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’m finally starting to understand Rails! :)

Now that school’s out I don’t have any homework breathing down my neck, so this morning I got up early and decided to write a Rails app that takes a GEDCOM file (using an existing GEDCOM-to-XML parser) and imports it into a Beyond database.

Instead of using the traditional scaffolding (which is the easy way to get started with Rails), I decided to go it on my own, creating the necessary models and controllers and views through “script/generate,” and then link them together. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about how Rails works. The whole MVC thing makes sense now, and I see how I can stitch the pieces together to get what I need.

About the only real difficulties I ran into were from naming fields “key” and “object_id”. I wish there were a document somewhere that told you what field names to avoid. There probably is and I just haven’t found it yet. Anyway, after a while I realized that “object_id” was a Ruby method and rel.object_id was giving me a long funky number because of that and not because something was wrong with the database. So that was nice.

Oh, and I discovered config/routes.rb, which answers a lot of the questions I’d had about URL mapping (i.e., where the “/controller/action” URL actually comes from, and how Rails knows about it). Very cool.

Anyway, I’m really, really glad I’ve gotten past the initial bump in the road. This is where the fun begins. :)

Technorati Tags: Rails, Ruby on Rails, GEDCOM, Beyond

I’ve been bemoaning the lack of a nice web app (or any web app, for that matter) which I could use to access my S3 storage. Then today I found filicio.us. It’s new and simple, and it actually works. You can check out the demo if you’d like.

I’m missing folders, though. Tags are nice, sure, but for files it’d be nice to keep a hierarchical structure. (JungleDisk lets me do that.) Or at least I think it would be nice; I’m prepared to shift my paradigm if necessary. But even so, it still seems like having lots and lots of files would make the hierarchy nice. We’ll see. I’ve got a ton of files to upload (3rd party backup, just in case :)) and the thought of losing the structure is slightly disturbing, but then again with a quick search, it may not make a difference. I’ve gotten used to Gmail’s labels instead of folders, come to think of it. Here goes. :)

Technorati Tags: S3, filicio.us, Jungle Disk, Gmail

I felt like writing a list this morning. And I did. It’s on Top of the Mountains at
Ben’s Bylaws of Blogging. Feel free to leave additions in the comments.

This morning I got a link in my e-mail activating my test Google Spreadsheets account, so I’ve been playing around with it. It’s pretty cool, and I even think it’ll work out fairly well for managing my (meager) finances.

The collaboration, with inline chatting, seems cool. I had it open on my Windows box, then forgot about that and opened it in Camino on my Mac. And suddenly, to my surprise, there was a chat sidebar on the right. Easy and unobtrusive. (And yes, I did chat with myself, but only a little bit, I promise. :)) The chats aren’t logged in the Gmail chat archives yet, though. When I closed Camino, the chat sidebar on my Windows box didn’t change (it said I was still there), but I’m sure that’s just a small bug they’ll fix soon.

All the basic functionality seemed to be there (at least everything I need). Simplicity is bliss. Good call, Google.

For some reason it was quite slow in Firefox on my Mac, but in Firefox on my Windows box it didn’t feel slow at all. It was kind of slow in Camino, too, but it’s Gecko-based — go figure. It doesn’t support Safari yet.

So, hopefully it’ll get faster on the Mac. But even as it is, it’s sweet. I love Web 2.0. :)

Technorati Tags: Google, Excel, spreadsheets, Camino, Gmail, Firefox, Gecko, Web 2.0

Came across a very interesting idea on LibrarianInBlack.net, namely textcasting. Apparently Slate.com has started doing it, and in all honesty I really like it. With podcasting and screencasting, textcasting fits right in with the rest of the family. And it’s a much cooler name than “RSS.” :) I’ll start using it on my blogs.

Technorati Tags: textcasting

Check out 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail, a great article by Josh Porter on Bokardo.com. Here are the main points:

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.

The one that’s been on my mind most lately, in designing Beyond, is #2:

2. They solve too many problems, or try to.

This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…

Technorati Tags: Web2.0

I was working on a document in Writely a few moments ago, and I wanted to take a block of text (plus an image) and print it. So I copied it and opened Word. Just as I hit Paste, I thought to myself, “What are you thinking? This isn’t going to work.” And then it worked. That’s cool. :) To me, that’s what Web2.0 is all about — things just work. Ah, it’s lovely…

Technorati Tags: Writely, Web2.0