It's the end of the World

…as we know it.

First, the Earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came. Then Man. And then Gutenberg and then newspapers, advertising and, finally the Web.

And we built Web pages. Each page featured a navigation area, a part of the page devoted to getting us to other pages. And headers and footers. And content, even with images. And it was pretty good.

And browsers got better. And access got cheaper. And standards got more rigid and more and more people got online to check this out. Fortunes were made. Not by me, or anybody you know, but fortunes were made. And lost.

And then there were internet appliances all over. You could call up Web pages on your cell phone, on a tablet, from your game system or your car. That InterWeb thing was well and truly taking over. And responding to all of these changes, the developers of Dreamweaver did their best to keep up. Bugs were fixed. Features were added, massaged and deleted over the years.

Templating was added. Code hints. Invalid markup was highlighted. There were improvements to both the Design View and the Code View. Various workspace layouts were developed, and you could even make your own. Dreamweaver became, not just a great way to build Web pages, but Web sites as site management features were added. But still, the focus was on the pages and sites—not the content.

It's a subtle but important difference. People don't buy nails because they own hammers. They buy nails because they have two things they want to be joined together. Last year, Lowe's sold a skillion drill bits. Not because people wanted drill bits, but because they wanted holes. And that's how we ended up looking at a new CMS—a Content Management System.

We are past the point where it should take an army of skilled technicians to post a simple memo online. We shouldn't have to depend upon a few high priests of technology to get material uploaded. The democratization of the Web is nigh. We can use the technology to make itself easier. That leads us to the UNLcms.

Using Drupal, and the Dreamweaver Template model, we can create pages at the push of a button. We can carve up the content area with columns. We can insert images and make links and do a great job of building compliant pages without spending an inordinate amount of time and money (the same thing, often) learning an interfacing program. We needed the program because HTML and CSS was hard. But then the program became hard, too. Templates helped, but there's never been anything really easy about any of this.

Now we can build pages with a Web browser. We're not even tied to a single computer. We can add administrative users to cover vacations and delete them when they return. Right now, today, it doesn't do as much as Dreamweaver and the Templates but it's catching up, fast. I have seen it improve every week for more than a year, now. I look at it sort of like a parent watching a baby learn to roll over, and then sit up, and thinking of a day when the kid will be riding a bike and going off to school and choosing a career and so on. I don't really see the program as it is now—I see what it is becoming, what's possible.

And I love what I see, now.

There's a scene in the movie Other People's Money where Danny deVito talks about buggy whips, and how technology has made entire industries redundant. We don't teach people how to shoe horses, any more. We don't teach folks how to operate slide rules as much as we did just a generation ago. That's what we're up against, here.

I can talk about the differences between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms for a couple of hours. Document-centric modeling, updating Web pages from cell phones, not just Macintosh and Windows PCs. But the biggest difference I see between Dreamweaver and the UNLcms is that the UNLcms has a future.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

For the last few years, I've tried to teach myself to say "This used to be my dad's birthday". I'm done with that, now. This is the day my dad was born, regardless of whether or not he's still here. Dad was a countdown baby, "Five... Four... Three... Two..." (5/4/1932). He would have been seventy-nine years old, today.

I thought I was a pretty normal kid, growing up. Dad would, from time to time, try to teach me some goofy lesson about patriotism, about getting involved in my community, about civic responsibility. I was much more interested in trying to learn the opening solo of "Reelin' In The Years" and how to convince girls to go with me out to the airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good to vote. It's also good to drive a new Camaro. Yesterday was Election Day here in Lincoln. Dad would have been proud of me, for voting.

The way I have dealt with the grief over dad's death is probably a measure of how important he was to me in life. I had no idea. Everyone else who lost a father seemed to be coping so much better so much quicker. I am still about nineteen seconds away from crying—sobbing—if I'm not careful. Friends I grew up with were back at work within a few days, continuing their educations, their careers, their families, their plans. I seemed to hit a wall there, for a long time.

I still have moments. The phone will ring and, for no reason at all, I find myself thinking, "Oh, that'll be Dad! I have to tell him about…". I find myself at Sears, looking at a long row of lawn mowers and thinking to myself, "What in Hell do I know about lawn mowers? I should talk to dad about…". I drive a 1995 Honda with 160,000 miles on it, and sleep under a roof with twenty years on it. How do I decide which one to replace, first? And how do I pay for it? And what do I do about the other one? Dad would know.

House advice, career advice, car advice, fashion advice. How to deal with family and friends and church obligations. How to get a dog. When I was twelve or fifteen, I didn't want any advice. Now, I would give anything to have him lecture me for just an hour.

When I was very small, Dad was super-human. He was a young, fit, Marine. He drove a sports car and had a wife and a dog and a house and… me. As I got older, he became more real. There was a time Dad was never wrong about anything. There was a time when he knew more about everything than I did. But gradually, he became less a Super man and more just a regular guy. We developed different interests. He loved to go fishing. I loved learning the guitar. I liked The Association and The Monkees, he liked Johnny Cash and Floyd Cramer. I found myself depending upon him less and less, as is the natural order of these things.

I feel cheated, somehow. It's funny. I've said this before, but I was much better prepared to lose him when he went to VietNam. Twice. When he came back, he became just "Dad" and on some level it's like I expected he would be with me forever. In VietNam, dad had occasion to ride around in helicopters and transport planes that were used to apply Agent Orange, to defoliate the jungle and make trails and personnel easier to find. They would go out on a spraying mission and come back, take the tanks and booms off of the aircraft, and then Dad would get in and fly to some other base with a bunch of mail, groceries and other supplies. They'd put all of that stuff back on and go back out spraying again and then send one of them back out to get him. He developed a lung condition. He died at seventy-three. He would probably be dead by now, if it weren't for that. But it's still hard. Somehow, I don't see it as an extra thirty-five years. I see it as a lost four, or five, or seven.

Dad would tell me it's fine to honor fallen heroes, but that it's up to us to make our own lives. Dad would tell me to get my nose back inside a Drupal book, because a whole lot of people are going to be depending upon me to know this stuff, soon. Dad would, as usual, be right. So I'm going to spend the rest of this day reading-up on Drupal, in his honor.

Happy birthday, Dad.