Sharpening senses with social media

“I share, therefore I am.” In a previous post about enforcing our reality, I explored the concept of our evolving social-media presence, its possible dangers, and its perceived influence on “our total social reality”. Despite our social technophobia, social media “poses no more and no less of a social threat than any other technological breakthrough like the automobile, television, and Internet”.

But can social media be something more than simply “sharing your thoughts, feelings, photos, and lives with the online world”? More than simply “an effort to declare or enforce your perceived reality or existence”? Why not? If we look up beyond our impulsive two-second retweets, sharing thoughts can lead to exploring new ideas, uncovering new interpretations, and discovering new insights.

Watch Dogs: Skills Tree

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. When I launched my blog in November 2013, I knew next to nothing about cloud computing. But I didn’t let that stop me from learning the cloud basics. Now, 10 months later, I’ve sharpened my senses to a point where I’m finding flawed statements about IBM BlueMix PaaS and IBM Service Engage SaaS on other blogs!

Burning XHTML bridges to WordPress

Three months ago, in a November post, I explored the “top 3 most-popular and most-reliable WordPress.org security plugins” at the time. Although some might blame the WordPress.org community for any security vulnerabilities, it is also the responsibility of the user to “actively maintain and update the software”. In other words, “your blog is only as strong as its weakest plugin”.

Later, in a December post and January post, I investigated the possible “downfall of topic-based XML authoring and topic-based information architecture” and the “growing impact of WordPress as an enterprise CMS and enterprise SaaS”.  If XML CMSs mean extinction, I also wondered whether “XML-oriented integrations… will forever be incompatible with PHP-based CMSs like WordPress.”

Madcap Flare: Topic XML view and text view

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. In my ongoing journey to explore topic-based DITA-XML authoring and its relationship to social-based WordPress strategies, I stumbled across a fascinating five-year-old solution that allows you to import your DITA-authored XHTML output into your WordPress.org installation.

Shifting DITA-XML editors into SaaS

As the conventional notions of desktop DITA-XML editing are being challenged more and more by social-media ideas of editing content anytime and anywhere, I’m beginning to see a growing wave of web-based and mobile-friendly XML editors. Back in December 2013, the Wikipedia article that compared 28 XML editors found only 2 web-based options: XmlGrid and FontoXML.

But in January 2014, the same article compares 29 XML editors with 3 web-based options: Xeditor, XmlGrid, and FontoXML. To confirm this, I viewed the article’s revision history, and verified that Xeditor was indeed added to the list this month in January. Meanwhile, as a fourth option, SyncRO Soft is planning to release its own oXygen web-editing platform sometime later in 2014.

oXygen XML Author (standalone desktop version)

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. Building upon my previous posts on killing XML and mobilizing IBM TRIRIGA, I’d like to explore the next evolutionary step for XML editors: SaaS delivery. Or perhaps I should frame it in the form of a question: Will the next evolutionary step for web-mobile XML editors be SaaS delivery?

Plugging into WordPress security

As some of you might already know, I’ve also been a blogger for ages. Since 2005, I’ve played with nearly a dozen blogging accounts from LiveJournal to MySpace to Blogger to WordPress to Connections. But by far, my favorite platform is WordPress.

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. With nearly half a million employees worldwide, IBM easily has thousands of teams of all shapes and sizes. So I’m not surprised to hear recently that a few IBM teams might be migrating areas of their social media sites from Connections to WordPress. While I love the WordPress interface, I also understand the concerns that other colleagues might have about the security issues in WordPress, particularly in its plugins.

Jay’s WordPress “word cloud” (Wordle.net)

But here’s the thing about plugins. Just like installing and uninstalling fun or functional third-party apps on your smartphone, you can also install and uninstall fun or functional third-party plugins on your WordPress.org blog. In other words, your blog is only as strong as its weakest plugin. Fortunately, there are countermeasures. You can uninstall your weaker plugins, and you can also install security plugins.