Casey A. Gollan: Notes + Links

YOU KILLED MY MOTHER CHOIRE. JUST LIKE THE INTERNET KILLED PUBLISHING.

A Conversation with Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine | The Awl

All kidding aside—and there is a lot of kidding—this hilarious conversation between Chore Sicha and Paul Ford, (who has proven himself to be one of the brightest minds in online publishing, and whose taxonomized website Ftrain.com has been blowing my mind since a very long time ago) is really intelligent, interesting, and ridiculously fun to read.

Last week at 20x200 HQ I had a really interesting conversation with David about how people react to and share things on the web (new retweets vs old retweets, liking vs favoriting, rating by stars vs emotions, etc). That discussion led to talking about redundancy (e.g. reblogs, old reweets, where content gets copied over and over) and then to the general merits of having structured data.

When using blog oriented content management systems like Movable Type, a lot of repetitious information gets inputted in a non-systematic way. E.g. coding a link to a pop-up image into a text field, rather than uploading the image into a field designed for that specific type of image and having the system take care of the rest in a standardized way. The problem is that it’s not just difficult to write a custom CMS that covers all your needs, but also to find out what your needs are, anticipate future needs (lots of my job at 20x200 involves going back in time and filling in blanks or adapting unstructured data into the logical new system), and create a system that strikes a balance between total lack of structure and too-rigid-to-function. I half-joked that every single person should be required to write their own CMS.

I think some of the most compelling web content today is “bespoke” meaning it breaks out of the boring “text and images slopped into a pre-packaged template” and features posts which are still organized in a linear way, but designed individually with respect to the content. This seems to break away from rigid/templated/database-centric design, but I find that Ford’s Ftrain.com and Harpers.org, which don’t have custom designs for every single page, are equally—if not moreso—compelling. They evoke a sense of bespoke-ness not through a decorative custom design for each page, but through a handcrafted and thoughtfully considered taxonomy of their contents.

This is all a roundabout way of getting around to saying that Ftrain.com was the first time I realized that though one CMS may fit all, the magic really happens when an author takes publishing tools into their own hands. After experiencing Ftrain, I promptly went out and bought a book on XSLT, which I never read and am still too intimidated to tackle. I don’t even know if it’s still a relevant technology, but the point is that years later the idea is still not out of my head!

Paul Ford on the hierarchy of Ftrain.com:

Many people come back to Ftrain over a course of months of years before the structure makes sense, and then, they tell me, it suddenly makes perfect sense. The structure is an essential part of the site. So if you like the writing, but are put off by the structure, know that other people have felt your pain, but that sticking with it might reward you. Might.

Ftrain is a hierarchy. Any given page has one or more of parent, children, and sibling pages, and every page lives somewhere in the hierarchy.

The front page is the very top node of the hierarchy, and everything branches out from there.

On the front page are all the pages flagged for release on this day, or, if there are none, the most recent piece written.

If you use Mozilla, a recent Netscape, or Opera the wonderful “Site Navigation Bar” feature will also allow you to quickly race around Ftrain’s hierarchy.

You can also navigate chronologically, by following the “Navigate by Time” links at the bottom of the page.

Ftrain is this complicated because it has over 1000 separate nodes, all of them connected to one another in some way, with something like 700,000 words between them, and all extensible. It was designed to make it possible to tell stories over time, so that a piece begun in one year could be resolved in the next, just like it happens in life, but with the added satisfaction of narrative completion.

I think the navigation is an okay, but imperfect compromise between the technical and the prosaic, and will continue to develop it.

Time and time again I am hit with pangs of guilt when dashing off notes + links containing words like “bespoke” and “carefully considered” to my off-the-shelf solution that is Tumblr, but they have truly created a set of tools that make it sufficiently stylish and effortless to capture ideas. I have ideas for some changed or additional features for interacting with my specific type of content which extend beyond the scope of Tumblr, but who has the time or knowledge to code these dreams into existence?

Me? I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. But it’s a good reminder that it’s time to brush up on my programming.