1/5/2024 0 Comments Cms drupal um flint![]() ![]() If you save your event announcement as an image file and post it to your website it isn’t an announcement. Dickīut how does our content become kipple and how do we avoid it? 1. He First Law of Kipple, “Kipple drives out nonkipple.” -from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. And in an era where content needs to pour from one container into another like water without losing it’s meaning, thinking of your site in static terms can make your content into kipple. Dick coined for objects that have lost their stated purpose and now just take up space. It becomes kipple, a term the author Philip K. When people approach their content on the web as if it is static, content can lose its purpose. Heavy repetition can make this advice seem trite, but it is pointedly appropriate in so many cases and this is one of those. There’s an oft-repeated, but never cited, quote on the internet that goes: “If everything is important then nothing is important”. Well, there’s a litany of factors: it could be the device, or the browser, or the CMS, or the designer being too naive about how the mass migration of content from a monolithic, bureaucratic institution will mesh with his ideas, or the front-end and back-end developers infighting about how best to do something in a CMS they didn’t have time to understand, resulting in an unscalable mess of code that is the binary equivalent of the world’s most nerve-wracking game of Jenga, orit could be that the content had more thought put into how it was positioned and looked on a desktop rather than what it was saying.īut why do people focus on the presentation of the content rather than the content itself? Well, because for a lot of people, everything is of equal importance so everything has to be given the same weight. “So why is everything broken on my phone?” The website was always going to be viewed one way on one type of screen and blind people didn’t exist. That 2005 web is still seared into the unconscious, where a website is a static thing and this bit of information is over here and this bit is over here and we have a gallery and a Java widget and a Flash banner and maybe a GIF of a giant button that animates when we hover over it. ![]() Most people, even if they themselves primarily access the web on their mobile device, cannot grasp thinking of their own content as a fluid jumble of words and bits when they sit down to put it into their own site. One of the big hurdles that people are facing when trying to get their content organized is grappling with the “device agnostic” internet that has evolved over the last five years. Because of that, and the departmental lack of time and staff to organize their own content, there are many sections of the site that are “broken” presentationally on mobile displays and, most importantly, inaccessible to people with visual and physical disabilities. While the launch of the site was a success in meeting our initial objectives to bring the vast majority of the university’s content over to the new CMS and to get folks set up in Drupal, the lack of time to really explain and help people organize and present their content just wasn’t there. Instead, people were given a crash course in a brand new CMS and presented with bare bones templates that were, for the most part, no more than a row of two to three columns to cram their previously formatted content into. Unfortunately, that crazy rush left little time to really elaborate on or help out departments with those two things. In the crazy rush to overhaul the University website before our contract with our previous CMS-provider expired, a lot of talk was made about content and organization. ![]()
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