J Lawson’s Blog Space

Just testing this out. Pic from Heidelberg.

As was to be expected Microsoft have decided to discontinue sale of FAST on non Windows platforms. Hardly a surprise really. But I’m so glad Microsoft decided last May they could no longer “afford” having HURIDOCS as a customer for http://www.hurisearch.org. We very quickly switched to Apache Lucene, Solr and are very happy with the [...]

Been trying out RapidWeaver for editing the site, very simple to use but not easy to control what’s happening wywiwyg editor inserts unnecessary xhtml all over the place. Some quite nice templates and I’m sure you can do nice things with it if you tweak. The point is without tweaking it’s really not good enough [...]

Had to give in to popular demand and set up a facebook profil. I did it mostly to keep in touch with old school friends I met up with at the end of May for our 50ths and also to check out the photos they took. It’s interesting, seems to be a very female kind [...]

Had a look a Microsofts new “semantic” search beta. I’m sure there’s no true semantic web stuff in there, but I have to admit I like the clean interface and discovery does seem to function. http://www.bing.com/ It really annoys me when the hype confuses natural language search and semantic web. I just hate these sites that [...]

Just got hold of the 2006 edition of Nielsen’s “Prioritizing Web Usability”. A quick look through tells me this book better have a good strong binding. If you’ve ever been on Nielsen’s site, the cover of his book is just as provocative in its refusal to concede to modern graphics, indeed to concede to graphics: [...]

Got my copy of the 3rd edition of Information Architecture for the WorldWide Web by Morville and Rosenfeld yesterday. Brilliant stuff, should be compulsory reading for all human rights webmasters! They cover it all: the principles, the processes, the building, the strategies, you name it it’s in there. The best is that this update looks [...]