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Mr. Derek Powazek

August 11, 2001 by Michael Boyle

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.

Well the Moose

August 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

is quick, that’s for certain. He’s already replied to my little missive and explains things a little more. And what he describes would drive me completely bonkers – in fact, it has done so many times in the past. I have a thing against all shadowy priesthoods, and the workflow priesthood in a web environment is one of the most frustrating things around.

It reminds me of the dark ages in Europe, where they developed this incredibly complicated system of monasteries and the whole Church structure surrounding, essentially, one issue: how to keep Aristotle hidden. OK, there was more to it than that – but make no mistake, keeping Aristotle unknown was a major driving force behind the European power structure for hundreds of years.

And then, of course, St. Thomas (you may know him as Aquinas – and there were others too all over Europe) let the cat out of the bag, leading (though not directly) very quickly to Luther and Calvin and the rest is literally history.

Point being that any priesthood, any dogmatic, centralized control of knowledge or process that goes beyond what’s very strictly necessary is a dangerous thing. It’s inefficient, and limits good people from doing interesting work. In that, TM, I think we are in agreement.

Ummm, it’s about both

August 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

. 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.

One nice thing

August 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

about unemployment is that it can really give an assist to one’s blogging. Just look at how great thisboyistoast has been in the past few days. Truly inspired weblog entries, combining personal opinion, reminiscing anecdote, and nice links in a very tight package.

I’m not in any way

August 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

a fan of George W Bush, but tonight’s speech on stem cell research was fascinating. Just as only Nixon could go to China (which is doubtful, in fact, but that’s the common wisdom), only a rightie like Bush could squeeze up the middle like he did. I venture that if Gore or Clinton had made the exact same speech either one would have been crucified by the right. I think W could get a pass on it, though – even though he very clearly left his adminstration open to the possibility of making much more radical moves in the future.