An interesting discussion on making the Web [more] permanent. Digital-to-physical publishing.

Ever since my work with EVIA Digital Archive I’ve been a fan of these sorts of concerns. So much so, I’ve been toying with ideas for making this blog have some degree of resiliency. It has existed in four and a half basic forms over the last fifteen (?!!!?!) years.

First it was a collection of static pages that I spent hours mucking with to set up archives and inter-page linking and “dynamic” site navigation. After tiring of that, and also learning of Blogger, I moved onto that platform. In the midst of grad school I began toying with ideas of permanence and syndication. Ultimately I developed a platform that used static files marked up in XML/RSS with a little Python to glue together the presentation. It was totes file-system intensive but maybe my most favorite implementation.

At the end of that process I decided to re-implement that platform into something more performant and also wrap the administration with a GUI. To make this happen I developed a rudimentary Python web framework for RESTful services. I made it most of the way there but got distracted by life for a few years. The blog was dormant during that time so I’m counting it as ‘a half’.

Finally the desire to publish online outweighed the desire to use a self-rolled CMS and I ported everything over to WordPress. While living in the WordPress framework is comfortable, easy even, it isn’t a close to the metal as I like to be. It’s also PHP, which I have little time for. Sure, it’s fine and in widespread use, but it is so far removed from the sorts of languages I employ on a day-to-day basis that it may as well be written in OOK.

So I’ve begun developing again. I think the advent of widespread browser support for XSL and CSS make this an incredible opportunity to create a web presence that consists of static artifacts tied together with just a modicum of dynamic glue. Artifacts will have URIs that point to “physical” instead of encoding a recipe for a page generator. The artifacts will be stand-alone objects. They will be tied together, however, with a thin veneer of dynamic navigation.

I’d love to return to RSS as the base markup language. That will be augmented with RDF/OWL markup for metadata. The metadata will either have sensible defaults or be primarily generated so as to minimize the busywork around publishing. Because that’s been the unbeatable opponent to maintaining this blog consistently. It’s easier to send crap out to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or what-have-you. But then there is no control and no permanence. So push-button publishing is a must.

At any rate, that’s kind of what I’ve been working on as a project that feeds my other project of creating a full-on ESM / SDLC environment at home. Killing my Facebook profile has been a further motivator to work on this.