The folly of content management
Simplicity is genius. The current crop of weblog publishing tools, otherwise known as content management systems, are anything but simple.
Which is odd, given that their main task is outrageously simple; to publish to the Web. Write some content, spit it out on the site owner’s index page and, presumably, in a location for storage; a location we call an archive.
We didn’t stop there though, did we? No. We asked the makers of said systems to make our sites dynamic, to allow others to publish to our sites, as guest commentators, using a system called (not surprisingly) Comments. And we asked for categorization of our entries. We asked for interlinking between entries, and even between those entries of a specific category. We wanted also to be able to specify more than one category for an entry, should our work be of sufficient depth to allow it.
Our archived entries need to be searchable! And if they could be achived, could they not be archived in any number of ways? Heck, we could store our work in an individual wrapper, in a daily form, like a newspaper, or monthly, like a magazine, and we would want to be able to display links to such such items in myriad ways: in calendars, simple lists, nested lists, excerpts, drop down menus, and so forth.
What good is information if we can’t make it complex?
Race towards the machine
Then, of course, we wanted our work to not only be readable by humans, but readable by machines. XML. RSS. Aggregators. Readers. Newsfeeds.
Not that we should stop and ask ourselves why, if at all, anyone would want to view our works in such a way. One honest look at our Web statistics (the one Weblog we should pay attention to) and it should be clear that a very small number of our visitors come looking for that content to begin with. Further, if we examined the IP address of the visitors that did, we might be surprised to learn that the visitor who most oft frequented our archived works was us.
Ah but we missed that. We’re told that dynamically published Web sites are da-Shit, and we wanted to have one, and asking a foolish question like “why” wasn’t going to get in our way.
It didn’t stop there. A large number of very persistent visitors to our sites understand one thing about people’s collective behaviour on the Web. They’ve discovered that the golden calf everyone worships is something called Google. They’ve discovered that Google keeps tabs on websites and ranks them according to relevance. Some magic pixie dust called Google Page Rank, which is driven by two things; content, which sites such as ours spit out in volumes and with unprecedented ease, and via inbound links which our sites allow them to post via our handy commenting systems.
Thus a parastic content management system is born. Spambots (a content management system that publishes links into other managed sites – for PAYING CUSTOMERS no less) feed links by the millions to content managed Web sites every day. Somewhere in Hoboken some fat fuck is improving his Web site’s Google Page Rank by crapflooding our managed Web sites with links to his.
Accordingly, the makers of our publishing system have added extra code to what was once an elegantly simple content management tool. We looked closely at our system’s template for the archived items, and discovered that there were no less than four distinctly separate comment input forms in that template alone, each one responding to a unique set of circumstances, all controlled by a mountain of javascript, yet at any given time only one will be seen by the visitor.
Are unregistered users allowed to post comments; is third-party authentication required; if so, is the user signed in; if she is, she sees one log-in form, if not she sees another; if she isn’t registered with the third party, she sees a comment pending screen.
Oh yes, there’s a Comment Template, a Comment Pending template, a Comment Preview template, and an Individual Archive template. All of these will appear different to each visitor depending on a predetermined set of rules we set in our Comment Moderation configurations, and whether or not we required third party authentication.
All of this so only the right visitors (altruistic humans and not spambots, preferably) to our sites can post comments. It’s an arms race. It never ends.
Of course the very best defence against abuse of one’s comment system is to not have one, but that is unthinkable.
Isn’t it?
What we really need
Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves some fundamental questions about why we’re on the Web. What did we hope to accomplish? Who will read our sites? Do we, in fact, need to index, list, quantify, qualify, categorize, sort, arrange and multiply our content. Do our items really need to appear in three separate archives?
Does it really need to be syndicated?
No, really, if you wrote about your morning toast, does it matter if that information can be assimilated by both man and machine?
Should our links last forever? Do they need to be cruft-free? Do they need to be future proof? Does our stuff need to be in a database? Do we really need to wear those goat-leggings and should we really be worshipping Google?
Do we need a better mouse trap?
Perhaps hand-coding really is a better way to publish on the Web.
© Raymond A. vanderWoning
Originally at: http://www.vanderwoning.ca/essay/folly