14.42, Wednesday 3 Jan 2001

Organizine is a Blogger-like tool to help produce webzines. It would be useful to produce something like Upsideclown (a 'site I'm involved in).

Premise: You create documents, and templates. Documents are simply text or html, with a title, author and summary. All information is typed into text forms through the browser. Templates pull all this information together and output html: You can choose any template for your document.

You can also choose sensible filenames and directories for your html pages (nice and flexible, yes?), which are ftp'd to your server. An archive and front page are automatically created.

Contributors to your webzine can have variable permissions -- they can edit only their own documents, not templates or overall settings.

So I like Organizine. It feels simple to use, and takes many hints from Blogger about ease of use (if you've used one, the other will be obvious). I've a feeling document management could get difficult with many files, and I'd like to see templates being editable outside the text form, but both of these are easily added features; the foundations seem sound. But would I use it? I don't think so. I know enough html and server-side processing such that it's fairly easy to set up and automate almost anything I want. I'm thinking about it though. For collaborative 'sites I imagine it could be very handy, and I certainly hope this results in an explosion of independent content and magazines in the same way Blogger et al helped with narrative.

Follow-up posts: