A new look for Silicon Valley Watcher
I’ve been nursing a bad cold but I wanted to take the opportunity of introducing a new look for Silicon Valley Watcher and to praise the work of my colleague Dida Kutz. The creation of a three column layout using Movable Type, or for that matter any other server-side web publishing application, is not an easy task.
Movable Type for example, was designed to publish blogs. It is very good at publishing one long page, split up into “entries.” It is also a good and inexpensive content management system, automating many tasks such as archiving that save on admin costs.
However, Movable Type is not a flexible publishing tool—at least not yet. As an online publisher I would like to be able to publish a variety of content and to present that content in different ways.
I want to go beyond the standard expectation of what a “blog” is and write news stories, features, columns--in addition to daily blog entries.
And I want to to be able to easily promote our best content on the home page, without those stories being pushed further and further down towards the bottom of the page. Yes, there are a variety of ways to work around these issues, but there is way more that needs to be done to create a very flexible server-side web publishing platform.
The three-column format will allow us more flexibility to promote our columns, features and other original content. And it will also allow us to comment on daily events in a traditional blog format. We’ll be playing around with the format over the next few weeks and we are always happy to have hear your best ideas in terms of presentation or anything else!
