I’ve just uploaded the slides to my website. You can download them here.

Unfortunately, I’ve been put into a real “graveyard slot”, right at the end of business on the Friday afternoon. And I thought Sally, the conference chair, was my friend! If you are attending, I would very much appreciate your support. If not, I’d appreciate your thoughts on this topic, as always.

Interestingly, a very similar submission last year didn’t make the cut. Whether the change is due to an increase in the quality of my submission, or a decrease in that of the competition, only time will tell…

To find out more, visit www.andrewj.com/plugins.

I recently converted my blog from an old bespoke (= “custom”, for my American friends) solution to one based on WordPress. However, this created a problem, in that the WordPress model is to hold all content in the database, and that wasn’t the right model for me.

Firstly, I have a number of articles which are very long for a blog post, and I had no interest in restructuring them. I also didn’t want to break external links to the existing articles.

Next, I decided that I wanted the freedom to continue to write in that style. Some of my writing takes several weeks, and it works for me to draft it as separate HTML pages. I also sometimes want to include active content or multiple images, and I don’t want to create a large and unwieldy WordPress database full of such stuff.

Finally, my online photo galleries are managed and generated using Jalbum, and I wanted to find a way of neatly integrating single images into my blog, complete with the watermarks and metadata extraction which Jalbum manages so well, without duplicating that functionality in WordPress.

This is probably typical of many older web sites, but WordPress doesn’t really embrace the integration of external content. This article describes how I solved this problem, and a WordPress plugin I have developed to make my solution reusable.

Migration of our web sites and email to the new hosting server is almost complete. See previous article/rant for some of my findings. After some initial frustration with my hosting provider (WebFusion) when I discovered the
limitations of their new Linux shared hosting services compared with the old one, I have to say a big “Thank You” for their efficiency in finding a better solution for me, and providing me with effective technical support to get it up and running.

If you do have any problems with our sites or email, let me know…

I’m currently developing a new blog, based on WordPress. This will make it easier to post “on the fly” than with the current solution, hand-carved from XML and ASP (now PHP).

When the new blog is running, I’m going to have a regular post for fans of my photography, so you can see what I’ve been working on. In the meantime, I’ve updated my gallery pages so they are a bit easier to navigate, bookmark and search.

And talking about my photography, I’ve recently been accepted by the Alamy stock agency. So please all rush at once and spend lots of money licensing my pictures for all those uses you’ve dreamed of but were too polite to mention

See you soon,

Andrew

I presented a paper on Agile Architecture. If you regularly read my work you’ll recognise many of the ideas, but I’ve managed to bring them all together for the first time. You can download my slides and script here.

What was very interesting was how the thrust of the material has changed from a few years ago. No-one was claiming that a given framework, process or toolset can solve EA problems. At the risk of being uncharitable I thought John Zachman’s ideas sounded very tired, and there was almost no mention of alternative frameworks such as TOGAF. I may have self-selected by not attending any vendor sessions, but there was also no promotion of tools or technology. A common view was that EA, SOA and many supporting concepts are currently entering the trough of the hype cycle.

Instead the focus was largely on people-related problems and approaches. The labels varied, but several speakers introduced ideas familiar to agile architects. Maybe we’re doing something right after all.

This article, co-written by Richard Wiggins and originally published in the Rational Edge in February 2003 describes a new approach, based on UML, which meets the real requirements of modelling the Enterprise Data Architecture.

This paper (in Adobe Acrobat Format), originally published by the CBDi Forum, presents some of those strategies.