I feel much better knowing I'm not the only one who finds Open Source CMS systems so frustrating. I've been poking around with several on the theory that a decent, affordable, CMS should be a key component in a personal knowledge management environment. Veen helps articulate why I've been struggling and it's not because I'm stupid, which is always reassuring. The comments to Veen's post are also helpful in suggesting some paths forward for my own experiments. Now, if I can only find those hours hidden between midnight and 1AM that I'm sure exist in some parallel universe

Jeff Veen: Making A Better Open Source CMS. "I've lost track of how many times I've heard people tell me things like, 'Yeah, we tried PHP-Nuke. But everything came out so Nuke-y looking.' That suggests to me that most systems are designed with a particular genre of site in mind. Then, features and functionality are added on top of that basic framework. And the whole package is then shipped as a tangled mess of add-ons and faulty assumptions." There seem to be a lot of people who want to write Slashclones or blog software or dynamic app frameworks, but not much in the way of generic content management. [Hack the Planet]

4:52:36 PM •  • comment  

Well Ted Nelson probably continues to be apoplectic over all this messiness, but Shirky is right. Thanks to Bruce Sterling for pointing me to something I had also missed at the time.

Also, yet another example of why evolution works without need for an intelligent designer.

Screwed-up, evolvable protocols that out-learn well-designed solutions.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Clay Shirky theorizing This essay was written eight years ago and I haven't read it till now. I really dig it when you read some assertion about the Web that's eight years old, and it makes better sense now than it did when it was written. Either Clay Shirky is impressively prescient, or this is some kind of genuine principle here. Maybe both! [Beyond the Beyond]

4:43:01 PM •  • comment  

I agree with Phil. This looks like an interesting experiment and worth $25 to play along. I'm =jim.mcgee and here is my contact page .

My i-Name.

While here, I've had a chance to learn about the Identity Commons, a move to create a third party identity service. Identity Commons is committed to individual ownership of identity information and relationships. They manage something called i-names, unique names that you can sign up for and keep for 50 years (one-time fee). I signed up for one this morning. I'm =windley. The equal sign is used before an i-name to identity it as an i-name. So far, about the only thing you can do with an i-name is to create a contact page. Here's mine. Eventually, the i-name will tie to all kinds of forms of contacting a person.

I-names are based on the XRI specification. XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) is a "new URI-compatible scheme and resolution protocol for abstract identifiers—identifiers that are location-, application-, and transport-independent, and thus can be shared across any number of domains and directories. The XRI 1.0 specifications were published in January 2004 by the OASIS XRI Technical Committee."

I've got no idea if this will ever go anywhere, but I think interesting and support it $25 worth.

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

4:37:28 PM •  • comment