“We have become digital crack addicts!”

Within my role as Community Manager for the OpenText Web Site Management (WSM) product, I’m close to celebrating a great milestone – 500 registered users.  This is a truly great milestone as the platform is open, meaning you don’t need to register to read the content and use the platform. You do however need to register if you would like to contribute to the aggregated feed of external blog posts – called “Community Feed”, contribute to the “Tweet Exchange” Twitter feed, or post to the Forum or Ideas feature. The fact that a vast majority of registered users do not provide their details to contribute to the Community Feed or Tweet Exchange is not necessarily surprising but a significant number also have not posted to the Forum as well, which begs the question why register?

I mention this as it could be inferred as another piece of positive qualitative data – perhaps people simply register to ‘belong’ and affiliate themselves with the community even if they are not participating pro-actively straight away. This qualitative feedback is a great compliment to its sibling, quantitative data a.k.a. metrics.

In some cases it even feels like such qualitative feedback has greater value and context. For instance, the open approach to the community platform was endorsed by some praise provided by a prospect (now a customer) who saw that open, honest, and sometimes critical discussion was ongoing in the platform’s forum. This sounds like it should have been a risk as the dreaded variant of the word criticism was used. What turned it into something positive however, was the fact that this prospect could openly see that there was activity in such discussions, and that any such criticism was used constructively and that the engaged members of the community pulled together on many occasions to share experiences or knowledge around a given point of criticism. Internal OpenText employees along with Partners and Customers have jointly played a role here. This subject of openness and transparency is perhaps a subject for another day.

What does particularly interest me in this space, is how digital marketeers and businesses with online assets in general, have become obsessed with metrics. We have become digital crack addicts!

In many cases this is completely understandable as there can often be a very tangible and clearly measurable route from visitor to lead to opportunity to closed deal within a traditional marketing focused website. But what about community platforms?

How does a conversation between peers in a community platform or a blog post by a customer sharing best-practice knowledge tangibly influence that bottom line? Let’s face it, it is that same ROI challenge around “Social Media” that has been floating around for a few years now and we all know there are no magic rules that provide the answer as the context is all so important.

As I tend to be someone who sees the application of repeatable patterns in everything I do, from Software Development code idioms to Marketing Strategies, I thought that there is sure to be a parallel to this challenge and indeed there is – in the traditional marketing world.

The Traditional Approach

This realisation came to me as I recently visited my home town in the UK and noticed that as I drove to see a friend, a local roundabout that had perfectly trimmed grass and beautiful flower beds also had a sponsor — the local Sports Centre.

This really got me thinking as it made me think about why the Sports Centre decided to invest in this way and because of my (digital) crack addiction, I thought how can they measure the return on that investment?

It is not exactly like the UK’s Health and Safety department would allow the placement of an all so trendy QR code on the sponsorship sign situated in the middle of a roundabout on a busy junction — although that wouldn’t surprise me nowadays as I have seen a few on the back of lorries!. I can see the future: “Is this van driven safely? No, then take a picture with your mobile device whilst driving and let us know!” — I digress.

Maybe the Sports Centre simply wanted to raise a positive profile within the community where many of its clients or potential clients pass through. After all, it was a beautifully kept roundabout that many a competitive gardener would be proud of and perhaps it is that association with something well kept and maintained which inferred a well run Sports Centre.

Why Invest?

Whilst looking for an image to accompany this post, I found the image above, which was a stroke of luck. The sponsors on this road sign happen to be CDS, a long-term well-respected Partner of OpenText based in Leeds, UK and one that I’ve had the pleasure of working with on a number of occasions. Given this coincidence, I decided to reach out to Mike Collier who is CDS’ Technical Director to ask directly about this investment. Here is what he said:

“The advertising on the road sign was all about raising brand awareness and coincided with a branding refresh we undertook a few years ago. This was also coupled with advertising on the back of a bus!

The location of the sign and the bus advertising was significant as it was on one of the main routes travelled by business people, into Leeds. The bus advertising was on a route which circled Leeds and in particular the town centre and the main train station.

I am not sure that we generated any real measurable business from it but it did raise awareness of the brand with a number of our existing customers commenting on it in a good way.

We did have a an unexpected piece of good fortune when the bus crashed! (no injuries thankfully) and it was featured on Look North – the local news channel!”

I found this feedback from Mike very interesting as it helps re-enforce the question I’m trying to raise in this post.

The Question

Community platforms such as the Solution Exchange are platforms that in the first instance, are there to help serve the community better. Whether that is the aggregation of related articles on a shared context or the sharing and dissemination of best-practice knowledge, the focus is on generating genuine value for end users to help them get their job done without a hidden agenda of lead generation.

Given this thread of thought, is lead generation a feasible goal for such a community of tech savvy users, who often are abstracted a level or two away from key decision makers? You could track activity at an Account/Company level instead of individual but my feel is that such tracking could come at the cost of user trust — a commodity that is hard to establish but so easy to lose.

What this boils down to, is something very simple — should such community platforms where the intention is to do something good for end users be a Brand Awareness initiative or a Lead Generation/Customer Acquisition initiative?

This question depends on many factors and in particular the context as many “social” communities can certainly facilitate nurturing prospects to a conversion goal. A retail brand using Facebook to promote to potential customers presents a contrasting context to that of an multi-product/service enterprise providing value to an existing customer base in an open and transparent way.

Conclusion – Lay off the (digital) crack!

For me, as the Community Manager for Solution Exchange, my focus is on generating genuine value for Users (Customers, Partners, along with internal staff). It is therefore unbelievably clear to me that I am undertaking a Brand Awareness initiative primarily. Yes, lead generation through referrals and soft promotions is and will be possible but it should not take centre stage.

So maybe it is time for us to lay off the digital crack as it clouds our decision making. Balanced use of quantitative and qualitative data is what is needed here to make educated business decisions. This may not be appropriate in every “community” initiative but one that makes a whole lot of sense to me.

What do you think?

The main context for this post is the enablement of Social Media features within an OT WSM project but the pattern described can be equally applied to other forms of integration through the use of the OT WSM Delivery Server.

I’ve long desired a way in which editors can be better empowered within the constraints of what the site builder/developer has allowed them to do with regards to features like commenting and tagging etc.  It turns out that the flexibility within the Management Server product provides us this very possibility.

With version 10 of the product, came the possibility for a SmartEdit user to drag and drop templates into containers from the panels available from within the SmartEdit view.  This was initially focused on the scenario where a SmartEdit user can build up the various content parts of a page but I’d question why can this not allow the same user to enable some functional elements with a page also?  Even without the drag and drop, the point of enabling that business user was something that I was interested in looking into.

Therefore, before I detail my proposed strawman, I think it is worthwhile to detail some of the guiding principles of the idea that has helped me shape this:

All Content in Management Server

This for me is a no-brainer and something that I often pass off as “best-practice”.  What I mean here is that everything as much as possible should live in the Management Server.  This means the content that is normally typically unique to Delivery Server should be within Management Server (e.g. XSLT and XML files) and published into Delivery Server.  More specifically still, those XML and XSLT files are set up as Content Classes and instantiated within the project tree structure. This provides the following benefits:

• Keeps all assets together in a single repository
• Allows the utilisation of version control within the Content Classes of this content
• Allows for the possibility to parametrise elements within the templates through placeholders
• Allows for the ability to permeate the setting of certain placeholder values through to SmartEdit users
• A single project that can be published to have all set up within Delivery Server (although Delivery Server project and system config needs to be managed directly within Delivery Server)

Utilise the Existing Skillsets of Site Administrators and Developers

This is another important one for me to ensure that those wishing to adopt new features don’t suffer from that fear of learning another skill by facilitating the rollout of these features through the existing knowledge they already have.

Adopt an MVC Approach

Why is this important? Well, this well established, tried and tested pattern is there for a reason and you’d be able to search for it easily if you haven’t come across it before.  It nicely separates the responsibilities within the feature “module” and you’ll see how this separates out into different CMS pages or elements in the solution allowing for the constraining of access to the  various parts if need be.

An Open Approach

This one should be obvious and is actually related to the point about skills above.  Encapsulation is a good thing when used right, but when something that can and often needs to be customised is shut away behind what appears to the user as a black box, then that task has just got harder.  Therefore, an open approach of providing access to the various parts if needed is important.

The Provisional Proposal

The essence of this proposal is the creation of a feature module made up of different Management Server components:

• A Configuration/Controller Content Class
• A Controller/Model Content Class
• A number of View Content Classes

It looks like I’ve sat on the fence with the “Controller/Model” part above so I’ll explain the purpose of each of the above Content Classes:

Configuration/Controller Content Class

From a SmartEdit user’s perspective, this is the main Content Class that contains the relevant enabling code/content for the feature.  It is this Content Class that can be dragged into a container on the page for instance.

Within this Content Class, several placeholders can be exposed to the SmartEdit interface allowing control of various feature parameters to a relevant level of user.  For instance, if the feature shows a list of comments and a comment form then a parameter may allow the user to set a “refresh time” for the comments, which translates in the technical world to how long the resultant calls under the covers are cached.

In principle, this Content Class refers to two other Content Class instances (actual CMS pages) – the XML Model and the XSLT defining the View.  In the simplest case, this may just contain a single include DynaMent:

<rde-dm:include content="anc_linkToXML" stylesheet="opt_listOfViews" 
                cachingtime="stf_refreshTime" />

It can be imagined that the option list and the standard field could be exposed through SmartEdit to allow user control.  If the option of the view is not to be given to the user, then an anchor placeholder can be used and a pre-assigned reference to the chosen view instance utilised.

Controller/Model Content Class

OK, so this Content Class is part Controller and part Model and the reason is because it contains the controlling code to invoke a given feature and the resultant XML provides us the model, which is the input to the view.

Typically, it is this Content Class that encapsulate the Delivery Server DynaMent language functionality and with OpenText’s Social Communities product, this will be using the HTTP DynaMent, which I have to say is a refreshing and strong addition to the product.

View Content Class

This is simply the XSLT that transforms the output XML from the feature into your resultant format.  Let’s keep it simple and assume we are generating a HTML result here.  One or more can be created if you wanted to provide different ways of using the model data. Of course, if it is just look and feel changes you’re looking to provide your users control in changing then this may be better implemented in CSS.  The various XSLT Content Classes are if the results are fundamentally used in different ways.  An example that I’ve often used is when a features should return XML or JSON – that’s simply a different XSLT file that is achieving this.

The Value

The value of such an approach is that it enables those with the relevant knowledge to encapsulate examples for others to use.  It therefore empowers business (SmartEdit) users to be able to choose functionality within certain sections of a page – for instance, a user can drag and drop comments or ratings onto an article page.  Finally, it shows an open approach for how such features can be enabled using elements that admins are familiar with – Management Server Content Class templates.

The Next Step: Your ideas!

In the first instance, I would like to understand people’s views on this with the intention to conclude the proposal by making a suggestion to how such a module can be packaged.  I would like to somehow make it possible that an admin can import the module into the Management Server and from there, complete a couple of minor configuration steps and then the module’s feature is available to the business user wherever the admin enables it.

Therefore, leave a comment or join the conversation at http://www.solutionexchange.info/forum.

First of all, it is worth mentioning how these threads are delivered.  The forum itself is an object of the OpenText Social Communities (OTSC) product, which interacts with the Delivery Server through the OTSC XML API.

Therefore, the forum thread pages are dynamically delivered with the shell of the page being the same physical page with the content influenced by parameters.  In this case, I’ve chosen to utilise sensible URL structures that contain the parameters for simplification and SEO.  I mention more about this in this forum post.  The use of rewrite rules in this way for SEO is one of the key values of a Front Controlling Web Server.

As the shell of the page is the same, I initially had the same <title> tag for all threads and thought that this was the problem.  After changing to adapt the <title> value to the title of the forum thread (along with waiting for re-indexing to happen) there was no change.

Finally, through checking the index of Solution Exchange on Bing with a “site:” search, I noticed to my surprise that one of the threads was indexed but was associated with the URL http://www.solutionexchange.info/forum.htm!!!  This was strange due to the fact that externally, the forum thread was only accessible through a URL like http://www.solutionexchange.info/forum/thread/{ID} meaning that I must be explicitly telling the search engines the wrong URL.  

This was the clue I needed to realise that my problem was due to something I had implemented many months before.

To address the potential SEO penalty that the home page of the community was able to be reached through http://www.solutionexchange.info/ and http://www.solutionexchange.info/index.htm, I introduced the use of the following html header link tag – the example below is the home page value but I included this across the whole site:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.solutionexchange.info/index.htm" />

You can read more about this on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.  In summary, it tells the search engines that this page is to be associated with the given URL and page ranking (or “Google juice”) is to be associated with that and not the entry URL that the crawler bot used.  This avoids the possibility of page ranking for the same page being split across two or more URLs or being penalised for duplicating content across multiple URLs.

With this knowledge, I was able to update the page template that houses this dynamic content to form the correct URL within this canonical link.  Now it’s back to the waiting game to see if the indexes will pick the content and forgive me for positioning different pages as one.

Although a small detail, the end goal and potential gain is huge as it opens up the rich content that continues to grow within the forum for discovery via the big search engines.  This in turn will only help those within the wider community who are not aware of Solution Exchange discover the content, which may help them resolve an issue or encourage them to take part in the community platform moving forwards.

As always, leave a comment or get in touch if you have any questions.

To compliment my short post on Multi-Site deployment of Concrete5, I thought I would add to it with a candidate approach for generating a mobile site.

Assumptions

With this approach, I’m assuming a setup of a mobile site on a subdomain as opposed to sub folder.  I would consider this best practice as URLs stay consistent between the desktop and mobile site, which is encouraged in the Mobile Web Best Practices Guidelines from the W3C (http://bag.gs/gReORJ).

I’m also assuming that the desktop site has been created already.  I appreciate that this may not always be the case and that in some circles, it is encouraged to consider mobile first.

1. Set up another site on your mobile domain

Follow the steps in Multi-Site deployment of Concrete5 for your mobile domain.  In my case, I’ll use the example m.example.com but do not go back to the basic install steps at the end and do not set up your site by providing the name, URL, and database details.

2. Share the Desktop Site Content

With thanks to the great MVC design of the Concrete5 product, all the content resides in the database away from the templates and the controls, which affect the view or presentation.  Therefore, sharing the database between sites is like sharing the content.

So, open up your site.php (e.g. /var/www/m.example.com/config/site.php) and simply copy into it the contents of the site.php from your desktop site.  This means you bypass the latter install steps.

3. Themes, Controllers, and Templates

Now that we share the content, we have a blank canvas for how we would like that to appear.  I actually take a copy of the desktop site files as a starting point as I can then build into them the various mobile optimisations and at least have a starting point where all the theme templates and blocks exist so nothing breaks.

So at this point, the site will be effectively a copy of the desktop site but on a different domain.

4. Device Detection

There are different services available for device detection but they all are orientated around detection through reading the User-Agent HTTP Header.

I ended up using Tera WURFL (http://bag.gs/ewCsoc) as I didn’t want to pay for something and thought that I could manually update ok.  This is working out fine for me but your needs may be different.

Based on the simple example available on the Tera WURFL site (http://bag.gs/fKsG2X), you can extract various properties about the device and make a decision about how you want to serve that device.

I chose to categorise devices based on certain screen resolutions and other capabilities meaning that I ended up with 3 different device profiles to serve: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced.  From this, I can make decisions based on the profile within my templates.

Summary

I don’t make any claims for this being the best approach but I sure would like to get the conversation going about this.  I know there are other smart ways where people change the theme based on device (in comparison to the changing of domain based on device as exampled in this post).

As mentioned earlier in the post, I like this approach as it keeps a balance of URLs between the main and mobile site.  Additionally, block templates are not tied to a theme and so the view.php or custom template for a block on the desktop version could be totally different than in the mobile version.  This also means that you can use Concrete5′s great image helper in such templates to help optimise image sizes for mobile.

Please feel free to leave comments and questions and I’ll do my best to answer or improve the post.

After seeing that many were having trouble understanding how they could use a single core Concrete5 installation to run multiple sites, I thought I would write this post to provide a strawman to help facilitate the discussion of how this can be done.

I run a server in the cloud using Amazon’s EC2 service and utilise an Ubuntu server with the usual LAMP setup.

1. Core Installation Preparation

To start, I have my core Concrete5 installation files in my default web site folder:

/var/www/default/concrete5.4.0.5

I keep the version number as this allows for the many different sites to use different cores if you wish.  How this is achieved will become clear later on in the post.

This basic setup of copying files is covered on the concrete5 site (http://bag.gs/hEWOT9) so I’m not going to repeat that here but it is important to say just copy the files for now.

N.B. Don’t go to the installed location in a browser yet – just copy the files.

2. Set up the domain that you want to host

This means that you can set up a separate virtual host in Apache or however which way you’d like to.  A search (http://bag.gs/heaC2L) will surely find you some assistance here.

The end result will be a virtual host that corresponds to your domain (e.g. www.exampledomain.com) and a separate directory from which that site is served on your server.  In my case, this directory is:

/var/www/example.com

N.B. I’m assuming that you’ve purchased your domain and have all the right DNS entries set to point to your server.

3. Set up site specific structure

This step is reasonably simple.  We are going to copy the entire contents of the core installation folder (concrete5.4.0.5 in my case) over to the new site directory so that we have the following:

/var/www/example.com/blocks
/var/www/example.com/concrete
/var/www/example.com/config
...
/var/www/example.com/updates

This copies what are in the most part empty directories and the inner concrete.  The root index.php is important as well as the couple of files in the config directory so make sure you take those across.

As concrete5 is well designed, the guys who have created the product have nicely permitted the extension of almost everything through utilising the directory hierarchy.  This means that as site developers, we should never touch the content of the internal concrete directory.  In the above case, the /var/www/example.com/concrete directory.  Consider it sacred!

If we obey this principle of not messing with anything in the core concrete folder, which helps us all upgrade, then you would notice that there is no value in that the …/example.com/concrete folder being a copy of the …/default/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete folder and you’d be correct.

Therefore, we are going to delete the /var/www/example.com/concrete directory and replace it with a symbolic link.  It is the symbolic link that allows us to point to different cores for different sites.

The syntax for the symbolic link when in the /var/www/example.com directory is:

...:/var/www/example.com$ ln -s ../default/concrete5.4.0.5/concrete concrete

Your Done!

Seriously, that’s all.  You can then pick up the basic setup (http://bag.gs/hEWOT9) at the point where you navigate to the new site, enter the site name, URL, and Database settings and away you go.

This small amount of preparation allows you to scale a single core instance of Concrete5 through using separate databases.

It would be great to get people’s views on this as I’m sure there are areas to improve or things that I’ve not considered.  Therefore, please leave a comment with your feedback.

Seth Godin’s book – Tribes (http://amzn.to/cX9JpK) – is a worthwhile quick read.  Although I didn’t find the content as valuable as Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (http://amzn.to/8ZyTXi), motivationally it was great as it really helped me verify some thoughts and ideas that have been lingering around for some time.  The premise is about how groups of people come together all the time due to a common idea and how a drop in transaction costs to form groups or stay connected i.e. through the use of Social Media has facilitated these tasks meaning that the effort of management is not really there anymore.

Instead of ‘Management’, what is needed to give a particular “tribe” direction and guidance is leadership and it is this that I prefer to refer to when I think of my role within the Solution Exchange platform (as well as Jack of all trades – master of none).  This in itself is relatively easy when the tribe is full of talented and gifted individuals and companies who innovate and lead everyday – no this is not some form of cringe worthy kissing ass.  In this case, “leadership” tasks are merely listening tasks.  This of course is a slight simplification but in the most part is true.  Listening is the consumption of audible information.  Observing the industry in which we all work is also a form of inward consumption and one where many input sources are used.  Choosing to implement ideas within the Solution Exchange or simply facilitating the more meaningful discussion for our customers (sometimes one leading to the other) is very valuable and it is this that I shall continue to try and take the lead on.

So, given all this, what am I saying? Maybe a manifesto is required? – I would like to continue and encourage discussion with those in the community, which the Solution Exchange platform is attempting to unify and connect, in order to bring light on examples of how customers are using and can better use Open Text product.  This in turn will help raise the profile of leaders within the community who are already doing great work and have done for years.  I’ve already established some great connections with some colourfully talented people in the last few months and I’d like to start putting some of these people (and companies) on a pedestal.  Lastly, and most  importantly to me, I would like to continue to lead by example and listen to the community to hear how improvements can be made and better connect the right people to take part in these discussions.  These conversations are so valuable as people inherently like to be listened to, especially when they see that someone has taken action as a result.  In my opinion, some of this is already happening and will continue to happen more and more adding value to the community initiative.

One final question; what is your part in this? Simple – contribute, discuss, and engage – please feel free to reach out to me to discuss what you think is right or wrong.

Twitter: DannyBaggs
Solution Exchange Feedback: www.solutionexchange.info/feedback

Thanks for listening!

Danny Baggs
Community Leader

However, in absolute honesty, this was not the issue of complex configuration that I was expecting and I will explain the steps I took.

The Delivery Server Common Search Connector

1. The first step is to install the Open Text Common Search product.  I was fortunate enough to have this already in our infrastructure so didn’t need to do this step.
2. Assuming the Common Search is installed, you can log into Delivery Server, navigate to connectors > Search Engines > Administer and click the import button.  Version 10.1 of Delivery Server has a pre-configured connector that you can use.  Click the OTCommonSearch link to import the connector.
3. Change the URL of the Common Search Server to the IP of your Common Search machine.
4. Change the “Incoming directory of indexing jobs” to a shared folder.  This is a path as seen by the Delivery Server.  I’ve chosen to place this on the local machine of the Delivery Server and share that with the Common Search machine.
5. Change the “Incoming directory of Common Search server” to point to the same directory as above but from the perspective of the Common Search machine.  I initially had problems here as the Delivery Server and Common Search were on different Domains.  We changed this anyhow to reflect better practice in our setup.
6. Create the shared folder if you haven’t already and make sure both the Delivery Server and Common Search have read/write access.
7. You’re done!

It was really that easy! (well, if I discount the delays due to not being able to share directories effectively across Windows Domains at first).

Finally, it is worth pointing out the tweaks I made to my queries for the new Search Engine.

When searching specific groups, you can now use the syntax:

group:<ds_group_name>

and

attributeName:'[#request:attributeExample#]'

for attributes.

Admittedly, I didn’t need to do anything more complex than this so there were not a lot of queries to change.

There may be more complex example out there but the key message is to start planning your changeover now as it might just be easier than you think!

As always, please leave your questions or comments.

After reading through this slide deck and only imagining how great the presentation would have been live, it got me thinking about a very relevant point made in Clay Shirky’s book – Here Comes Everybody.  He observes how Social Media and the communities that are formed from these ‘new’ tools actually lowers the cost of failure.  This is particularly relevant when you think of this in the context of an example Social Media campaign where those in the community are empowered to create short videos say, of them using a product.  From tens, hundreds, or even thousands of cheaply created contributions, many are going to be poor, some OK, and a minority are going to be fantastically engaging.  This power law (reverse exponential/long tail) shows how Social Media lowers the cost of participation to increase contributions and therefore increases the likelihood of discovering that golden piece of content that casts a large shadow over the others that does far more good than the others put together.

Naturally, there are risks involved also as the potential negativity is also large.  However, I don’t fear this as I’ve come to think that the nature of Social Media is a leveler or regulator of behaviour.  If you are seen to be pushing your brand unethically or are self-obsessed without desiring to understand the true value of your offering, then you’ll be found out and Social Media will provide a platform for people to call you out and damage your brand.  If you’re honest about the mistakes you make and open about what you are trying to achieve, you’ll be supported and supported in ways you never thought you would.

The main take away point from all this for me is the affirmation that we should all be empowering the communities that exist around our brands.  Whether large or small, it is the community that contains a brand’s most powerful “brand ambassadors”.  Giving them a voice and listening to what they have to say is far more powerful than making isolated decisions.  I remember once someone stating to me “never assume you know more than your audience”.  In today’s Social online world, never has that been so true.

Enjoy the presentation!

I’ve recently started to investigate what could be done when faced with this challenge as this is a very real problem for me and our www.SolutionExchange.info community platform.  Aggregation of user driven content can be a great thing but common publication processes like editing and translation are bypassed.  The availability of tools to aid an individual to publish his or her thoughts and opinions is of course a good thing in the most part as it allows for people to interact more quickly and easily removing the barriers that actually once prevented any kind of sharing or interaction (e.g. you were never able to publically comment on a newspaper article or spread a story without significant effort and cost).

With a wide and varied community, I investigated the use of the Google translate API accessible via the Google AJAX language API to start a trial to see how this automated process can help our users gain some context about content that may not be written in their mother tongue.  What is particularly useful, is that the API can detect the source language automatically, which is great when you have many languages within many sources.

The trial starts on the 6th August 2010 and I would like to run it over the course of a month to see whether this prototype evolves into something valuable for some of our users.  The feature can be seen in the footer of the site www.solutionexchange.info and must be invoked manually as no choices are currently remembered.  By design, this was a pro-active choice as I was keen to ensure users pro-actively decided to try out the feature and not become confused by auto-translated content that they had not expected.  Auto-translated content then shows up appended with a green asterix to indicate that the related text has gone through automatic translation.  Currently, Tweets, Solution Descriptions, and Community Feed items are just some of the sections under trial but this can be easily extended or refined depending on feedback.

I’d like to further and improve this trial so I’d happily take feedback here or through the feedback form on the site at www.solutionexchange.info/feedback.htm.

If  you have any questions then feel free to pop them in a comment below.

After hitting my head against a brick wall and following through a number of dead-end forum thread’s, I worked it out the old fashioned way, which is why I thought I’d write up my findings in this short article.

I was making a request using the .get() jQuery function that was returning JSON, which was perfectly valid (I checked with JSONLint.com). However, upon checking the JSON that was being returned when using the awesome Chrome Developer Tools, I saw a nicely formatted JSON string in the response content… and that was the problem – it was a nice human readable structure… IE7 doesn’t like that!

Removing all redundant whitespace on the server side when forming my JSON string resolved my issue and my callbacks were once again being called within IE7 along with all other browsers.

Leave a comment if you have any questions.