First Blog Entry

Today I released Marmox™ 0.2.3, which is a major milestone in Marmox releases because it now supports blogging. Marmox has been powerful enough to host my photos for some time, but only with release 0.2.3 did Marmox become powerful enough to host my own blog. I have just used a Marmox to create a new blog entry and I'm editing my entry in-place with a WYSIWYG XHTML editor.

Although I've had my own web site since around 1997, I've been slow to get on board the blogging train. For one thing, I've been more inclined to publish full-fledged, researched articles rather than off-hand thoughts. But another factor is that editing standards-based, manageable content has been labor-intensive. Sure, I could start using some third-party blog software, but my content would be thrown helter-skelter into some database using who-know-what storage format. And then what would I do when I wanted to upgrade or change to another system? In short, I wanted standards-compliance, loose-coupling, and control within minimal maintenance overhead.

Now my blog entries are stored in standard XHTML files in a file system. Well, technically they are stored in a GlobalMentor Marmot™ repository, behind which could be one of several types of data stores. In this case, my blog entries are being stored in a Subversion repository and versioned automatically. At any time I can log into my Subversion repository using WebDAV and copy my trees of XHTML blog entries, or revert back to some other version. And the XHTML files have straightforward, semantically-rich, clean content—all the breadcrumbs and menus you see are wrapped around the content automatically by Marmox.

But what is Marmox? That's hard to state just in one sentence, because on other sites so many aspects of Marmox have been artificially split up into proprietary systems that artificially meet only certain needs. Marmox is a content manager, a web server, a social network, a photo viewer, and a music player, just to name a few. Just imagine:

• What if Flickr stored your videos, too?
• What if YouTube also stored your music, and allowed you to play it online?
• What if Mozy provided real-time access to all your backed up file versions via the web, via a mounted local drive, and/or via WebDAV?
• What if MySpace provided your profile as FOAF data?
• What if Flickr allowed you to add not just tags, but interesting detailed metadata to any document?
• What if you could manage your Friendster, MySpace, and Orkut accounts from the same place?
• What if you could access all your documents online, all the time, from anywhere?
• What if you could read your books online?
• What if you could let your friends add comments to any of your public files—and keep them away from the private ones?
• What if your hard drive crashed and you didn't lose anything?
• What if your laptop was stolen and the thief didn't get your documents?
• What if migrating data to your new computer ceased to be a problem?

Marmox will address all these use cases and more. It's in early alpha development, but it already does a grand job of managing photos (stored on disparate servers; and aggregated, scaled, and cached dynamically) in the photography section of my site. I'll be explaining more about Marmox in the future as Marmox continues to advance.

Garret