Press "Enter" to skip to content

It's rocket science, except not

Dave rants :

The other Web content management systems don’t even have Edit This Page buttons yet. I’m amazed that people think Movable Type is so advanced. They have a long way to go before they catch up to Manila. And Blogger is totally not in the game and neither product, architecturally is suited to easy connections to editing content. Too many steps, too much memorization.

Oddly, every post on this front page provides me with a one-click method of editing itself. Click, edit, save, done. And I seem to be using Movable Type. I had to add the tweak, but it wasn’t exactly difficult (it’s just a template change) and the Movable Type architecture didn’t get in the way.

3 Comments

  1. That’s a cute trick. It’s not something I’d be interested in right now, but I’m glad to know how it’s done.

    One of the things that Winer doesn’t get is that it is possible to have too many options. I started blogging with Radio and couldn’t figure out what half the things I was supposed to be using were for. I dropped back to Blogger, where I got my bearings because I had fewer choices, and when I was ready to move up again, MT had the feature set I needed (not tied to one computer, can make and use multiple blogs). Radio’s a great tool, but Blogger (or LiveJournal) is better for people who need training wheels. That’s the value of the simpler (constraining) interface.

  2. Yeah. I ran a site with Manila for a while, but the benefits simply weren’t worth it. I snagged myself a weblog over at blogs.law.harvard.edu, too, and when I deleted the first post the site crashed — you couldn’t get to the admin panel, you couldn’t make a new post, nothing.

    Making it too easy for the user to shoot themselves in the foot is no good.

  3. Hey, Bryant. Email me that template tweak for the Edit link? Thanks.

Leave a Reply to Bruce Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *