Since moving to Hong Kong and thus becoming self-unemployed, i have had lots of time to think about how i have approached building content management systems. For the last 2 years, i've been working with my own CMS (Content First) on my own projects and with ExpressionEngine while working with Grist. Both of these systems are different in how they store and manage the content, but ultimately, they are both very similar. They are both built upon an RDBS (MySQL) and both include some normalization (3NF). The db structure attempts to make the data accessible via built-in searches, but as we found at Grist, once the data grows large enough, simple queries are no longer quick and everything slows down...

Most designers, he said, want to do something new each time. “But I’m interested in the solved problem,” he said. “I’m interested in high art and real science.”

i was very influenced by this recent blog: http://andycroll.com/writing/the-end-of-hover, in which andy croll suggests we can free ourselves from the needless rollover effect. i've worked with rollovers for a long time. when i first discovered the technique of replacing images dynamically, i was amazed. but what i was really impressed with was (early versions of) the DOM manipulation. the effect itself never did much for me or the user experience, so i'm happy to see it go. of course, this effect was cumbersome until the CSS :hover selector showed up, but easy development has never been a reason to implement something. so, let's be happy we are moving beyond a useless graphic effect and onto a better way to represent...

it's nice to know that you can always overstep your negligence and procrastination by simply increasing the version number. yes, indeed, this is the "new and improved" 1000camels blog! now that i am effectively out of the tech business (and into the baby business), i seem to have lots of thinking time to work my ideas out. i will likely do most of my work offline, but i figure this blog will be a good place to post more formal ideas, specifically the essays i am working. here's to blog 2.0!