In the late 1990s, when I was fervently chasing a career in Web design, everyone who knew how had a personal portfolio site. Each typically consisted of the same four categories: What's New, About Me, My Stuff and Links. Each was tended to by hand and updated frequently and gingerly by its author. Each had impressive graphics, an intricate navigational scheme and a suite of connections to friends, acquaintances, mentors and idols. These personal sites were, in my opinion, more expressive of peoples' online personae than anything in place today.
A few people are aware that I've been sitting on a mountain of articles and such for almost two years now. They have asked me repeatedly: why not just throw up a copy of WordPress or MT or something?
Well, for starters, the problem I'm solving is not how to put content on the Web. Moreover, I'm far more interested in producing meaningful, long-lived content than just getting any old thing into the hands of the public right now. This requirement, I feel, is antithetical to the very founding ideas behind blogs.
Aside from being a word with the typographical and phonetic qualities of a schoolyard taunt, a blog is fundamentally a Web log. A journal. A diary. A chronicle of entries whose primary indexing key is the publishing date. The aforementioned personal sites didn't have this constraint.
Additionally, the focus on ease of publishing makes the format lend itself readily to vapid content which is obsolete as soon as it is written. From where I sit, I don't see a gem in the rubble of WordPress themes that is going to adequately prop up any document that I'd like to have stick around. And don't even get me started about comments.
So then, if it's permanent articles I'm after, why not go with a wiki?
Ward Cunningham invented the wiki as a collaborative repository of software development patterns. Like so many other software products that are designed by programmers for programmers, the plight of the interface yields to ThatOfTheImplementation. This particular example may not necessarily be true for more modern wiki engines, but many spectres still remain.
All this aside, I intend to be the only contributor to my own Web site, so I don't need any of the collaboration benefits of a wiki. So what about something in between?
Some call it a structured blog, others call it a CMS, others still call it a bliki. I call it a Web site, and this is how I plan to make it.