Watchers of the Silicon Valley Watcher site might have seen some (momentary) strange displays of our entries, sidebars, ads and other unusual things, over the past couple of days.

I'd like to say we were experimenting with innovative publishing formats, but that was not the case.

It was me tinkering around and seeing what does what and trying to map out in my head how various things interact.

I do speak a little Geek. I had worked as a software engineer in a past life and it was a much simpler life then. Today, developing web services and combining them into different applications is way more complex. Things are nested within each other and point to code on different locations on the same server, and on servers all over the internet.

When I worked as a software engineer, I worked on a mainframe, I would "point" my code to go fetch data from a known and trusted location on that same computer. The data flow is way more complex these days, and this is the opportunity and the challenge. The opportunity is in crafting sophisticated web services applications from either free, or very low cost software components, such as Linux, PHP scripts, etc. The challenge is doing it in such a way as to make it easy to make changes on the fly, and those changes are instantly reflected across an entire web site, or collection of web sites.

In Movable Type (MT), the trick to being able to use this publishing tool in different ways is understanding the interaction between the main index file, and the many different modules and templates--which are then defined in cascading style sheets.

It is interesting to see how sophisticated much of the server side software components have become. However, there is still an amazing amount of integration that has to be done between the tools available. You need a good-sized "box" of tools to do the work. For example, I would love to point and click and drag and save and rebuild and open and delete and undo, and other stuff--server side, as easily as I can do client side today on my laptop.

Playing around with MT was an engrossing, fun, and often frustrating experience, and I managed to wipe out a bunch of modules I had been working on. Fortunately, my colleague Doug Millison was feeding the blog here at "the watcher" with excellent entries. You'll see more of Doug when we launch Silicon Valley Media Watch in the next couple of days.