Blogs or Globs? Versioning Systems Unite!

WordPress has been my friend now for almost a year. I’d known about it for a lot longer, but hadn’t gotten into using it. Of all the bloggin solutions out there, WordPress is probably the overall best. It’s focused on what web sites really mainly are: words. So if you’re looking for a photoblog, maybe this isn’t quite what you want. WP can do that, but there are plugins to make it more gracefully handle photoblogging. That’s fine with me, since most photblogs are really photglobs. Heck, most blogs are really globs when you stop and think about it.

WordPress is good at straight ahead blogging. It’s fairly easy to set up, since most web hosting services have WP as a one-click-install. Though customizing it beyond choosing a template is not for the average person. Many tech people use it because of this. Looking to find answers or looking to post answers to computer/software/programming troubles? The answers are probably on a WP blog somewhere. Blogs are good for posting information that would otherwise be difficult to update or disseminate in a timely manner. And techy stuff is usually outdated so quickly, blogs are the perfect medium.

That said, we need a WP feature that can stamp something as time-sensitive, so that if it will be outdated or useless in the future we can mark it ahead of time and then forget it.

In addition, we need better category tag management. Perhaps meta-categories. This would be useful in a techy write up, such as “Installing Rails on Debian Linux”. It would be a good idea to have a field for the version number of common software names. That way search engines and their users can more competently narrow down a search to relevant and applicable information. Nothing is more frustrating than finding lots of information on how to do something on old versions of software only to find out that it doesn’t work for a newer version.

We already have functions that pass old articles to “archive” sections of blogs when they are past a certain date. But we need some common web-based system for software versioning. With a system similar to DNS with domain name servers, we could more use this data as a web-service to stamp information as relevant to a particular version or versions. Something similar already exists with package management software such as RubyGems, or Apt-Get, and with versioning applications such as CVS or SVN and WebDAV. Combining these into a more general purpose web archive of versioning with a standard XML structure would be quite useful. It probably wouldn’t even require much, maybe be similar to RSS or ATOM. Implementations that call to it, would need to die gracefully when they get no response or an invalid response. Default would leave a message saying the version information could not be confirmed.

As things stand today, we are really just beginning to make use of metadata on the desktop and in consumer software. It makes for really cool things that happen automagically for the end-user. But we’re just beginning. There is so much more metadata and sometimes it is as important and useful as the core data, since it is really part of the same thing.