Dad With Teeth

Everybody's Got A Story to Tell

Stories

A good story for me is about the human experience, the trials and travails of making a contribution to the human race. Native American storytellers, autopsy instructors, Vaudevillians from the 1930s, authors, radicals, mothers, fathers, even transients… everyone has a story to tell. Some are tragedies and some are little victories, and a few, very few, are triumphs. For me, a story is a story if it captures the spirit of a life well lived.

The genres that capture me are history, culture and politics. But current climate of politics in America is so toxic I can’t imagine finding the passion to tilt at another windmill. So my third choice would be human interest feature stories. OK, I know, every story should have some element of human interest. Otherwise, who would read it? But these are stories told in the first person by people on the cusp of a decision.

For History I usually read a rather academic site called HNN (The History News Network) run by Seattle author Rick Shenkman. Rick is a former managing editor for KIRO-TV and a wonderful bestselling author. This site acts as a sort of aggregator of news and opinion, with pointed reflections of how current events are shaped by our past. The essays are usually well crafted stories about the ever changing fabric of America.

Culture and the arts usually starts at the New York Times. Granted, some of the writers craft articles that are very elitist, but on the whole, if you are writing for the Times you know how to write.

And finally, for human interest on a truly global scale I love The Witness Project. This is an organization teaching folks from oppressed countries (in often hostile environments) how to document their lives and turn their stories into documentaries for a worldwide audience. From Vigilantes at the Border of America, to Torture and Displacement in Northern Uganda, to Forced Labor in Burma, Witness opens a window in worlds untouched by corporate media.

CMS

Content management seems pretty clear to me. Like anything, you have to have a plan before you start. Spending the time up front imagining how the data will be leveraged by both the users and the creators is critical. My CDs are listed alphabetically and cross referenced by genre, my photos are sorted by type and organized by date, my car keys hang by the door; the user base is small (me) and I can find what I need quickly. Fortunately, very few others need to access the data, and when they do I can act as the content manager. Consistency in naming and organization is a must, because writing an application that will cull through your data needs to be simple, and including a list of special exceptions as to how it finds the data would be a train wreck. The two points made in our reading that made me smile was: 1) the admonition that if a CMS solution requires you to reformat your data something is wrong either with the folks selling you the solution, or how you organized the data in the first place; and 2) your CMS broker needs to have the ability to time when pages will be added to the site. I sure wouldn’t want to be up at 2am loading pages. Ugh.

posted by Drew Keller @ Tuesday, April 04, 2006