Much of my fall was consumed with the behind-the-scenes development of a new web-based content management system for our longtime client Yankee Publishing. The end result of this work, on the back-end, looks a little like this:

Suffice to say that it’s a completely Web 2.0-buzzword-compliant web-based system for managing online magazine content. On the back-end, editors use the system to manage articles, photos, recipes and travel lsitings; on the front-end side of things, the content automagically squirts out into pages that look like this.

The project has taken me to new levels of intimacy with the Yahoo! User Interface Library, which has proven quite useful as a toolkit for driving things like “drag and drop a photo into an article.” Similarly, a recent infrastructure upgrade on the server-side brought a move to version 5 of PHP, and that move provided the opportunity to recast much of the back-end code in beautiful PHP objects.

The reason for all this work has been the relaunching of YankeeMagazine.com, the companion website to YANKEE magazine. The relaunch of the site provided us with an opportunity to move much closer to complete “separation of content from presentation” nirvana: for the most part the new site consists of XHTML “content” from the content management system rendered inside a brand-new utterly CSS-driven design by Todd Libby.

And the reason for all of that is this:

On the right is the December 2006 issue of YANKEE, on the right is a press-proof of the January/February 2007 issue. You’ll notice that the one on the right is bigger. The change, which is explained here by Editor Mel Allen (and here in the Boston Herald) is rather dramatic. Especially when you’ve worked with the old “tiny YANKEE” for ten years, as I have.

The renovated magazine is bigger, brighter and, I dare say, bolder. The new issue really takes the new size out for a ride — there’s lots of air in the design, and the new typography is a pleasant blend of old and new. Look at this double-page spread, for example (and then read the article here — it brought tears to my eyes):

The new YankeeMagazine.com contains the complete contents of the print magazine. But to truly appreciate it in a form that you can carry in your pocket and read over breakfast, you should probably buy yourself a subscription too.

In the weeks and months to come we’ll be taking the new CMS out for a ride too, adding new features to the site that let articles and photos be sliced and diced in new and interesting ways.

It’s an interesting time to be a friend of YANKEE.

Thoughtfully provided by Mandy MacNevin:

Here is the schedule for the levees in and around Charlottetown for January 1, 2007. All times have now been confirmed, either directly or with the kind help of David Jabbour from Central Beauty Supply.

After a dozen futile attempts to recapture the joy of the Italian cappuccino experience, I turned to the place I should have turned to begin with: Catherine. Using her Coffee Gaggia, Lavazza beans I brought from Italy, some china mugs I brought from Copenhagen, she whipped up a tour de force:

Two important developments on the Christmas Magic front this year.

First, Oliver’s first baby tooth fell out while he was asleep on Christmas Eve, perhaps the result of the vigorous carrot-eating bing he’s been on courtesy of orders from Don the Dentist. This meant a visit from Santa on Christmas Eve and a visit from the Tooth Fairy on Christmas Day.

Catherine had a book of “baby teeth practices from around the world” at the ready for this moment and so Oliver and I learned that in many places in the world the custom is to throw the tooth on the roof or to bury it in the ground.

Second magic came just after Oliver went to bed on Christmas Eve: a horse and wagon with bells clopped down the street in front of the house, creating a very effective illusion that Santa was in the neighbourhood. Kudos to the downtown horse people for their assistances in this regard.

Nudo: “Nudo is an olive grove. And part of it can be yours.” Pointer from springwise.com, which continues to entertain and delight me.

Following the splashy public announcement of Jaiku’s new API, I’ve updated class.jaiku.php to follow suit: updating presence is now done via the API if you pass a developer key (with no developer key, the old school way of updating is used). Thanks, Andy.

Although Jaiku provides several ways of updating your presence by mobile phone — you can send updates by SMS, and there’s a nice Series 60 application that runs on my Nokia N70 that does everything but make bread — there are times when I’m away from my mobile phone and want to update.

Enter Asterisk and PHPAGI which, together with class.jaiku.php make Jaiku By Telephone.

It’s not exactly a “ready for use by my grandmother” application because the text input system supported by PHPAGI (documented here) is a little bit like knitting with invisible yarn.

But it’s a cool proof-of-concept, and a good way to procrastinate a couple of hours on Christmas Eve morning.

I call into my Asterisk server, press a key to call up the AGI script I created, hear my current Jaiku presence message read to me, and then update my presence. I don’t quite get the keystrokes correct, but the result is:

If you’ve ever known any really hardcore cigarette smokers, you may have encountered a situation, say at 3:00 a.m., when you’ve all been up too late, where said smokers run out of cigarettes and are forced to forage for cigarette butts with enough extant tobacco to make lighting them up worthwhile. Really desperate smokers don’t care whether the butts were originally from their cigarettes or not.

It was this same general phenomenon that took me to the Great Canadian Bagel this morning in search of cappuccino. Everything but Cora’s wasn’t open early this Sunday morning (and we all know how that went last week). Even Catherine was still asleep. And so I drove around like a crazy man looking for a cappuccino fix.

I think, as a general rule, it’s good to avoid drinking cappuccino that is dispensed out of something like this:

To begin with, part of the point of my newfound early morning cappuccino is the early morning contemplation that it allows. You can do a lot of things in the front seat of a 2000 VW Jetta, but quiet contemplation isn’t one of them.

And then there was the “cappuccino” itself:

I know, I know: what was I thinking. Separate from the drive-thru problems, I should have known that the Great Canadian Bagel, where all their bagels taste like freeze-dried gloop imported from Mars, wouldn’t have what it takes to turn out good coffee. I was right: what arrived through the drive-thru window tasted approximately like an over-cooked Skor bar dipped in gasoline station coffee. This was “cappuccino” in the same sense that McDonald’s used to make “pizza” and Pat & Willy’s makes “Mexican food.”

Perhaps the other moral of the story is to never go north of Allen Street looking for good coffee. Or, for that matter, never buy cappuccino from your dry cleaner:

It was back to Beanz this morning for cappuccino. Today I specially requested a regular white china cup to avoid this problem.

The aesthetics of the experience were much-improved. Unfortunately I don’t have a taste for the Beanz beans.

Thanks to the readership for pointers to Just Us Girls and Crema Coffee; I’ll sample them on days when a mid-morning cappuccino is necessary.