Since some piano player in New Jersey owns the domain MichaelGray.com I had a few options but the best was to go with my middle initial and byt the domain MichaelAGray.com. Since I’m all about wordpress as a CMS I put the files up, put up my theme of choice thesis, tweaked it with the thesis reputation skin, and installed the XML Sitemaps plugin. I set it up to ping all of the search engines as shown below:

Within 4 days the homepage for the domain was showing in Bing and Google as shown below (yahoo just didn’t love me enough)

I’m a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website aren’t as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling.

That’s not to say you should use sitemaps and not worry about spiders being able to crawl, because internal anchor text can play a huge role in SEO. However use on XML sitemaps as a redundant backup plan to help make sure you fully crawled and indexed.

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They, like me, see time to act as a critical measure. Accelerating timely and appropriate action in response – how long it takes you from a touch point event to the correct response – should therefore be a focus for companies. Operational Intelligence is their approach to reducing this time and involves visibility (events from many sources, KPIs, dashboards), insight (correlate events, detect patterns, analyze trends) and action (business event management, process management). They see this as particularly important in areas where a real-time response makes a real difference like SLA management, compliance monitoring, call centers, fraud detection, sensor networks etc. Taking these one at a time:

Visibility – users must be able to go get the data. Vitria has a long history of integration work and is able to pull data from lots of different databases and applications. They have added event feeds like JMS, RSS feeds and more. Everything is treated like an event source and their active connectors turn data changes in data sources into events. A web-based environment for monitoring and displaying is provided and this is aimed at a business user/analyst. The UI allows users to define KPIs, SLAs, use various visualizations etc.

Insight – a Complex Event Processing engine supporting correlation, time series and trending, analysis. The engine is XQuery based so it can handle complex XML packets natively, important given the growth in XML based messages. Some simulation/what-if analysis. A pretty typical set of functions for correlation and analysis over various dimensions/moving windows/trending.

Act – policies or business rules are defined to determine what to do in response. Significant events are evaluated against policies and these trigger actions such as initiating a business process. Audit trails etc. are provided because everything is in M3O and can be stored and analyzed.

From a usage point of view users define the interface using a Yahoo Pipes-like approach where things are hooked up to each other. Modeling involves processes defined using BPMN and executing on the Vitria process engine. A typical BPMN editor is provided for process definitions while Event Policies (which allow large numbers of conditions against any part of the event) specify the conditions against an event that can be used to take actions, trigger processes etc. This allows a more dynamic matching of the events and processes. The event correlation engine can embed data, trends etc in messages that can be used by event policies and these can feed back into the event processing engine to close the loop. Monitoring and managing of these processes and events is supported also. I was pleasantly surprised with the direction Vitria has taken.  The product had a nice simple UI designed to empower business users so they can turn the knobs of the company right from their chairs.

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Many years ago, Toronto-based i4i was granted a patent related to “[s]ystem and method for generating an XML-based fault model.”  The abstract specifically mentioned Word documents, and then such documents were named many more times throughout the rest of the application.

As for the subject of legal contention, Emil Protalinski reports, “Word 2003 and Word 2007 use extensible markup language (XML) for encoding and customizing the XML in a way that i4i believes infringes on its patent.”

Now, a federal jury’s sided with i4i, and you might judge the importance of the decision in light of the fact that i4i’s website is down (think traffic overload).  With most tech-related companies, that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day.

Unfortunately for i4i (and perhaps XML pros who would look to the company as something of a hero), Microsoft does intend to appeal the $200 million verdict, so it may be quite a while before anything’s final and money changes hands.

Around 75,000 people from 25 nations submitted applications to the contest.  Brazil’s Renzo Nuccitelli won first place overall, and so seems like someone who’s really earned a place on a pedestal among XML professionals.  Nuccitelli’s email address must be a hot commodity right now as people seek advice or try to make a hire.

Otherwise, India’s Anil Mahadev was named top developer in the “Ported Application” category.  Yasuhiro Nonaka of Japan won the “Query Challenge” contest.

Then, an official release goes on to state, “Dual winners of the 2008 ‘Gadget Challenge’ competition were Ontario, Canada’s Zaidan Alaoui and Maharashtra, India’s Vibha Pandya. . . .  Rahsheen Porter, Grayson, Geo. (USA) and his video entry and Rendra Setiawan, Jakarta, Indonesia, were winners of the ‘Video Mania’ contest.”

Congratulations all around to these champs.  And the many runners-up should remember that it might not be too early to start practicing for next year’s contest.

As explained on the software’s homepage, “XMLFox is a graphical XML editing and validation tool for creating valid, well-formed XML documents and/or XSD Schema.  It includes an XML View, XML Tree, XML Grid, and XML Script modes for editing, as well as extensive find capabilities for text and XML data.  Additional features include XML and Schema Validation, standard editing features, XSD Schema building and more.”

You may or may not be able to think of some things not mentioned there, but that list is quite a mouthful.  The program should be well-suited to an underpowered laptop or netbook that can’t handle more sophisticated programs, or it’ll certainly do the trick for someone you’re trying to introduce to XML.

Ian Harac also wrote in a review of XMLFox, “[I]t’s quick, clean, and easy to use. . . .  As a free editor which does its one job well, XMLFox worth looking into.”

Consider giving your wallet a break and XMLFox a try, then.

Ayca Yuksel, a senior product manager from Microsoft, explained in a statement, “Quark XML Author enhances the user-defined XML support within Microsoft Word and allows users to create XML content easily, which eliminates many of the barriers associated with the adoption of XML.”

XML pros might be able to save shave some time off their normal routines, then, or work more quickly on computers that are unfamiliar to them.  And folks who aren’t accustomed to using XML at all might become more productive, too, thus leaving less for the traditional heavy lifters to do.

Compatibility problems shouldn’t be an issue since the new product is supposed to work with Microsoft Office 2000-2007.  Older versions of Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word have been taken into account, too.

Quark XML Author 3.0 will be made available on April 30th.

Let’s delve into the fun part to begin.  Recognize the phrase “klaatu barada nikto”?  Or how about the concept of Bruce Campbell fighting an army of skeletons?  Well, it appears that someone might be an “Evil Dead” fan, because the company - Codenomicon - has a name quite similar to that of the book featured in those movies.  Or maybe Codenomicon’s founder enjoys H.P. Lovecraft stories - even better.

As for the actual offering, a press release explains that Codenomicon “announced its flagship XML testing product allowing the industry to clearly understand the existing security weaknesses in many open source and commercially deployed products taking advantage of XML technology.”

Codenomicon’s use of Fuzzing test methodology is even supposed to let it diagnose previously unknown vulnerabilities, and considering how the recession has caused hackers to step up their game (and grow in number), that seems extremely important.

Professor Howard A. Schmidt, a former White House Cyber Security advisor and Codenomicon board member, said in a statement, “Codenomicon has found a critical focus area which expands beyond web testing, where the XML industry has an opportunity to proactively assess the security holes contained in everyday services used by the general public.”

Jim Earley, who works for Flatirons Solutions, stresses that embracing XML is not going to require sending a company’s entire IT department back to school and then restarting the business from scratch. Instead, the process might be as simple as doing some reading on different forums for a couple of hours.

Earley writes, “We often consult our clients to use a standard directly out of the box (or with very little customization) until they have a good ‘feel’ of how well it works in their environment before digging into the real customization work. Given that funding for XML projects is likely to be reduced, this is the perfect opportunity to begin integrating one of these standards into your environment, try it on for size while the economy is slow, and when the economy improves, then consider how to customize your XML content to fit your environment.”

Sounds smart, right? The first part of his plan is a little like renting a certain car so you know the right trim level, options packages, and aftermarket gear to order when actually purchasing one. The second part is perhaps like making the rental when you’re not busy ferrying friends and family members around all the time.

This careful approach is worth suggesting to even the most risk-averse and tightfisted boss. Maybe be delicate, though, because the Dow dropped another 98 points (it’s now down 290) in the time it took to put together this short piece.

The competition’s homepage explains, “If you’re a student, then you can leverage your entry in your job hunt.  If you’re already in the professional ranks, you can gain some well-deserved recognition for your XML skills.  Oh yeah, and there’s thousands of dollars in prizes, ranging from Wiis to complimentary technical conferences.”

Any and all thanks should go to IDUG, the contest’s sponsor.  As for more about what’s actually going on, there are five mini-challenges in the areas of videos, gadgets, queries, ported apps, and plain old XML.  One entry is allowed in each contest per month, prizes are given out, and then a points tally will determine an overall winner.

There are different start and end dates to the XML Superstar contest in different countries, though, so you’ll want to visit the official site to see how the clock’s running in your region.

Good luck if you decide to enter.  The grand prize is a Bose Wave Radio.

Part of what makes the web so interesting is that there are so many different kinds of content out there. Do you use videos on your website? If so, send us a Video Sitemap file so that we can send you visitors to those videos! Do you host source-code samples? Submit a Code Search Sitemap! Here are the various kinds of Sitemap files that Google supports at the moment:

• XML Sitemap files for web pages - Use these files to submit all of your web pages (this is the preferred format for web pages). While not all search engines may support the Sitemap types listed below, the XML Sitemap for web pages is supported by all search engines of sitemaps.org.
• RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds for web pages - Many blogs create these automatically.
• Text files with web page URLs - If you can’t automatically create one of the above formats, you can create a text file with your URLs in it.
• XML Sitemap files for Video Search - Videos on your website can be indexed and made available for Google Video Search.
• Media-RSS feeds for Video Search - mRSS feeds are used by various other systems, we can use these for Google Video Search as well.
• XML Sitemap files for Google Code Search - If you make programming samples or code available to your users, you can submit these for Google Code Search.
• XML Sitemap files for mobile web pages - Using this kind of format allows us to recognize content that has been optimized for mobile devices (please note that there was recently a small change in the format).
• XML Sitemap files for geo-data - If you have geographic data on your website in the form of KML or GeoRSS files, please let us know about these files.
• XML Sitemap files for News - News websites can submit their news content in this special Sitemap format (please note that you must first register with Google News before these files are processed).

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