As I think it's clear by now, I'm not only an arts administrator but also a geeky amateur computer programmer at heart; it goes all the way back to my high-school years, in fact, when I was a member of a Boy Scouts Explorer group dedicated to the FORTRAN computer language, sponsored by the old defense contractor McDonnell Douglas (now a part of Boeing), and even involves me being the primary designer and programmer of the site you're at now, for those who didn't realize.

It should be no surprise, then, that I naturally turn to a system like Movable Type to run the backend of the CCLaP site, owned and operated by the excellent tech company Six Apart. (And just to be clear, I don't actually know anyone at Six Apart, nor do I stand to benefit in any way by saying nice things about them today.) The company markets a line of what's called "content management systems" (or CMSes), basically the software that makes such automated websites like blogs work; for those who are still confused, you can think of a good commercial CMS as containing a big text database at its core, containing all the "content" of that blog, then software and an interface that lets you "manage" this database easily, and then software and an interface that displays this information all pretty-like at a website (or useful-like as an RSS feed, etc).

Six Apart sells three commercial products that pertain to CMS, differing mostly through how much of the process is set up in advance for you; Movable Type is the one known for fairly hardcore geeks, in that almost nothing is prefabricated for you (such as web templates, feed templates, etc), and that its creators assume from the start that you have access to your own server space and know how to install software systems to it. Have I lost you? Yeah, try one of Six Apart's other services, then, TypePad or VOX, both of which set up all these details for you (one more like Blogger, one more like MySpace), so that all you have to do is type a web entry and push a big button that says "Publish." Movable Type is definitely not for the faint of heart, and I don't want to wrongly recommend it here to dabblers who would be in over their heads with such a system; for those who are already fluent in HTML and Javascript, though, and who understand the concept of a pervasive tagging system to convey proprietary information, it's definitely one of the CMSes out there (along with Wordpress) that I most recommend.

Movable Type recently released version 4 of their software, and it's just so chock-full of new goodies that I'm not sure where to start; on-screen updating AJAX-style, much more sophisticated controls over each option at your disposal, not to mention just a much slicker and more professional online interface, for maintaining each detail of one's website in the most elegant way yet. It's easy to overlook an accomplishment like this, I think, one where everything simply works and works well, and where one subsequently spends even less time than before fiddling with the tech side of the creative process, and more time than before directly connected to the actual creative side. I think back to my early days as a blogger, back in the mid-1990s, and the kinds of massive time-consuming workarounds all of us would have to do back then in order to maintain them; it makes you appreciate a well-working system all the more, I think, which is why I've been wanting to take a moment here just to congratulate the Six Apart development team, for a job well done with version 4. I continue to be a very happy customer, and am glad to see you as a corporate structure continue to put so much emphasis on innovation and the user experience.