Building GeekSpeak.org, Part I

Lyle Troxell — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:52:00 -0800

In 1999 Sean Cleveland and I launched a little online magazine called PCExtreimist.com. The same week that it launched I started wworking for a Radio-Station website company, Feed the Monster, where I met Miles Elam. XML was the cats meow then, and Miles and I saw it’s “perfection” esp in the separation of content from layout/design. Feed the Monster was all about good design and shared content about the music industry… great looking, high-profile, radio station websites with shared content. The company tanked. Content Management is hard.

Sean’s personal finances started looking fairly bleek too. Even thought PCExtremist.com was well recived, read and linked too, online advertising was no way to pay the bills. We stopped adding content to the site, but have held onto it… maybe one day.

The three of us settled back in my home town of Santa Cruz, where my father, Peter, was the station manager of KUSP, a non-profit public radio station. It was August of 2000 when my father asked me to stand in as the host of GeekSpeak, a weekly technology talk show. I grabbed my friend and Mac expert John Tracy and with Miles and Sean started doing a fairly fun radio show.

It was not long before we realized that a good website would be a great benifit to the show and to the listeners. Miles started desiging a site that would be all of the good things from Feed the Monster, but open source and designed very cleanly. Fairly quickly he put up an amazing infrustructure using cocoon. The infrustructure uses flat file xml documents. And to modify the site you have to edit xml documents. You see, the publish side is clean and great. Wonderful separation of data and design. But, as with Feed the Monster when I started their, less attention had been put into managing the content.

Due to the desire to separate the content from the design we used a simplified doc book to hold the data… because if you used something like html you would be bowing to that format’s design. Additionally html uses things like Bold, while docbook uses things like Author. It is true that if you view our website you may see an author name bolded, if you viewed the content as a pdf you may instead see it in a different color to denote a person.

Every week I copy last week’s show, change the dates, edit the info.xml file and SCP it up to the GeekSpeak server. It’s a pain in the butt and I hate editing XML more then anyone I know, but, on the good side, the show page apears well formated (thanks to xslt). The show apears home page with a teaser and the abstract. The show apears in the rss/podcast, after I upload the audio for the show, and it even has a text and html render of the description of each show so that iTunes makes it look good. These are not normally trivial to do, but with our system it really is quite simple.

But October of 2002 was the first time I made one of those show xml documents… that is over 3 years ago. I am so done. And I look around and their are blog tools all over the place. Their are web appliction development enviornments that tout the lack of XML configuration.

In December I decided I would grab Ruby on Rails and make an editing system that would tie into our cocoon publishing system and compleate this radio show website content managment system. Allowing Sean Cleveland, John Tracy and the rest of the Geeks to add content to our site with ease. To answer questions publically and to share their wealth of information with the world for more then one hour a week.

Next Part: Edting XML is Hard… mText

Lyle Troxell: Building GeekSpeak.org, Part I

Building GeekSpeak.org, Part I