My Crappy Drupal Web Site

I just finished posting a new, crappy web site, and I couldn't be happier.

This is the second project I've done with the Drupal content management system (CMS). The first was for the City of Austin Community Technology Initiative. This new site–the crappy site–is for SoAustin.Net, the quasi community hosting service that I run.

The reason that I'm happy is that even though the new Drupal site is crappy, that's mostly because I just migrated the content of an old, static (and, need I say, crappy) web site into the Drupal framework. I think moving to a CMS may be a first step towards cleaning out the crap.

I can't really explain it. The physical effort of typing "vi newpage.html" (vi is the Linux text editor) is barely incrementally more than pushing a "new content" button in a CMS. Yet, somehow, when my content lives in a static framework, it is rarely updated and often goes to rot. I discovered this truth when I migrated my personal website to a blog. I published more in my first six months of blogging than I did in the previous six years combined. I am hoping that movment to a CMS does the same for SoAustin.Net.

So if you are an SoAustin user, please hang in there. I really really really will get correct instructions posted for configuring your email client one of these days.