Thursday, September 13, 2012; 11:42:46 AM Eastern
Blogging in transition
A little over a week ago I wrote a piece called scripting.com in transition. I was getting ready to show people OPML Comments, and wanted to give you all a heads up. Now you've seen the next step. I've opened up a little window into the CMS running behind the threads site, called the worldoutline, to show you a bit of what it can do. - Over the last couple of years I did a transition of my blog. First, I rewrote my CMS which had evolved in a disorderly research-driven fashion over several years. That was called Scripting2. Then I started a new CMS called the worldoutline, which was actually begun with the seeds of a way of organizing web content that goes back to Clay Basket in the mid-90s. But this time I achieved the goal I had been trying to reach the previous iterations.
- My goal was to create a way of writing, designing and programming for networks that was unified. Where a new domain is just a matter of putting a label on a node saying "Start something new here, and this is its name." Its analogous to a page-break in a word processor. On the net the equiv of a page-break is a domain-break.
- Things that used to represent large conceptual changes, like the difference between content and its rendering, are shrunken so you just have to save a document to effect large change on the web. Why not? We already have tools like this for printing and page layout. We're 15 years into the web now. We all create lots of sites, so many that they're hard to manage. We live at the edge of our capacity to manage it. But our tools, the file system and IDEs have only made incremental improvements in the last couple of generations. We're not using the great new capacity of our machines very well.
- So I don't think most people have an expectation for what comes next. That's why this is going to be so much fun. I think you will be surprised at what you will be able to do. :-)