Websites Are Non-Linear

Saturday, 23 September 2006

I have a problem with blogging software. Its not the technology or the software themselves that are problematic.

Somehow, what I want to say a lot of times does not fit into a "journal" or a "blog" post well.

I tend look at personal websites as extensions one's self. So, it is only natural that websites reflect the different dimension that a person has. Blogs only deal with time.

I have tried to write my own software to manage the this website. I've been able to do it quite easily too. However, the shortcoming is not in the tools but the idea of having to force every single idea into Blog template.

I like the visual idea of websites resembling a spider web. My most productive period with this website; by productive i mean, periods where I wrote, tweaked and updated Useful content; was way back in 2003 when this site was a "Opensource CD shop" selling open source software CDs, predominantly Openoffice.org.

The technology then was very primitive - my own handcoded PHP and a text-file database for a catalogue. But, the distance between my ideas and their appearence on the web page was very short.

So, now I'm looking at reorganising my website by throwing out all "management" out of the window and concentrate on the content.

I'm tempted to go with plain HTML. The most useful websites(in my line of thought, atleast) tend to be plain and full of useful info without all the gizmos like RSS/Calendar/talkback.

I'm not against the web2.0 features per se. (you know i'm not; i've had gradient images, rounded corners, section specific rss feeds, microformats and what-not on this web site :)

It is just that, I seem to hit a wall when I see "Blog post" window. Perhaps I'm not the blogging kind after all.

The bare bones tech:

I'm considering moving all the content to static pages perhaps using myghty. Myghty will allow me serve simple text files served as web pages without me having to install and maintain a "blog software". I'm the tinkering kind, so myghty is a good choice.

The ideal setup would be... * write a arricle/journal-entry/news-bite in a text editor (emacs) * scp it to the server.

Perhaps the settings on the file (commenting enabled etc.,) can be part of the file itself. The idea of using a database to store simple text file seems to be an overkill to me :)

Pybloxsom does this already. But, I do not want to install and learn yet another "System". A home brewed solution seems to be a better fit.