I don't know if I should say the concept of the personal website died, or simply fell into a perverse form of self-loathing and mutilation, but whatever the cause, the weblog is the result. Do you remember what a personal website used to be? Well before Blogger, MT, WordPress, bBlog, and other personal CMS programs shoved the journal format down your throat? Generally, it was an index page listing what you wanted to share and then various other real, honest-to-goodness hand-crafted pages below that about various topics. Some were essays, some were links to pictures or pages of pictures, sometimes something like a weblog but markedly different ("Updated on Wed: Yes, we can do this now!" then later "Updated on Fri: Oh, well, except for ___"). It was a site and it had pages and those pages were distinct, separate, and unchanging. Some had a webpage while others had a whole website (back when the difference was that a site was more than one page, not a domain name versus your ISP's /~name/ hosting plan).
Now we have websites, via the old definition, that are nothing more than a large array of pages of rants and raves and quizzes and "OMG! U R KIdding!!!!!!" and polls and ... and ... crap and it's covered all over in Amazon links in the hope of some random reader buying something, completely ignoring that that person got there via a Google query consisting of some band's name and one of nude, naked, or erotic. The average weblog is a disaster of bad English, bad design, bad taste, and bad software.
In other words, a weblog is the answer to a question no one asked.h2. What Was the Question, Again?
The question in question is that of: how can I make this easier to create and update? The answer that came down was to use a CMS. This is generally a great idea, but the first CMS for the personal website was for a journal-format site. Now, journal-format sites are great for real journals or news or community sites like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, or even larger sites like CNN or Yahoo! News, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them. The problem in this case is that journal-format sites are designed to hold a very large amount of information; there's a main page with recent entries and then some form of interface to huge archives behind that. For sites with large amounts of content, that's a great solution. The problem is that individuals do not normally have large amounts of content. Sure, some have journals with a hundred or even a thousand entries per year, but very few people actually approach those sizes, much less the size needed to obscure that data in the fashion that news reports are. Entries on weblogs are hidden behind date archives, category archives, archives of popular entries, etc. and the reason for that is sad: the most popular methods of creating a personal site are centered around a journal format and not a website format. They're designed around entries and not pages. You wrote something called title on the date and said it's of the type category and then the software files it away and wraps up. You're done. Intuitive? Absolutely. Well-designed and organized page? Absolutely not.
The journal format solved the problem of updates being little bold tags at the bottom of a page, but at the expense of it feeling like a "real" personal website. Now, it's not like it killed it directly; there's nothing about Blogger that said "this is your only site!" and prevented it from being used as a journal section of a standard site. Even today, with that tool and others, this is possible and some people have done it and made "old fashioned" websites with weblog-centric CMS packages. The problem lies in that if one has a tool for a task, one will prefer the tool to anything that requires manual labor. Now that someone can update a site with a web script, why make other pages manually? "Just put them in an entry and link to it. It's just easier that way," becomes the prevailing attitude. Since the software that can do this requires you to actually read the manual to know how to make it "fake" a website, very few people do it.
It was understandable, of course, but now we have the crux of the problem: where was the GUI for the rest of the website? On the desktop machine, of course. Microsoft FrontPage, Claris HomePage, GoLive CyberStudio (before Adobe) and others allowed people various ways of generating site content on their computer and pushing it out. None had journal modes, so when the journal format came on people used something like Blogger to update the journal and the home software for the other pages. That worked fine when you were at home, but what about when you were at a friend's house, or at work? This was about 1998 and while there was no wireless access, people were starting to see connections at work and at others' homes and the lack of a web-based tool was limiting the format. Then the tools took over. Now that there was the flexibility of editing the journal content anywhere the static pages and such became less and less important. Now, they're the special case, if that.
Is that good or bad? If you want a journal, good. You have the tools to make it. If you want a personal CMS for a website, bad. Your solutions consist of altering a journal-based CMS to do what it was not exactly designed to do or writing them up manually. I, personally, have tried both and hate them both. Now that I have tools, why edit files manually? Yet, if I use a tool for this purpose, I cannot determine a file structure beyond the extraordinarily simple. I can create a site with the format /category/title.html and have some control, but that's only one level. If I want it to go deeper I have to control that with another weblog and another hack.
