Fusselman.org:About

From Fusselman.org

In April 2007, I decided that I was spending more time maintaining my website's underlying bits than I was maintaining the content itself. Until that point, my site had been primarily a place to play with new stuff. I decided to start looking for a CMS to handle the "guts" of things, while I focused on the content.

I considered moving to one of the blog style engines, like Wordpress, but realized that most of my content was topical, not episodic. To that end, I selected MediaWiki, of Wikipedia fame. It allows me to build nodes for each project, and keeps a version history, for when things inevitably change.

I've made a number of custom modifications to MediaWiki, including turning off extension safety (to allow me to upload binary content). I've also modified the basic skin slightly (More changes to come there). I also discovered that changes to the left-hand navigational structure can be made by editing the MediaWiki:Sidebar page.

My friend Dave ask me today about why I wasn't on Wordpress (He'd never seen the site before), and he was intrigued by using MW as a blog engine. For all the reasons stated above, I really like the way this works. I am considering a PERL script to parse the main page and generate an RSS feed.