0 Content Silos and Streaming
Lately I’ve been reviewing the way I have things setup in terms of posting content via RadiantCMS. Very sloppy. Need a plan to make it cleaner and more efficient. Throw it all into a silo.
Currently things are sloppy. I have a ridiculous amount of snippets for determining the “types” of content I’m posting. For example I use r:if_content tags to modify display in the event an image part is used. That part determines whether or not to use another snippet I use in conjunction with the Page Attachments extension to get the most recently posted image attachment. Pretty clever stuff in my opinion. But again, its all so very sloppy.
Why not Tumblr?
I’m a blogger and no two ways about it. I enjoy writing and discussion. However, simply writing doesn’t completely do it for me. Often I’ll find interesting images, cool videos or some quotables. Yes, I realize I’m describing Tumblr, but I’m also a tinkerer. Having the freedom to modify the way I interact with the platform at which I blog and produce content is more important to me.
Streaming Content
All that aside, content should be streamed. Some weeks ago I was introduced to the word “silo” as it relates to web content. It’s the idea that content belongs in a silo. You then take that content and present it in a fashion that is presentable for the end-user.
Doing this in Radiant should be fairly simple. One page would act as a silo for all “stream-able” content such as links, blog entries, images, videos, quotes, even twitter. I would then use r:if_url to determine proper display as opposed to r:if_content which would determine the existence of a part.
What’s to come
I hope to re-factor all my snippets and get a cleaner way to integrate and maintain content streams. I hope to start adding support for “Youtube” videos. Should be fun!