Just a summary of existing research, but some good points nonetheless.

If you’re a regular visitor of Boyink.com (all 2 of you), you’ll notice some subtle and some not so subtle changes in place.  In the talk of car guys, I’ve done an “engine swap” on Boyink.com.  Previously the business side of the site (the blog that you’re reading) was driven by Radio Userland.  It now runs on pMachine.  So what’s that mean for you?

- The biggest visual change is bringing the Jeep related pages into the same look and feel as the rest of the site.  While it’s a bit strange to have my hobby related pages under the business masthead, getting all the content I manage on a regular basis into one design and one tool was important.

- Commenting and permalinks are now available.

- You can change the Font size of the body text using your browser controls.

- The pogo stick gag I dreamed up about a year ago is finally live.  To see it keep refreshing this page and watch the picture in the right column.  Goofy, I know.  Doesn’t take much to amuse me...

Under the covers, the change means:

- No more tables.  While I’ve been on the pro-tables side of the CSS vs. tables for positioning argument in the past, it made sense to use CSS for positioning with the pages that make up Boyink.com.

- No more having to deal with the Radio memory leak.  I couldn’t keep it running for more than 1/2 hour before it ate up all available memory. 

- Boyink.com is now a database driven site.  While Radio was just a fancy way to continue to crank out static pages, pMachine is a database driven tool.  Now I can work with content programmatically - magic words for a geek.  I’ll also be able to add other sections more easily - like the Portfolio I’ve been wanting to put out there for awhile.

The only downside is that I found no easy way to import all the old posts that Radio generated, so a year’s worth of content is out the window.  That’s OK - most of it wasn’t that good anyway.

So I’m off to clean house on my web server…

Proof positive that education doesn’t necessarily make you smarter - the Popout Prism folks choose to demonstrate their nifty new browser with a whopping 27 MB demo video.  It’s probably a bad sign when your demo file is larger than the product file that it demonstrates.

My experience is that thinking about content in a “meta” sort of way is tough to do for many people.  Actually, just talking (and thinking) about content in a generic way is not something that comes naturally to many people.  People see newsletters, press releases, and other already existing pieces of content, and have a tough time visualizing how that same information might be pulled apart and communicated differently on a web site still in development, for example.

First I’ve heard of this, but interesting stuff.