Structured Blogging

Fall 2005 was a blur. So much so that I decided to take the blog portion of the site down. Too much going on. But now, with a new year ahead, and in response to several requests, I’ve brought the blog back online and couldn’t resist the opportunity to restructure content a bit.

As I’ve noted before, I use Movable Type to manage content. I’m a big fan and have convinced others to use it for more than just blogging. Even with WordPress growing in popularity, I find MT’s balance of structure and flexibility to be a good fit. For example, I use a single MT weblog to manage different types of content, from blog entries like this to the various static photo series to my photoblog. It’s probably not the most elegant way to go about things, but by customizing MT’s standard templates combined with a handful of plug-ins, the site dynamically responds to different media types and the structures they require, in both human and machine-readable formats (e.g, the feed for this blog).

So it was with considerable curiosity and excitement that I found the Structured Blogging site by way of Paul Kedrosky via Dick Hardt. I have to agree with Mr. Hardt — it just makes sense for this type of innovation, especially the ability to produce microcontent-specific feeds. By baking in much of the customization I’ve hand-rolled, MT will be that much more powerful out of the box.

Best wishes to everyone for 2006!