Tools, Tools (Ad Nauseum)
It’s been one of those active cranium weeks. The days are getting longer, we had a record month of sunshine, and I stopped watching TV. So now my brain is circling around the web publishing problem. Again. I’m waffling between building the damned solution myself and writing plugins to connect existing tools.
Last night I had myself convinced to build a new wiki/weblog tool. It was so obvious too, I could see the entire design. It was the only approach that would do everything I wanted. And then tonight, after playing with WordPress 1.5 and talking to a few people at work, I can see another path: to build it as a set of plugins and additions to WordPress, MediaWiki, and other external or home-grown bits.
It’s a balance between what I want to spend time on in the short term, and what I can honestly commit to in the long term. I keep asking myself if I really want to build, maintain, and support an entire publishing platform. I’m really more interested in the ability to create content. It strokes my ego, and lets me show other people some of the stuff I do. But I want all of it in one set of tools that are interconnected and easily extended.
The software has to integrate different types of content nicely. As I was saying last week, I want a hybrid of a page-based and news-centric tool. Something that’s sort of like WordPress, something that’s kinda like MediaWiki … and then something that can connect to various other bits.
There are problems with the many-tools-hacked-together approach that adds an odd balance to it. Styling each tool in a consistent manner, for example, or allowing inter-tool searches requires deep integration. Providing a single user login between tools and providing a consistent syntax for content markup are also important (and non-trivial). But I don’t think that any of these things make itimpossible, and they can be built incrementally.
The existing tools (like WordPress 1.5) improve regularly and significantly. Each has a mountain of community support. The tools are well maintained, tested, and they are good at what they do. Contributing to and connecting these tools together seems to be the sensible approach, but it will force me to rethink my expectations.
Damn it. I think talked myself out of building it again.