Jeff Croft writes about personal content management:

[A CMS] ought to make your content more useful simply by virtue of the content being in the system. But more often than not, it doesn’t. Most of time, you actually make your data (read: content) as dumb as possible by way of entering it into a CMS. Seriously.

He’s got a good point — with most content management systems, we flatten out the structure (or square-peg a round hole, as he puts it) and lose important information. Rolling your own is sounding better and better every day. I’ve been meaning to do that for Riverglen Press, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to extend it to Blank Slate either (once I figure out what on earth I want Blank Slate to be — at the moment it’s just a neglected child, most of the time forgotten while its siblings bask in the spotlight, but ironically it gets more traffic than the others).

At any rate, I’m itching to make these sites more my own, and writing a custom CMS is a great way to do that. (I also really need to revamp the graphic design…) The main thing is to decide what I need this CMS to do. Most features I don’t really need, really, and my tastes have sharply turned to lightweight lately.

More to come later, once I have more time. :)

I’ve been waiting a while for two Christmas presents (so to speak). The first has been incubating ever since Google bought Writely in March. Five minutes ago I opened Google Reader and found that the present has hatched, as
Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

This is very, very, very nice. I’m ecstatic. :) Writely’s UI wasn’t bad, but I much prefer Google blue. And having both docs and spreadsheets in the same app is wonderful. I really am giddy as…as…I don’t know what, but I sure am giddy. :) :) :)

(In case you’re wondering, the second “present” is the gDrive, aka unlimited file storage, coming sometime in the future from Google. I hope it’s soon!)

Technorati Tags: Google Docs, Google, Writely

It’s been a while since I wrote about programming. Almost a month, in fact. ~sigh~

So, the BYUFHLC is on hold for now due to time constraints at work. (I have to get all the new extraction software done by a month from now when we present it at the ICAPgen conference.) After ICAPgen I should have enough time to finish it, though.

Haven’t coded much Ruby (or Rails) lately. I may start using it for prototypes for this extraction software, though… Considering that we’ll be switching to a Linux server sometime within the next few months, it almost feels like a waste to code the stuff in .NET (not to mention that I much much much prefer Rails), but it’ll have to do. At least I can rest assured that I’ll be able to recode it in Rails five times as quickly. :)

In other news, Matz is coming to BYU to give a colloquium two weeks from tomorrow. (11 a.m. on the 19th in 1170 TMCB, if you’re interested and on campus.)

Technorati Tags: BYU, Family History Library, ICAPgen, Ruby, Rails, Ruby on Rails, Matz