Okay, I've done some soul-searching and talking and reading and making music and eating and feeding guinea pigs. In other words, time has passed.
God BLEEP it I hate it when WYSIWYG editors are buggy like Wordpress… But I already ranted about that in the last post so I'll try not to say anything about it anymore. Been there complained about that, eh?
So here's some new info that can influence how I design and manage my site(s):
- I would rather code all the html by hand than deal with buggy WYSIWYG editors. I would rather have reliable tedium than chaotic brilliance. This is why I switched from FrontPage to a text editor, from Word to a text editor, and (for my Tripalot sites) from Dreamweaver to a text editor. I always seem to gravitate towards a text editor, because text editors are the most reliable authoring tools.
- I'm plagued with Aplus.net's PHP-related Internal Server Errors. I get these all the time when I Drupal, Wordpress, Mediawiki, and PHPBB… and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Aplus.net has not been able to help and in fact today an Aplus.net tech support guy told me that his sites (hosted on Aplus.net) get frequent Internal Server Errors as well. This turns me off to the idea of using Web 2.0 on Tripalot, at least while Tripalot is hosted by Aplus.net. Maybe a hosting switch is in order?
- Meanwhile, my static xhtml pages continue to load quickly and reliably. Tripecac and the rest of my sites are fine. Tripecac is sort of my "musical blog"; I update it twice a weak, and other sites once or twice a week. I do all my static page authoring on my main pc. I wish I could use other PCs to author (and publish) static pages as well. That, in fact, was the main reason I tried Web 2.0; I wanted to be able to post ideas using my laptop. Which is what I am doing right now…
- Honestly, I don't really need most of the Web 2.0 features. Collaboration? No. Versioning? Not really. WYSIWYG editing? HECK NO!!! Fancy navigation? No. Tagging and categorization. Not really. A built-in search engine? Well, that's kinda nice, but I can use google for search or use the PERL script I wrote (which still works, by the way). If I forego Web 2.0, I think the only features I'll miss (until I roll my own) are:
- ability to quickly edit blocks of text instead of having to locate and load a file (e.g., if I see a typo in this post I can quickly edit it)
- comments (although since these pages are not yet public, I have no idea how often they'd be used)
- WYSIWYG editing. Did I just say that? Grrr… Seriously, though, I really wished that for once a WYSIWYG editor would prove reliable and efficient. Please, someone, write a decent WYSIWYG editor!!!
- more writing, less coding (unless I start developing my own modules)
- nice look and feel (better than my stuff, since I'm definitely not a graphical designer)
- the calendar function (which is cool but underused)
- lots of other cool stuff…
Notice how Wordpress botched up the bullets? Okay, okay, no complaining…
- Okay, you can see that I am in fact ambivalent about giving up Web 2.0. I actually like a lot of the features, but wouldn't mind losing the rest. I guess one question I should ask myself is whether I can get the same cool features offline (not on Tripalot), and use them to create static pages which I push to Tripalot. I think the answer is yes for everything except comments. Anything collaborative really needs to be done online. Mark Prindle says he manually adds comments to his static html files, but I'd rather automate that if possible.
- I suppose I could use Blogger to author and then push the files to Tripalot. That would give me the best of both worlds, right? Reliable authoring, and control over the static files? I've already read that Movable Type lets people do the same thing (but that's not free).
- Maybe I could have a CMS (like Blogger) on my LAN, and use that to author content and then push it to Tripalot. But then I couldn't have comments, and if I spot a typo on the site, I need to locate the page locally in order to edit it. I suppose I could write a greasemonkey script (or favlet) which lets me load the local version of a tripalot page. Hmmm…
- Maybe I can start off by finding a (local) Push CMS which lets me create urls which are compatible with Pull CMSes. Or vice versa. The idea is to make sure the urls are not dependent on Push vs Pull CMS. If I need to disable comments in order to preserve the ambiguity, so be it. Eventually, I should be able to run PHP reliably on Tripalot, because either Aplus.net will get its act together or I will move to a different host. I won't continue to pay for hosting services that I cannot use.
- I need to pick one CMS and forget about the rest. Either Wordpress, Mediawiki, Drupal, or Blogger. It's imperative that I select a tool and start using it to create actual content. That's the only way to really evaluate it. See, before I started blogging these CMS ideas in Wordpress, I thought Wordpress was simple but rock-solid. Now I think Wordpress is simple but flawed. And today, when I was trying to see if Drupal could "push" XML (via an export docbook module), I ran into lots of problems. I installed PHP5, deleted duplicate menu items, installed a tidy standalone executable, installed an htmltidy module, and I still couldn't get drupal to export XML. Darn. But at least I know that now. If I just stuck with hello-world examples, I'd think these Web 2.0 apps were all gold. Now I know that they are just as unreliable as Dreamweaver. So this gives me a different perspective than I had yesterday. Web 2.0 isn't infallible by a long shot. It's not necessarily my "goal state". Perhaps text editing and xml+xsl are my best long-term strategies. Who knows..
- I'm tired of investigating this stuff. I wish I could have someone to ask. However, no one seems to know the right thing to do, at least for me. And I'm not sure I should be asking. What's good for them is not necessarily good for me. Web development is as much an art as a science. I know that's a cliche, but think about it… my music is unique because I do everything from scratch. So are my static web sites. Warts and all, they are "mine". The more I depend on other people's tools, the more my creations start become generic. Bit by bit they lose their character. Bit by bit I lose my attachment to them, and put forth less effort in them. So I need to keep things personal, keep things "mine". Maybe this means I need to avoid Web 2.0. Or maybe not. This Wordpress blog definitely has my look and feel. The wiki doesn't though. And neither does drupal. phpbb is pretty standing looking too, despite the colors. So I guess if I need to preserve the look of my site I need to be able to heavily customize the template. Maybe that's a good next step for investigation. See how closely I can get these Web 2.0 apps to mimic the current Tripalot look and feel.
Hmm. Okay, enough thinking and typing for now. Time to read something fun.