Better tools
A new version of Movable Type, the system I use to maintain this weblog and many other portions of my web space, was released over the weekend. Among the steps forward are support for MySQL (an open-source database that has become a standard for web applications) and something entirely new called TrackBack. It’s hard to describe what this actually is, but it may revolutionize the weblog format. It allows a threaded discussion between sites, so that (for example) a weblog author using MovableType could post an entry mentioning my blackberry story. That entry written by someone I may not even know could then be inserted into my own commenting system. Or, if I were to add a category structure to my farm’s site like, say, recipes, I could allow other weblog authors to post to both their site and mine at the same time. There’s other uses for multi-site threaded discussion that will sort themselves out over time. Could be really neat, it could never get used. We’ll see.