web 2.0

Reading in the wonderful Baroque Trilogy by Neal Stephenson about the activities of the scientists in the early 17 hundreds and earlier it appears that scientific progress was largely enhanced by writing letters about work in progress to collegues. It seemed to be about trying out ideas, describing problems, asking questions or answering them, discussing ideas etc. Finished work was committed to books - if at all. This activity of writing letters - isn't that how blogs and comments are working nowadays? It is only a little faster and reaching a larger (global) audience.

Coming from Postnuke and Typo3 as my last content management systems (CMS), I have finally finished converting my website to Drupal. The conversion was partly done by direct database table transformation but mostly was done using simple cut and paste (sometimes quite a drag). This certainly would not have worked for a larger website. But for me it was easier and faster than making sure that all the database table conversion would go right.

I have been using content management systems (CMS) to maintain my websites for some years. I started with postnuke. While postnuke was very good to use at first as long as default settings were used it turned out to be very much trial and error especially the access control turned out to be quite demanding to get things right. But in general it was a very reliable system. Then a new version also introduced a new way of handling themes: The move totally destroyed the layout of my pages.