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Michael Boyle's weblog

Updates here have been

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sporadic due to a great deal of busy-ness, but also because I’ve been working on a new design and playing around with Moveable Type, the new micro-CMS on the market.

The new design is going to be pretty nice, I think (if I do say so myself), but I’m having trouble rendering it using no-tables techniques. My current thinking is that the world should progress in that direction ultimately, and for extremely simple pages it is much more efficient to work with than tables are. Trouble is, there are just as many fudges and workarounds required as there were using tables, which pretty much makes the whole endeavour beside the point. So I’m going to have to make a decision – and right now, I’m leaning towards using tables. The point of all-CSS design is to dispense with workarounds and browser silliness (at least one of the points is to do so). If I can’t do that, I don’t see the point in making the switch.

Fifteen years

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ago next week, in September, 1986, I started my university career at McGill University. That was when I first moved to the city I’ve made my home, and became, eventually, one of the most important turning points in my life. Coincidentally, next week I return to McGill, this time to teach a class in the graduate certificate program in e-commerce. I’m teaching one section of the Internet Design and Analysis course (with Ed Bilodeau, who founded the initial version of the course). That means two things: first, it’s kind of cool to be associating myself with McGill in a formal manner again, and second, I’ve been incredibly busy preparing, and falling slightly behind schedule… so this space may be a little sparse in the next while.

Mr. Derek Powazek

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has given birth to his book, Design for Community! Huzzah! Huzzah!

I’ve never written a book, but I have had the experience of holding a book I helped produce (I co-designed, layed out, and helped edit) in my hot little hands when it first arrived from the publisher. I have had very few more satisfying feelings than that one – so I can just imagine how great Derek feels holding his book having written the thing!

All of which prompted an expensive day at Amazon yesterday. I bought DfC, Jeff Veen’s book, and the new-ish edition of Rheingold’s classic The Virtual Community, in which I believe my name is mentioned (among many others, a testament more to Howard’s supreme graciousness than to any contribution I may have made) in the Forward.

Ummm, it’s about both

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. The Talking Moose waded out of the mud and into the fire with his piece yesterday. It’s the most ridiculous thing the Moose, who has otherwise been a very interesting read, has ever published.

The poor Moose clearly doesn’t understand what web designers, as opposed to code monkeys or integrators, do for a living. He seems to think they need or want to code every page or something inane like that. On personal sites that may be true, but that’s just for fun.

You can’t do content management properly – or even do it at all – without a damn good designer figuring out how to make it look, and with a damn good coder to make that design work with the content management system, and without a damn good architect to make sure that it fits together well through time.

I’m just old school enough to think that all of those roles – designer, coder, and architect – are best done by a single person. But none of those interests are antithetical to using a content management system to actually make it all happen on a day-to-day basis. In fact, a CMS can’t be implemented efficiently unless those folks do good work first – otherwise, the benefit of the CMS is lost in a miasma of snippets and included code and exception-fixing.

Of course the irony is that the Talking Moose site itself is a good example of this fact. Bryan Bell couldn’t have casually changed the design of the Moose had his code (made up of HTML and CSS) not been clean and useful to begin with. Likewise, had Dave and the gang at Userland not built a weblog architecture whose function enabled the weblog form (with the calendar-based navigation etc.), Bell’s work would have been useless. And the “design” (defined strictly) would be a secondary concern had both of those things not been done well for the task at hand.

It’s absolutely about design and the kind of work people like Zeldman do and it’s all about integrating content management systems as closely as possible to the writers and other “content people” who are doing the publishing. There’s no fight here, though the Moose seems to have wanted to stir one up.

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