Discussion Group

The green-eyed monster
I have to admit that I agree with Seth's take on Brian Carnell--it's astounding what he's been able to do with his various websites. While I'm proud of the things I've done with Unreason, the success of this site lies on the shoulders of its great members, and its great Authors.

Brian is either fearsomely efficient, or he has a very forgiving spouse, or both. His writing schedule is ambitious, in the sense that building a giant three-sided tomb for onseself is ambitious. There is at least one, if not more than one, well-researched and well thought out piece of commentary on every site in his network. As a writer who hasn't posted anything substantive to his own website in quite a while--Jousting With the Dark Knight of Creationism was the last time, a bazillion years ago--I have nothing but respect for what the man has accomplished.

More cogently, he's using Conversant, the software that powers his site (and Unreason) in effective and interesting ways. Yes, I've mucked with the discussion group, and I'm slowly building a pre-publication system...mostly, I've been focussed on automating the publishing process because it was so horribly tedious that I will do anything to make it easier. I set a goal of one-click publishing, and I'm one step away from that.

Brian has run off in another direction, into the area of knowledge management. It's a topic I'm not horribly familiar with--Seth writes that he'll speak more about it, and I'll be interested to see what Seth has to say. What Brian looks to have done is made it very easy on himself to find new ways to find all the things that he's posted. In Cache Me if You Can, for example, he shows how he whipped up a "related stories" link that should, if I read it correctly, be easy to link to every darn story on his site. (Yes, I'm a geek--reading Brian's description, I think I might have found a way for him to put the table in question in his templates, meaning he won't have to use the resource call at all. Brian, if you read this, I'm still thinking on it.)

I originally started using these browser-based website management tools because of their automation. I once changed Unreason's logo on what was then a mere seventy-odd pages, and it took me over an hour. I could change the logo on every page of the current site in about a minute and a half, give or take connection speeds between Elroy the iMac and Conversant's admin system. In many ways everything I've done to improve the site since then has just been a variation of trying to automate that logo change.

But Conversant wasn't really designed as a website management tool. It's groupware, which was the way-cool buzzword several years ago. I have a groupware tool at my job, Microsoft Outlook. It allows all the various people who are responsible for a particular project to communicate with each other and figure out what is happening now, what happened in the past, and what should happen in the future. That's groupware. (Since I'm still in training, it also allows my supervisor to come in every day and ask "So, Mark, what's up with X?", where X represents something that went wrong. But I digress.)

All of that information we generate, that knowledge, needs to be dealt with and understood. Any system that can make it easier to find exactly that piece of knowledge I'm looking for, and combine it with other pieces of knowledge to give me the big picture, is a Good Thing. And that's exactly what Brian's doing with Conversant.