No Longer Content to Have no Content

According to records, I first purchased darkbee.com back in 2000. Since that time, I've added a few bits and pieces here and there, but for the most part it's been stagnant, not really doing anything other than gathering virtual dust, greeting occasional search engine bots, and receiving even less occasional "real" visitors.*

I've detailed some of the reasoning behind this in an article on darkbee.com, but to summarize here it's partly because I spent more time working on how it looks than what's on it, and partly because I stuck with a host which made it difficult for me to update content (through no fault of their own). Well, everything changed when I really started to play with content management systems and in particular TikiWiki. I had run across TikiWiki when I was looking for a possible Wiki to use at work. It's a really heavy-duty CMS, centered around a Wiki, but with many other features such as image galleries, forums, blogs, group and private calendars and the list goes on. Anyway, it dawned on me that my time would be better spent actually creating content rather than trying to code a website with very little content. I thought about using TikiWiki for darkbee.com, but concluded that it was overkill for such a small personal site. Consequently, I began looking at other smaller alternatives and came across Web-App.org, which seem to fit the bill perfectly. I installed it and began to try it out.

Once I had customized Web-App to capture the look and feel of the original darkbee.com site, I was finally convinced that this was the way to go. So now I have a great website that allows me to focus solely on adding new material, and maybe even build a small community of like-minded users. And herein lies another consideration in that, websites are no longer static pages of plain text, they are centers for collaboration, communication and general interaction. Using Web-App allows me to have features like forums, that I never could have coded myself (or at least, never would have finished coding!), which in turn adds the interaction element to my site. With that said, I'd like to invite you to visit the "new and improved" darkbee.com, and who knows, maybe join and make a few posts/comments yourself!

*Spot the pattern; this blog hasn't exactly been a hot-bed of activity either!