Opening Up

I can't promise how long this link will be good, but if you want to take a look at the video we made with Fave Media, then take a look now.  Since Turtol is defunct, I don't know how long it's going to remain available.

I see by the clock on the wall that it's been 20 days since my last post.  I intended to make a post on the 28th of last month, with a brief update and the news that I'd be gone for 12 days or so on vacation.  But time slipped away and I never got it done.  Then we left for Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. 

It was a very nice trip and a very nice stay at a very nice golf villa,  tho I never actually got around to playing golf, instead spending my time laying around and watching my kids see the ocean for the first time.  They were enthralled.  Living vicariously through your kids is not as bad as it sounds, as long as you're just re-experiencing the shear joy and splendor of discovery, and not trying to compensate for not having been picked first for everything on the playground.  I did try to post an entry via my BlackBerry, but my wife got wind of it and, well, let's just say it's a good thing that those BlackBerrys are so rugged.

Then off to Atlanta for my cousin's wedding.  A lovely affair, and great to see my aunts and uncles again, whom I haven't seen all at the same time since my grandfather's funeral some 8 years ago.  I think that's why we have weddings and funerals: It's not to celebrate a marriage or mourn a death, but to see your relatives whom you never seem to make the time for otherwise.  Sigh.

One of the benefits of this trip was I got to have some very good country fried steak and good ol' down-south sweet tea, which you just can't get here in Chicago.  I wouldn't trade you a raging case of the clap for the hot dogs they have down there, but you surely can't beat the fried steak.  I usually try to get my fill of biscuits and gravy while down south, too, but alas, I didn't have the opportunity. 

Since getting back, I've been working on reproducing the sweet tea, and I'm pretty close.  What I haven't really been doing is making much progress on some of my technical projects.  Ah, such is life.  

I was reading Robert X. Cringely's most recent column for this PBS feature The Pulpit and something struck me.  Metaphorically, not physically.  What grabbed my attention was this passage:

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

You should read the whole article to get the full context, but Cringly's thesis is basically that education is being transformed by how we access information, much to the chagrin of educators.  Now, I fall into that latter category from time to time, having taught general computing, hardware, software, operating systems and programming.   So I know that this topic is not so much a can of worms as an oil-drum full.  Still, I see where he's coming from. 

For example, while teaching a programming intro class, I had two students who are really archetypal of what I usually see. 

I'm a huge fan of Formula 1 racing.  I've comment previously about being fascinated by rare talent, and F1 is so knife-edge that it take rare talent to even get into the seat.  Multiple-time champions of other racing series have totally failed to even make a good showing in F1, such are the demands on a driver's talents.  It's a stunning sport to watch, so much so that right now I'm watching the practice session (Really!  Practice!) live from Malaysia.  It's mid-afternoon there, and a while past midnight here.  I'm a pure sucker for this stuff.

One of the questions in that Shane And Peter interview to which I've referred a few times was on life/work balance.  Now, my balance has very recently been thrown totally off. 

There were problems, of course, among the three Turtol partners, mostly small but not all of them.  None were large enough to be show-stopping, at least in isolation.  And, truth be told, I really was a bit surprised by the turn our final pre-breakup conversation took.  My intention, when we sat down to talk about our then most-recent management issue was to alter our role/responsibility balance among ourselves, favoring more control by me at Michael's expense.  It's certainly possible that I was too harsh in my criticism of Mike, though I believe it was well considered and accurate, if not delicate.  And I recall Mike agreeing with me at the time, though he may not actually do so now.  I don't know, we haven't discussed it.  All our conversations since that one have been about handling his decision to close down the company.  I briefly considered trying to continue on without him, just buying him out of it, but Turtol was his idea, his brainchild and largely his baby. 

Still, after a time it was my baby too, and the loss still hurts.

 

I've been putting this entry off for quite some time now.   Not entirely on purpose -- though of course my silence was purposeful, as it was motivated by legal matters.  But to increase the sense of drama, I'm not going to get right to the point.  Instead, first some rambling about the nature of Open Source.

In the Open Source world, a "fork" is, generally, a Bad Thing.  It means that some project has gone in a direction inconsistent with the needs of a large portion of its community (or, if you prefer, user base).  Or that it's gone nowhere at all.  The project leaders, keepers of the Sacred Code Repository, are either doing their own thing or nothing at all, but either way, the community gets pissed off enough that they "fork" the code.  This isn't as dirty (nor as punny) as it seems.  It just means that they are taking the code and making a brand new project out of it, with new leadership and new direction, like the proverbial Fork in the Road.

Forking is considered a Bad Thing, as I said above, because it indicates that there's a real disconnect among the developers and users of the project, but more so because it results in two projects in the same ecological space, so to speak.  This is thought to dilute support for BOTH projects, a kind of electronic overcrowding leading inevitably to starvation of the species.  

I'm not entirely convinced of this conventional wisdom.  There have been successful projects which forked to created two separate but equally successful projects.  And there have been forks which produced very good products which eventually re-merge into one, all stresses being forgiven.  Plus, Free Market Economy 101 says that competition is intrinsically a Good Thing, and I tend to agree with that.  The reasons that OSS (Open Source Software) folks seem to dislike forking is that (a) they aren't economists, by and large and (2) they are often idealists who believe that we should all be able to just get along, and forking shows the flaw in that ideal.

And this all leads to my personal Fork.... (don't you hate that I'm making you click to read about it?).... 

 

Well, if Hollywood misses their golden chance to pick me up, looks like I'm on my way to the Pulitzer.

I did the Shane and Peter Interview thing a couple of weeks ago. It was fun, and I figured it would be a good way to fill some blog space without having to come up with an idea of my own.

Then, Naomi over at IttyBiz saw my entry and posted a compliment about my Steve Jobs v. Bill Gates response. I guess she either had nothing to do or her mouse broke and she couldn't click away from my site, because apparently she read my article on Talking Shop. This she then added to her list of 32 Must Reads to Ensure Small Business Success. Wow, I'm blown away. I note that I'm higher up the list than marketing uber-guru Seth Godin. Clearly, I'm more of an authority than he.

So I'm on Cloud Nine.

But then, Shane picks me as a best interview finalist! I mean, Holy Crap. You can probably tell by the fact that my posting frequency has increased the effect all this positive attention has had on me. Hey, I never claimed not to be narcissistic.

Thanks for the links, Naomi and Shane! Right back at ya'.

Programmers say that a lot. I suppose all of us, when looking back at our earlier work, swallow a bit and say "I can't believe I did that! What was I thinking!" This just shows that we're always growing, getting better at what we do. I hope.

I've been spending most of my time with business development matters recently, with the exception of laying the technological groundwork for the next major version of our TurtolCMS software. Well, the first major version really. We've been using the "0.5x" moniker for a while, because we know it's not what we want it to be. But we have 50 or so clients using this tech, and we can't just wholesale replace it, so Will diligently makes improvements and keeps it alive. Meanwhile, I've been doing a clean-slate redesign. It's been fun.

But once in a while, I need to revisit my earlier mistakes (again, 0.5 is good, but not as good as I'd like) to see what NOT to do in 1.0 of the thing. A client requested a search bar in their site, and I figured I could kill a couple of birds with just the one stone. I set about to create a Google toolkit as an add-on to the TurtolCMS, including a site search mechanism. It was pretty easy code to produce, but it was way klunkier than I'd have liked due to some built-in deficiencies in the old codebase. Leading me to that "I can't believe I wrote that" moment.

Here's to continuing to improve at everything we do.

So, I'm on my way to stardom. OK, maybe not so much. But a guy can dream, can't he?

We hooked up with a company called Fave Media a while back. They have an interesting take on web-based advertising, which is that they make a 30-second commercial for you (or longer; some are almost 2 minutes) and host it on their site, then do a bunch of keyword campaigns around getting traffic to your video for you. The hook is that they provide a better-than-Google (in their opinion, and mine, too) local-search engine so that you can figure out which Irish pub is closest to where you are right now. We're working on some cross-promotion and other initiatives with them, and we just shot our very own video to boot. We'll see if Hollywood comes calling. I've installed an extra phone line, just in case.

During production, our producer Mylene (by the way, if you're looking for a recommendation for a video producer, I'll enthusiastically pass her info along) took some "making of" stills. This one is of the four founding Turtols. From left to right, that's Libor (dressed crappy on purpose -- it's part of the script), Michael, Roberto (Employee #00001) and me. Based on the smug-as-hell expression on my face, I probably had just made some sort of smart-assed comment.



I'll post more about the whole process when the video itself is available for all to see. Or not, depending on how badly I sucked.

I love chambers of commerce. Yes, plural. Chicago is a big town, so every neighborhood has its own chamber. Every once in a while, a bunch of them get together for a big rollicking meeting, but most of the time the local chambers promote smaller neighborhood causes. Both sizes of meetings are good.

We're in "West Town," adjacent to the north-west corner of the Loop, our downtown district. At the regular monthly meetings, we get to meet new people from the area, plus reconnect with folks we've encountered before. Even divided up into smaller districts, Chicago is a pretty big place, so there are always new faces, new stories, new businesses. In my previous post, I posited that you really have to meet someone face to face to establish real trust. Now I don't want to knock on-line friendships. Maybe I'm showing my age or something, or I'm deficient in this particular area. But I find satisfaction mingling with a bunch of strangers, sipping crappy wine from a plastic cup and munching something I can't really identify but assume to be cheese.

Not so much, typing snarky messages into a forum or blog. This is not to say I don't enjoy that too, but it doesn't carry the same weight with me. I'd rather shake hands with the people I work with than not. Now, we have clients from coast to coast in the US and Canada, and I haven't had the opportunity to speak face-to-face with all of them. And I may not get that chance.

But to the extent I can, I do. Most of our conversations are handled over e-mail, with largish file attachments. But even if it's only a quick phone call at some point in the process, I find a little bit of personal contact adds a great deal to the relationship. I enjoy it and it makes me feel better. I hope it makes the client feel better too. So far the results are good.

This entry may get ramblie (rambly? how DO you spell a made-up word?), but I promise all the themes do tie up nicely in the third act. The themes in question center around communication, a topic upon which I dwell frequently. A long time ago, while running a software/network consultancy, I had a client who embarked on a mission to bridge the communication gap between the mainstream American Christian community and the Muslim community. He was probably the most brilliant man I ever met. He held several Ph's D, which didn't make him brilliant, but served as outward indication. We clicked pretty quickly, and I, in my sophomoric way, explained my theory of how communication breakdowns lead to the problems we face in everyday life, both large and small. He took what I posited, and in the remarkably gentle manner of an excellent teacher, expanded on it. At the same time he deepened my understanding of my own theory. I won't go into it here, just because I have another agenda presently. Some other time, maybe.

The upshot, though, is that there is more than one type of communicating. And knowing which form to employ (either actively or passively, as initiator of a conversation or the focus of one) is at least as important as the words chosen.

This is on my mind due to my answer to the title question of the Shane and Peter Entrepreneur Interview, which has been running around in my mind for the past couple weeks. This answer basically centers around the whole notion of the current "Web 2.0" (how I loath that moniker, but it's stuck, so I'll cope) and "Social Networking" trends, and how they shape our world. You see, one of the several paths to greater visibility for my company which I've been pursuing to become part of social networks. I've got on several of them, but I've yet to work out how to exploit (in the nice sense of the word, not the mean-spirited one) these to actually get the benefit I want.

This is the first in my series of book reviews. A little background: I'm an reader. I read. Lots. My wife, Audrey, reads much much more than I do, and I'm sometimes called competitive, so this is me trying to keep up with her, if nothing else. I read the Journal every morning (the Metra train is my friend here). I read about two dozen different blogs as often as they update. I look at several on-line news sources every morning when I get to the office. I read a couple of monthly magazines, my favorites being This Old House, F1 Racing and Inc. And I try to knock off a book or three a month, when time permits. Time doesn't frequently oblige.

When I do read, in order that I might become well rounded, I try to rotate the genre. I read, generally in this order, a History, a Fiction, a Philosophy and then a Business book. And around the bend again. Once in a while, someone will suggest another book to me, and I'll slip it in, so feel free to suggest. FYI, I don't usually go for romances, thillers, spy novels (other than Ian Fleming, but I own originals of and have read them all) and the like.

The book of the past week or so is The San Francisco Earthquake by Thomas and Morgan Witts (1971). A History, in case that isn't clear. It's a remarkable story, of course. But what I found most compelling was the (likely unintentional) contrast among three of the key figures in the response to the earthquake and subsequent fire. They are Brigadier General Frederick Funston, who took decisive, immediate action which was likely wrong; Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who took no real action until it was likely too late; and A. P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of Italy, who took decisive, immediate action which lead to his tiny upstart bank eventually becoming the behemoth Bank of America. Surely lessons in leadership and judgment may be derived.

I recently took Shane and Peter's Interview, as you can see, and in an follow-up comment here, Shane asked:

"a bit off topic but - how does an open source company work. I know its not quite an oxymoron, but I am feeling all conflicted when I think of it."

A common sentiment, and I'm not sure I actually have answers just yet. After all, we've only been in business for about 18 months at this writing. We haven't proven we can sustain what we're doing yet. Let's give it another 5 years and revisit. But, having studied many different business models and several theories of market and social dynamics, plus a whole slew of ideas on motivators, I can say that at least my considered hypothesis is what we're doing will work out, long term.

The options for making money from OSS (Open Source Software) seem to fall into several general categories, which we'll visit each in its turn.

I've been preoccupied with marketing recently (more in another post yet to come), and one of the sites I've happened across is IttyBiz by Naomi Dunford. A good read, and highly recommended. Her entry from yesterday, Bikini or Thong: My Response To The Challenge pointed me to Shane and Peter's Interviewing You: the Entrepreneur. Now, I've only been reading Naomi's blog for a week or so, and just looked at what Shane and Peter are doing for the first time yesterday, and they certainly don't know me, but what the hell, I'll answer the interview on the off chance someone, somewhere (Hi Mom) cares.

What’s your personal mission statement?

I don't have one, because I don't really believe in them. Call me jaded by spending most of the late 80's and early 90's in Big Corporate America. BPR, TQM, XYZ, PDQ, pretty much made me think all those things were worthless piles of steaming horse puckey.

What’s the biggest mess you’ve dealt with this year?

A very good friend of mine, a mentor from my earliest years and the guy who convinced me to get out of Big Corporate America, once said "This is not a problem, this is an opportunity to excel." Ok, he didn't say it once, he said it all the time, because one constant in Big Corporate America is the problems opportunities to excel.

So I don't really see things as big messes. Not to say we haven't had several opportunities. But even those did, despite the temporary pain, provide a benefit. One client, earlier this year, gave us an insane deadline (which moved up a full week without any real notice), a crazy number of deliverables, and almost no source materials to work with until the night before they absolutely had to be on line. But we made several very good friends, learned a whole lot about our own capabilities, and several doors opened up. So on balance, it was a fine mess, if you take my meaning.

What current entrepreneurial efforts consume your time?

Marketing. Did I mention that already?

Why do you do what you do? What inspires you? When do you get most excited?

My favorite quote:

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well." - Horace Walpole

If I'm going to do something, I'm going to DO it. Go Big, or Go Home. I'm into whatever I'm doing with everything I've got. Until half-an-hour later, when my ADD kicks in and I'm really into something else. These are the "well." My kids and their education is the "profoundly."

Boxers or Briefs? or as Naomi says, Bikini or Thong, duh?!?

Maybe the most important question on this survey. No, I'm not kidding. On the face of it, this question amounts to nothing more than petty voyeurism. I mean, who REALLY cares? Are you going to look at the web site my company built for you any differently if you know the answer to this?
But it does speak to our culture, and an issue raised early in the Internet era, during the heady days of 9600 bps dial-up and CompuServe. The trend spotted then was that even though we (individuals) were all becoming more connected via electronic media (e-mail was just taking off, forums were it, usenet was widely.. um... used), we seem, sociologically, more distant from one another than ever. Pundits pontificated on the collapse of the social order and all kinds of other disasters. Of course, it didn't come to much (yet... I'm not giving up the bomb shelter). But now look around you. We all have 30,004 "friends" in our FaceBook and MySpace accounts, we're LinkedIn to 1,257,498 other people and yet when you walk down the street, nobody says "hi" because we're all listening to our iPods. I HATE iPods, not in and of themselves, cuz they're pretty cool, but because they provide yet another way for us to isolate ourselves from one another. Don't even mention those damned "Self-Checkout" lines at the supermarket.
We reach out electronically, via the ever-expanding IP network, because we can't or won't do so in person. I find this discouraging. Yes, it's very cool to converse with a fellow developer 12 time zones away via e-mail and IM or a FaceBook app, but I'm much happier if I'm sitting in a little Wine-and-Cheese shop, sipping and gnashing, talking about Important Things with people I just met through a friend-of-a-friend's-cousin's-older-brother's-sister-in-law.
But that's just me.

What do you do when you’re not [designing | programming | managing | writing | toiling for the wo/man]?

Usually, I'm thinking about what I was doing when I was programming/managing/writing/toiling. But in addtion, I'm:

• Fixing my 58-year-old house up. Been there seven years; Still unpacking.


• Playing with my three kids, two dogs and two cats. I may have a wife, too, but I have a hard time remembering.


• Yelling at my three kids, two dogs and two cats. Holy crap, can they get into stuff. I mean, REALLY.


• Cooking. Love it, love it, love it. Next business venture: a restaurant. When I have lots of spare cash to flush.

What one thing made the biggest difference when getting started?

I started my first "real" business (registered with the state, tax ID, the whole 9) when I was 18. So I was too young to really know how hard it was going to be, and by the same token, too young to CARE how hard it was going to be. Having started my fifth business (depending on how you count 'em) at the age of 39, I can tell you that energy makes a HELL of a difference.

What’s your exit strategy?

My two business partners are 15 years younger than me, so ideally I'll have them trained up and able to run this beast without my day-to-day involvement by the time I'm ready to step back. I'll likely never step down, unless they lynch me. Could happen.

What is the last thing that made you belly laugh?

Belly Laugh, eh? It was something my younger daughter, Renee, said yesterday. She's like that. I'm not going to share, though, cuz she's 7 and some of what she comes up with should be kept behind closed doors, lest you think I'm a really bad parent. Of course, parents will know better, but I'm still not sharing.

Have you ever been in business before?

Have I ever NOT? There's a running joke in the Esposito family. When a new woman comes around and looks likely to stay, the other women (aunts, sisters-in-law, etc) tell her "Get a good job, honey, because Esposito men don't work." I can count on one hand my male relatives with 9-to-5-ers. We are all self-employed, some more successfully than others, to be sure, but "Entrepreneur" seems to be written in our DNA.

At what point do you consider yourself successful?

Right here, right now. I'm doing what I love to do, building a business out of nothing. I am reasonably healthy. I have a wife I don't hate, and who at least gives me the impression that she doesn't hate me. I have kids who are showing signs they may not become drains on our already straining society. What more do I need?

Oh, well, that nice new Ferrari 430 Spyder. I'll never get that one past my wife.

What was your first experience with a computer?

Probably around 1980, but not really sure, a friend had a Bally Game System with a BASIC programming cartridge. Had to enter everything on a 12-key NUMERIC keypad (no, really, I wouldn't make this up), into 2K (yes, 2048 bytes) of RAM. From there, I built a 4-bit micro from a kit, then on to an Apple ][+. Oh, and I did some IBM mainframe coding in there somewhere, too, in FORTRAN and COBOL. Told you I was old.

Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates in a jello wrestling match, where’s your money?

I'm going with Jobs, because he really know how to be slippery. Jello is his natural environment. Flavoring is just a bonus.

Where do you do your best thinking?

I tend to go to bed with problems on my mind, and wake up with solutions. Sometimes at 3am. My wife long ago developed an immunity to me getting up with a start at crazy hours, rushing to the computer, hacking out some quick code, or some clever bit of prose, or whatever, and coming back to bed 30 minutes later.

What does your average daily work / life balance look like? How much time do you work, play and sleep?

My wife is a firefighter/paramedic, so I don't have "average." She works 24-hour shifts, followed by 48 hours at home. So, I work at the office two days, then spend one at home, working from home in the morning, and doing my best Michael Keaton in the afternoon when the kids get back from school. On the day Aud's at work, I send the kids off to school, laptop it up from 8:30 until 3:00, then homework, horsing around, dinner, TV for 1 hour if we're lucky and well behaved, and didn't have to wedge orthodontia, piano, soccer, baseball, tennis, et cetera in there somewhere. Next morning, I get the kids off and then hike it to the train downtown (Chicago). Home between 6 and 7 most of the time. Day after than, she does the kids thing, while I get up early and hit the 6:51 train to get me to my office by 8:00, work until about 5, home about 6. Except days when we have a Chamber of Commerce meeting, a networking event, or a vaguely-business-related-excuse-to-drink-while-writing-it-off party to attend.

Weekends are another story.

If I could introduce you to anyone, who would it be?

I'm fascinated by rare talent. Sports figures are the most obvious, so Michael Schumacher, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan make the list. But people who've done rare things in business abound too. Peter Drucker would have been nice. Carnegie. In the non-dead category, I'd say Steve Jobs (if he'd take my calls after the Jello comments), Bill Gates (as much as I hate to admit that), and Howard Shultz.

What stops you from giving up when you are frustrated?

The opportunity to excel.

If Chuck Norris and Steven Hawking had a baby (hey it’s my damn interview), would you vote for her for president?

Given that she's running currently, I don't want to comment on my inclination or disinclination to vote for Hillary.

And now for my question...

I really don't have one. Sorry, I plead lame.

There are quite a few things which make me just nuts. Three of them constantly run around my house, bickering with one another about who did what to whom first. These three, though, at least have the decency to be cute about it, most of the time. Other stuff just pisses me off without offering anything to blunt the effect. In fact, there are so many, and I have to talk about them so often, that I'm adding a categories for them to this blog.

Taking several slots on this list (mind you, this is a LONG list) is Bad Web Design. BWD takes so many forms, it needs several slots in my list. Now, I'm no designer, to be sure. And I don't pretend that I could ever do a better job than what Libor, my business partner, scrapes off his desk. I may not know much about Art, but I know what I like.

One thing I JUST HATE is a website where the designer considers me a captive audience. Libor and Steve (our emergency backup designer) are both really good at avoiding this. By allowing me, the website visitor, to do things like change the font size (using my browser controls, not something embedded on the site) and make my browser window more narrow than tall (so I can have two sites side-by-side on my screen), the designer shows that she respects the fact that she's NOT in control of my experience. I have the right, and indeed sometimes the NEED to alter my personal viewing experience of a website. If you don't make it easy to do this, then that's one Naughty Point for you. Locking me in to some goofy 450-pixel fixed-width two-column layout with a crappy pattern filling the remaining 500-odd pixels on BOTH sides of the content DOES NOT work for me. It torques me off. Why should YOU determine how much (and in what font size) I can read before I have to move my eyes to the next line?

So many designers rail against that notion. These I refer to as "dumb-ass artist-types." Note that there are "really-smart artist-types" too, but these guys aren't it. Print designers who've moved into web design, by and large, fit this mold. They're used to working in 8 1/2 by 11 form factors, with absolute control of the page layout and content. They think their design is so very slick and has such impact that we causal-not-classically-trained-non-artists cannot possibly be allowed to view it in any other way than that in which they intend. Or something Really Bad will happen. What, I have no clue, but I'm sure that Free Speech and the Expression of The Artistic Soul are all in danger if I want to be able to read that crappy site of theirs with my nose more than 2 inches from my screen.

Let's get this straight right now: graphics alone don't make a site good; layout alone doesn't make a site good. Content, alone, CAN make site good (and by "good" I mean "useful for things other than pure impressionistic pleasure"). Thus, start with good content. Graphics and Layout SUPPORT the content. They are NOT, in themselves, content. They cannot replace or supplant content. Get over it.

And lest you think I'm alone in this crusade, please read Screen Resolutions and Better User Experience from Smashing Magazine. A very good article in support of what I've been saying for years now. Unfortunately, not everybody agrees; What I find most funny about this, to be honest, is the number of comments which completely ignore what the article says and go on to postulate, with some air of authority (false) that 974.8 pixels is EXACTLY how wide a site should be. Not "really-smart" at all.

I'll be posting things that, like this, drive me crazy, but that I have to justify over and over again anyway, periodically. In an ideal world, this will help to prove my points about how stuff should be done. Time shall tell.

As I've noted in previous posts, abstraction can be it's own worst enemy. Abstractions tend, when taken to the extreme, to lead to self-referential constructs, or things that talk about themselves. (Kinda like me in this blog, come to think of it.) The problem, of course, comes in when you make things talk about themselves TOO much, and you lose track of where you started, where you're going, and how you're gonna get there.

I've been reworking the TurtolCMS for a while now, in the hopes of making it an even more powerful web application platform than it has already proven to be. In so doing, I may have painted myself a bit into a corner. If you want to be more fully confused than you've been in a while, then read on. You have been warned. Any hemorrhage you may experience in the general vicinity of your brain is, therefor, no longer my fault.

The TurtolCMS (tcms from now on, just to be more confusing) is a web application which supports the construction of web applications, all within a web-based application framework. Good. Nice start.

In order to do what tcms does, it manages items I call "Assets." Assets may be of one or more "Asset Types," which basically defines what sort of data the asset represents (web content, images, video, users, blog posts, catalog items, such an item as added to a shopping cart, the list goes on), and how the asset behaves in the context of the tcms and its various web applications. Easy Peasy.

The tcms is, itself, a web application. So it, and its operational parameters, can be contained within an Asset and corresponding Asset Types. Whew, ok, first big breath, but I can deal.

In order for the tcms to operate on (load, display, update, whatever) an Asset per the rules of the webapp as described by the Asset Type, it must, naturally, load those definitions. This is usually done by loading these definition from Python code modules. But it can be done by loading the definitions from the database itself. Ok, more of a stretch, and something is feeling like we're walking out on a ledge, but so far, I'm coping.

So, just to get things going, let's say we want to load the HTML page called "/" and send it to the client web browser. That page is an Asset, naturally, with the type "TurtolCMS.Core.HtmlPage." We tell the system to load the asset. In the process, it finds a database record with the name "/" and gets it's "types." It loads the corresponding module (....HtmlPage) so it knows how to process the thing. So Far So Good

But wait, one of the features of the tcms is something we call "Maintenance Mode," in which the tcms always renders an "under construction" page, no matter what we ask for, for anyone NOT logged in as an Editor. Before we can do the above paragraph's work, we first have to determine if we're in Maintenance Mode or not. How? Load the TurtolCMS asset. How? Look it up in the database. Load the corresponding code module (TurtolCMS.Core.CmsType). No Worries....Yet

But the tcms is a dynamic data-typing system, so as we add more capabilities, we have to extend the tcms asset with additional Asset Types. How? Load them from the database. What does that entail? Loading an Asset describing the Type. Which means? Loading another AssetType definition. Where? Maybe from code, maybe from the database.

Actually, re-reading it, it doesn't sound too bad. I must have forgotten something. My head hurts. Goodnight.