David Brooks writes today in the New York Times about the state of education in the US.

I had a WordPress blog set up at my last job, and it's definitely fun to run a dynamic website. But once I left I didn't feel like maintaining it (in particular, watching for crackers and comment spammers), so I decided to make it static. It's definitely doable with a little with a little MySQL- and unix-fu.

The mid 90's was the era of Yahoo!'s directory. The web was organized by hierchical categories (the names and children of which were decided by Yahoo) and somebody visited sites to place them in a category. You searched the hierarchy, not the text of the web pages themselves. Search engines came only a little bit later).

Web browsers usually have the ability to save web addresses as bookmarks. These can also be organized, like a file system, or like the file cabinet each draws their metaphor from, in a system of hierarchical folders.

Web 2.0 has popularized the concept of tagging data; marking it rather than filing it. This increases the complexity of categorization exponentially.

I haven't been blogging about anything too interesting lately because I've been so busy tinkering with the website itself. I'm using drupal now because I was looking for something less bloggy and more content management system-y than WordPress. (At some point I have to figure out how to get my old WP blog into here, but not today...)

While setting up my site I discovered the View formatted source extension for Firefox. What a killer extension when you're tweaking the styling of a site!

It looks like the website is up and running.