Day 76. Some quick thoughts about content management

I'm about to head down to Austin again which means I'll be taking some days off from the project, so I wanted to jot down some quick thoughts now to share with Bryan at HAX about issues that came up for me in managing content at HAX. I hope these comments will be useful, and I'm still posting 5 stories a day as GoogleDocs (you can see that RSS stream via Diigo), so that I can wait to see what direction HAX will take going forward. This is just the beginning of a long-term project for me, and GoogleDocs is a good staging area while I try to figure out just whether HAX can support the kind of content I will be developing as this project takes shape. If HAX cannot be a main content area for me, then I will come up with some other HAX experiment to try in conjunction with this project!

Right now, based on what I understand, the tool HAX has in place right now to manage site content is something called "Outline" mode. It's a way for the user to see what pages they have at the site, to add new pages, and to arrange those pages. I ran into a lot of buggy/unexpected behavior with Outline mode, and I wrote up those bug reports at GitHub. What I want to explain here is something different: even if the Outline mode were working as expected, it would not be able to meet my needs both in terms of the number of pages I have in play, and the ways I would like to organize those pages.

Number of Pages

How many pages can a HAX site support? I'm not sure if there are technical/practical limitations on the number of pages, but I'm looking for a publishing system that will accommodate not just hundreds but thousands of pages. I would say that is a reasonable expectation for a website that is meant to be a content companion to a semester-long college course, especially if all the course content is at the website.

Even if a course does not offer a range of reading / assignment options for students each week, a 15-week course can easily generate hundreds of pages.

If a course offers different reading / assignment options every week, then that number of pages will expand accordingly. The UnTextbook that I built for my Mythology-Folklore course has appx. 2700 pages. Our Freebookapalooza "library" of online books has appx. 1500 pages and is still growing. The new project that I have just started will certainly grow to be thousands of pages also over the next few years.

In the past I have used blogging platforms to do most of my content development; one of the great features of blogs is that there are usually no limits to the number of post pages you can create.

Organization

Just as I've gotten used to using blogs for content, I've gotten used to the blog way of doing site organization: labels (or tags; the terminology varies). Using labels is a way that you can organize lots of content at a blog, and it has the important advantage of letting you use multiple labels for the same piece of content, effectively putting that content into multiple "folders" instead of limiting each piece of content to appearing in one area of your website.

So, for example, at my Freebookapalooza, I can label books based on their geographical area (that is the main approach I take), but I can also label books based on sources, authors, illustrations, etc. Based on whatever my needs might be, I can quickly add labels to posts (to a few posts, or to hundreds of them), in order to then have a URL which lets me access those labels.  So, for example, last semester there was a student thinking of doing a project on Raja Rasalu; I created this label so that I could quickly share with that student the books in our library with Raja Rasalu stories:
https://freebookapalooza.blogspot.com/search/label/Topic: Rasalu

Blogs also offer label-specific RSS feeds, and the same is true also for Diigo, which is a tag-based system that makes it easy to organize not just thousands but tens of thousands of piece of content, re-using the same content in many different ways based on the tags. For example, it's the RSS from my gdoc tag in Diigo that is generating the blog post content you see displayed here: Latest Stories.

That ability to use labels to re-use and re-purpose content is a key feature, for me, in any content management system. Now, it could be that this kind of approach just does not work in a system like HAX... but in the absence of this type of organizational tool, HAX will still need something other than the Outline mode to allow users to organize their site content.

Playlists/Albums: Sequencing Content

Now, labels are a great way to organize content, but they are not a great way to sequence content, so I also want to say something about playlists/albums. In effect, playlists/albums are like labels that, in addition, have a sequencing feature.

Take Flickr, for example. At Flickr, I can upload thousands of images, no problem (I have about 8000 images there right now, almost all of them illustrations from public domain books). I can then organize those images into albums, with a sequence that determines the navigation of that album. The same image can appear in multiple albums, and I can also put my albums into collections, which is helpful if you have lots of albums.

So, for example, Flickr gives me a URL for an image like this:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/38299630@N05/3679416973/

By default, that image is part of my "photostream" and that is the default sequence that it is part of, with the forward and back navigation moving forward and backwards through the images based on the data/time of the upload.

But I can also put that image in albums, and on that image page, you can see the two albums that it is in:

In this case, the image is in two albums: one that contains other illustrations from the same book, and another that contains other illustrations of the same fable.

URL for that image in the album for a specific book:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/38299630@N05/3679416973/in/album-72157684356607455/

URL for that image in the album for a specific fable:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/38299630@N05/3679416973/in/album-72157620692760527/

Each of those albums has their own navigation sequence, with backward and forward arrows for the user, and I control that sequencing at the album level.

Music playlists and video playlists work the same way: the idea is that users organize content for various purposes in various ways, re-using the same content in new ways based on specific goals and needs.

People are definitely used to the idea of music and video playlists and image albums; I think the time has come for us to start thinking about text-based content in terms of playlists too!

Which way will HAX go?

My guess is that the Outline mode is going to be a useful tool for small sites as people get started, but eventually HAX will need to support sites with hundreds of pages. Will it support sites with thousands of pages? I don't know if the flat-file approach will work for that or not.

So, if/when HAX moves towards supporting sites with several hundred pages, there will need to be something beyond the current Outline mode for organizing the site content.

And in that case, I would like to put in my pitch for a "playlist/album" approach so that HAX content — text pages or images or videos or audio files — could be used and re-used for playlists/albums. I don't know if that is practical or not, but it is the type of content management and navigation that I sure would like to see.

If that sort of things is simply not possible with HAX technology, then that is also good to know, and I will be curious what new approaches to content organization and sequencing we will see in HAX as it evolves.