Genii Weblog


Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 30 Jun 2005, 01:59 PM
We had yet another one of those cases where an enterprising BP decided to post all of the presentations from Lotusphere (or at least all those available originally from the Lotusphere On-Line site).  Some people cheered (mostly attendees who couldn't attend all sessions).  Some people complained (mostly speakers who want some control over their content).  Some people simply grimaced over the design of the website and the blatant attempt to harvest registrations (although you could just cancel and skip that part - not a very robust design, shall we say).

Of course, if IBM were to simply host the material themselves, there would be, presumably, less of the complaining and more of the cheering.  If they would even go one step further and point to the presenter's chosen page for additional information, they would make attendees, non-attendees and speakers all happy.  The attendees and non-attendees would be able to get samples and possibly updated presentations rather than old PDFs.  The speakers would get a chance to show off their websites, samples, additional information, etc, essentially draw the viewers into the conversation.  Even IBM would win, as they would share more up to date and valid information about IBM products and would look smart and reasonable about sharing the information with non-attendees.

So, why doesn't IBM do it?  It has certainly been suggested, begged for, etc.  IBM clearly has a right to use the content.  I imagine the cost of the servers to host it would be far outweighed by the benefits.  Why do they pass up an opportunity like this?

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Tue 28 Jun 2005, 06:28 AM
One of the odd things about providing resources to the web is that you see your website mentioned in languages that you can't read.  For example, this post below references our Web Editors list, but I can't read a bit of it.  I hope he is saying something nice...
Inline GIF image

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Mon 27 Jun 2005, 04:00 PM
In the Business Partner forum, in the Penumbra forum, on the blogs and even on my rare forays into AIM, things are quiet, but not the quiet of inactivity this time, but rather the quiet of lots to do and everybody busy doing it (and catching a bit of vacation where possible).  It is a good kind of quiet.

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Fri 24 Jun 2005, 12:00 AM
I don't know whether this is an HTML question or a CSS , but my Linda Discovers CoexEdit story demonstrates the problem if I color the cells at all.  Here is a bit of the table in Notes:
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and here is the same table (different colors, but otherwise structured the same) on the web:

Inline GIF image

So, why don't the text parts overlap on the web the way they do in Notes?  How can I get that same flow in HTML  This just looks like two columns instead of staggered columns the way I intended.  (To be clear, I created three columns and merged the left two then right two and so on.  In Notes it looks great, but not on the web)

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Wed 22 Jun 2005, 11:04 PM
I have been trying an experiment, and I wondered if anybody would care to take a look.  I got some feedback about the screenshots with CoexEdit that it was hard to tell what the point was.  I thought about this some, and realized that the better we do with CoexEdit, the harder it is going to be to look at the same rich text field in Notes and the web and get  it.  The whole point is that they look the same, but looking at two screen shots that look the same isn't very compelling, so I wrote a little story: Linda Discovers CoexEdit

So, does this story do a better job?  Is it too campy?  What do you think?

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 16 Jun 2005, 12:00 PM
[Modified 8/17/05 to remove links to old pages which do not exist]

As I have mentioned here recently, I am looking at ways to make our product pages more useful, especially for the Solutions (CoexLinks and CoexEdit).  I was hoping that some of you who like to share your opinions could take a look and share your opinions on these new versus old pages.

CoexLinks - Old Page and New Page (old page and new page are now the same)
CoexEdit - Old Page and New Page (old page and new page are now the same)
Some questions to consider:
1) Does the page look better, worse or no better/no worse?
2) Is the information provided in the boxes clear in the new versions?
3) Would you know to click the screenshot to see more screenshots?  If not, how and where could I point that out?
4) Do the screenshot pages (if you do click on them) communicate anything?  (People seem to like screenshots, such as the Hannover ones, but they don't speak to me much)
Thank you so much in advance.  I would really appreciate any feedback, positive or negative.

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.