Okay so this post doesn't sound as exciting as Codeos and round-ups of fun stuff but it's still worth a few moments of your time...

We're all very pleased to say that our latest Cogapp-developed museum website launched a couple of months ago, created for the National Portrait Gallery. In fact, our working relationship with the Gallery goes way back to 1990s (remember them?), when we were commissioned to build their 'original' site, the Portrait Explorer kiosks and an accompanying CD-ROM.

The existing site was very much of its time: based on databases and built with HyperCard, it consisted mostly of flat, static pages.  By 2008, when our work on the new site began, the needs of both staff and visitors had evolved and we clearly needed to take a completely fresh approach. Not least to the back-end processes through which Gallery staff update and add to the site.

At the heart of this new approach was our selection and use of a new content management system, or CMS. Just in case you don't know: a CMS is a tool that facilitates the creation, editing and control of web content, usable even by those who have no technical training. For a client like the National Portrait Gallery, this means that staff at the Gallery can easily and visibly update their own content while the site remains live. A CMS gives the user a lot of autonomy and flexibility because they're not tied to the developer to make small changes to layout and other minor revisions. Most of all, using a CMS is completely separate from the back-end processes, meaning that if anything goes wrong, it's most probably the developer's fault, which hopefully makes it easier to fix! And finally, a CMS ensures that content is separate from design. If changes to layout are made, it doesn't affect the valuable, often very substantial content.

There are two kinds of people in the world - those that believe that there are two types of people in the world, and those that don’t. When it comes to collecting, there probably are two types of people in the world. Those that collect, and those that don’t. I am a collector (or hoarder). We work with a lot of Museums who are in the business of collecting, but I am intrigued by individuals that are compelled to put their own collections online. The Stewardess Uniform Collection