This one admittedly has nothing to do with broadband. Instead it is all about my weblog, and my frustrations with the current generation of blogging tools. This saturday morning rant is actually inspired by Jeffrey Veen, who thinks that

Open source content management software sucks. It sucks really badly. The only things worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it really doesn’t have to be that way.

I could not agree more. I recently installed Urchin to better track the stats and how visitors use this site. I realized that in past three months, it does not matter if the post is “original reporting” or just a comment on some other news story, it got roughly the same about 400 page views.

I guess, there is no way to better assess the usage since most of the posts reside on home page. Another observation: if the post sat on the front page for say 24 hours, it got twice as many reads. (I calculated this by seeing how many people clicked on the more link.) Now this everything falls-to-the-bottom logic of most of the blogging software systems is something which is very frustrating, for the original writing/reporting sometimes takes five times the time of a quick opinion on something which is posted elsewhere. As a writer, who does it for the love of the game, nothing is more disheartening than knowing that not as many people have had a chance to read the story/post you worked so hard on.

Ultimately, a content management system should be designed to empower writers and editors to do content creation and maintenance themselves. I’d like to see it take a step further: empower designers, information architects, and site owners with the ability to make the CMS work for them.

It has been a frustrating few weeks trying to over come this problem, and while I have managed to come-up with a “band-aid solution” I still need help from experts who know the CMS system I am using, and the design etc. I guess, its something which will remain a vexing problem for years, because I think most of the current generation of tools are created by techies, and are all about cool features, and not about simplicity of use from a writer’s perspective. And apparently I am not the only one who is struggling with these issues.