I don’t know if I should say the concept of the personal website died, or simply fell into a perverse form of self-loathing and mutilation, but whatever the cause, the weblog is the result. Do you remember what a personal website used to be? Well before Blogger, MT, WordPress, bBlog, and other personal CMS programs shoved the journal format down your throat? Generally, it was an index page listing what you wanted to share and then various other real, honest-to-goodness hand-crafted pages below that about various topics. Some were essays, some were links to pictures or pages of pictures, sometimes something like a weblog but markedly different (“Updated on Wed: Yes, we can do this now!” then later “Updated on Fri: Oh, well, except for ___”). It was a site and it had pages and those pages were distinct, separate, and unchanging. Some had a webpage while others had a whole website (back when the difference was that a site was more than one page, not a domain name versus your ISP’s /~name/ hosting plan).
Now we have websites, via the old definition, that are nothing more than a large array of pages of rants and raves and quizzes and “OMG! U R KIdding!!!!!!” and polls and … and … crap and it’s covered all over in Amazon links in the hope of some random reader buying something, completely ignoring that that person got there via a Google query consisting of some band’s name and one of nude, naked, or erotic. The average weblog is a disaster of bad English, bad design, bad taste, and bad software.
In other words, a weblog is the answer to a question no one asked.h2. What Was the Question, Again?
The question in question is that of: how can I make this easier to create and update? The answer that came down was to use a CMS. This is generally a great idea, but the first CMS for the personal website was for a journal-format site. Now, journal-format sites are great for real journals or news or community sites like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, or even larger sites like CNN or Yahoo! News, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with them. The problem in this case is that journal-format sites are designed to hold a very large amount of information; there’s a main page with recent entries and then some form of interface to huge archives behind that. For sites with large amounts of content, that’s a great solution. The problem is that individuals do not normally have large amounts of content. Sure, some have journals with a hundred or even a thousand entries per year, but very few people actually approach those sizes, much less the size needed to obscure that data in the fashion that news reports are. Entries on weblogs are hidden behind date archives, category archives, archives of popular entries, etc. and the reason for that is sad: the most popular methods of creating a personal site are centered around a journal format and not a website format. They’re designed around entries and not pages. You wrote something called title on the date and said it’s of the type category and then the software files it away and wraps up. You’re done. Intuitive? Absolutely. Well-designed and organized page? Absolutely not.
The journal format solved the problem of updates being little bold tags at the bottom of a page, but at the expense of it feeling like a “real” personal website. Now, it’s not like it killed it directly; there’s nothing about Blogger that said “this is your only site!” and prevented it from being used as a journal section of a standard site. Even today, with that tool and others, this is possible and some people have done it and made “old fashioned” websites with weblog-centric CMS packages. The problem lies in that if one has a tool for a task, one will prefer the tool to anything that requires manual labor. Now that someone can update a site with a web script, why make other pages manually? “Just put them in an entry and link to it. It’s just easier that way,” becomes the prevailing attitude. Since the software that can do this requires you to actually read the manual to know how to make it “fake” a website, very few people do it.
It was understandable, of course, but now we have the crux of the problem: where was the GUI for the rest of the website? On the desktop machine, of course. Microsoft FrontPage, Claris HomePage, GoLive CyberStudio (before Adobe) and others allowed people various ways of generating site content on their computer and pushing it out. None had journal modes, so when the journal format came on people used something like Blogger to update the journal and the home software for the other pages. That worked fine when you were at home, but what about when you were at a friend’s house, or at work? This was about 1998 and while there was no wireless access, people were starting to see connections at work and at others’ homes and the lack of a web-based tool was limiting the format. Then the tools took over. Now that there was the flexibility of editing the journal content anywhere the static pages and such became less and less important. Now, they’re the special case, if that.
Is that good or bad? If you want a journal, good. You have the tools to make it. If you want a personal CMS for a website, bad. Your solutions consist of altering a journal-based CMS to do what it was not exactly designed to do or writing them up manually. I, personally, have tried both and hate them both. Now that I have tools, why edit files manually? Yet, if I use a tool for this purpose, I cannot determine a file structure beyond the extraordinarily simple. I can create a site with the format /category/title.html and have some control, but that’s only one level. If I want it to go deeper I have to control that with another weblog and another hack.
Meta-Meta-Meta-WebLog
Why not use journal entries for everything? It’s just data, after all. Well, yes and no. For instance, this entry will be posted as /archives/2004/05/06/weblogs_killed_the_personal_website.php most likely. I know this ahead of time because I hacked (in the traditional sense) the archive format to not use database IDs and use something a bit more … portable. The URL is based on meta-data about this essay (which it treats like a journal entry) and is designed to move to other journal-based CMSes with relative ease. In general, it works fine. If, however, for this one entry, I wanted /archives/rants/weblogs-bite.html I would have to:
- Make a new site
- Change the archive path to conflict with an existing site and use
/archives/ - Use an archive path similar to
/archives/category/keywords.html - Override the keywords field to be my page name
- Publish
Why can’t I just tell it “put it here for me?” Why do I have to conform? It’s making a static page anyway, isn’t it? It’s a journal-based program. That’s why.
So, where are all the real personal CMSes?
I want to:
- Have several “sites” on my site. Each needs:
- Chosen template
- No specific URL base for the site, just a “mount point” where the index page goes.
- Entries can be pages or journal entries. Each would:
- Have a specific URL that I could over-ride at post time
- Be content-agnostic — it should allow it to be a page, a journal entry, a photo, a file, or whatever.
That’s all I want. That’s it. Nothing out there can do it. Unless you know of something?
CityDesk comes to mind (http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/) as maybe the closest – in intent.
Expression Engine – http://www.pmachine.com
in a round about way… with modifications.
Have you tried Whisper (nee Pages) http://whisper.cx/
Like Gator said: ExpressionEngine. It costs – but you get the kind of flexibility with it that none of the other blog/CMS tools offer.
EE uses a template concept that’s different from any other blog tool I’ve come across. But then EE’s aim is not to be just a blogging tool but a crossover to a real CMS.
At quite another end of the spectrum: Blosxom (upcoming version 3 will bring a lot of changes/improvements). That’s like a barebones frame and you can hang practically anything on it.
The organizing principle behind it is that you use the Unix directory structure for your site organization.
Try TextPattern. It has “sections” which have “articles”, maybe not as flexiblel as you want, but much more flexible than say Movable Type.
Like I mentioned before, I do this with XML/XSLT. I write content for the site, and let the automation transform it into pages. There is no ‘editor’ application to speak of at the moment, and I’m still working hard to finalise the schema/xsl/structure of the pages so I can swap out css and re-arrange the page into all sorts of common layouts without changing the resultant xHTML.
I guess I’m one of the few “roll-your-own” folks out there. What I really want to do is run PHP5 with its updated XML parser, but I’ll wait for that piece and work on my formatting rules for now.
I’ve been maintaining a bunch of sites (more intranet than external, but thok.org is one of them) using a little cgi that makes the head of a CVS repository appear as a web page – so saying “I want this file here” is at most a “mkdir” and a few “cvs add“s.
As such I’m sort of a latecomer to blogging, and still think in terms of building static pages and publishing them, even for chronological things…
Have you thought of setting up a Wiki site with passsword control on? Very flexible content management system.
Conversant can and does do exactly what you’re talking about. Content is stored in “messages” (which can be public or private, or access controlled), any amount of meta-data can be attached to a message, and the message can be published to a weblog (or multiple weblogs), published as a distinct web page, become the root of a new discussion thread, or any combination of the above.
Ultra-simple, for zines, made for groups, templated, files where you want (Blogger for sites not journals, basically). Sounds like you’re after Organizine.
Launched in 2001, was only up for a week.
http://www.google.com/search?q=organizine
I will update it soon.
http://www.la-grange.net/cms
Some of them may give you a partial answer. I have the same requirements plus others.
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