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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Monday, October 24, 2005

Congressman Westmoreland Explains Broadcast Flag

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:42 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Copyright, Policy & Regulation

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Response To: Is Truth More Important in Web Advertising?

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 6:44 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Friday, October 21, 2005

Qumana Support For API's Questionable

In March of this year I was impressed with the ideas behind a new product called Qumana, which billed itself as a writing tool for bloggers. For many reasons, I think such tools are of growing importance and really wanted to see how Qumana worked. I installed a copy and immediately hit a snag. It seems Qumana has an idiosyncracy that keeps it from working with my host software, Conversant. In short, to communicate with a blog host Qumana needs to get and store a blogID. The space Qumana allows for this ID is just 15 characters. If your blogID is more than 15 characters Qumana truncates the data and throws up - giving no idea what the problem is. In March my host developer and I identified this problem, notified Qumana, and tried to work with the product manager for some resolution. But despite repeated attempts we didn't get any.

This past week Qumana released version 2.0 with lots of new advertising features, but without bothering to fix this limitation. We have again reported it and have, to date, received only the most cursory and noncommittal response. Qumana claims to support All Blog Hosts who support the major blog APIs. Well, Conversant has full support for all three major APIs, but Qumana doesn't support it. AFAIK, the API's don't specify how long a blogID should be, so this is not really an API issue - it's a reasonableness issue.

What is reasonable? Every other blog editor I've used - MarsEdit, BlogJet, ecto, w.bloggar, etc. - didn't have a problem with this. So I'm thinking that a 15-character limit is unreasonable (I didn't realize people still wrote software with such small hard limits for system variables anymore.) Conversant isn't like most weblogging systems. Here the weblog isn't the entire site, it's just one part of a site. and there can be more than one weblog on a given site. In fact, a single Conversant system can host thousands of individual blogs, as it's designed as a group publishing system and not a simple blog host. To limit the blogID to 15 characters is, well, dumb - as evidenced by the fact no other blog editor does it.

More importantly, what is a reasonable response from a software company that promotes itself as a "pro blogger" tool? At minimum, I think it's reasonable to expect that someone at the company spend a half-hour to validate an issue we have investigated thoroughly, invested significant time in, made multiple efforts to explain, and know beyond doubt Qumana is breaking. Then make an up/down decision on whether they want to fix it and let us know. Qumana doesn't owe us a fix, but they owe it to all their customers to be forthright when one raises a legitimate issue against their claims of support and compatibility.

As I said at the top, this is a prelude. This is my second run at this problem because I think the workflow ideas behind Qumana are important. I didn't say anything about it publicly the first time, but now I'm getting frustrated. So far I have not seen the kind of follow through that a pro blogging tool needs. I will post updates here as the situation evolves.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:45 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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