – in fact I believe if your CMS does not expose some sort of core API it will not get the traction it needs, and you cannot really improve the code in your system without others using it. Other factors that contribute to the nature of a CMS include SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) models, and the question that comes to the fore, in my mind, is whether a CMS embraces the nature of a service or platform-oriented environment.

I also gave the idea of designing a content management system in terms of presentation management some thought and initially I conceptualised that the presentation management part of it can be defined in a class hierarchy. The presentation management core will have a Page class and it might have a many-to-many relationship with a PageElement class. Thus a single page might have many page elements. A page element is a block element such as a paragraph, header or video. I still have to think a little bit further but my thinking was around being able to create pages and being able to add page elements to that page. Each element would be of a type and a type could be a paragraph, header or video, but it can also be another page element. The HtmlTextWriterTag class contains a whole list of enums and potentially it can be used in a dynamic sort of way. This still needs some thinking though.