I have a website (at felixsalmon.com) which I've cobbled together by
combining my very basic html skills with a template I nicked off
blogger.com. What I'd like to do now is take it to the next level, by
breaking out all of my (70ish) postings, putting them all on their own
page, tagging them all in XML with subject, date and keywords, and
then redesigning the homepage so that it automatically shows the most
recent four posts and has fixed links to all the film reviews, say, or
political pieces. Then whenever I write a new piece, I just give it
its own page, tag it up in XML with its date, saying it's a
media-criticism piece or whatever, and the dynamic home page will do
the rest, putting it at the top of the media-criticism index and also
at the top of the homepage.

I have two questions: (1) is this possible? I'm assuming it is, but if
it isn't, how close can I get? And
(2) Where can I find some 14-year-old whizzkid in Arkansas or Mumbai
who would do this for me on the cheap? I can't afford a professional
web developer. How much is this whole thing likely to cost me?

---

Clarification of Question by fms-ga on 04 Oct 2002 14:16 PDT

Thank you, gamaiun-ga, for an extremely useful response! I don't know
if you're a Google Researcher, but if you are, it's good enough to
count as an answer, I think. I followed your links, and ended up at
http://www.movabletype.org/ which looks like it does what I need
without lots of extra functionality which would only serve to confuse
me. Do you think this could be the solution I'm looking for?

check out www.elance.com. i found a great graphic designer there,
inexpensive, and awesome work.

It sounds like you don't necessarily need a new web designer, but
instead your web site needs a good Content Management System (CMS). As
you can imagine, the kinds of tasks you want to do for your site - tag
articles with subjects & keywords, sort them into categories, have the
front page auto-update with new articles, and so on, have been needed
by almost every news and content-based sites on the web. Thousands of
site owners have asked this question, and by now, some excellent CMS
solutions have emerged.

Take a look, for instance, at the Free Content Management Systems
directory, at
http://www.clueful.com.au/cgi-bin/cmsdirectory/browse/Products:Free%20systems
or at Google's own Content Management directory
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Content_Management/?tc=1

While some of these systems may sound intimidating, most of them are
easy enough to set up and use by one person. So, while you probably
could hire a designer with scripting and XML skills, you would
essentially be paying them for reinventing the wheel; keep in mind
that robust and secure CMS systems are fairly hard to create, and are
usually done as large open-source projects.

Having said all that, I have recently had the chance to set up a web
site using one of these free CMS systems, namely PostNuke
(http://www.postnuke.com).
It's available for most platforms you're likely to care to use; setup
is as easy as unzipping the file and pointing your web browser to
install.php, and answering some questions. It's written entirely in
the PHP language, and uses free database engines such as MySQL to
store the content and the layout of the site. Having set it up, you
can choose the appearance of your site (using skins), as well as set
up an arbitrary amount of modules - News, Articles, Polls, Web Links,
Discussion Boards, and many others, through the web-based
administrative menu. PostNuke will archive and auto-update articles
and news for you, making the creation of new articles as easy as
cutting-and-pasting text into web forms.

To be sure, PostNuke is not perfect, and has annoying drawbacks. For
example, the News and Articles topics/sections are displayed as
pictures, and not as words (I could be missing some option somewhere,
but still).

Whether you end up using PostNuke, or some other CMS, I have a feeling
that finding a web designer proficient with an already existing CMS,
or simply hiring a designer and having them learn one, is much cheaper
and easier than hiring a programmer to create a new content-management
system from scratch.
Hope this helps!

MoveableType looks really nice, though I never got around to setting
it up myself. Another option is to use Blogger itself. Their how-tos
are fairly informative.

http://www.blogger.com/howto/

Sounds like a great idea. One strategy is too use a Microsoft Access
database to store the messages on the server and ASP to query that
database and generate your front page dynamically on request. In this
model, each message is given its own page via a query of that
database. The URL would specify the record number of message subject.
For example:

/viewmessage.asp?article=725

You can download code for a message board which contains most of these
components but will require tweaking for your own needs. See
http://www.lostcommunity.org/forum/default.asp . The bottom of that
page has a download for a messageboard script for Microsoft Windows
NT's IIS software. It can be easily modified to fit your needs. Also,
that webmaster's email address is on that page. You can contact him
and he's modify it for you.

I'm glad you found what you were looking for! :)
Your newly redesigned site looks great.

I'm not an official Google researcher (they're not accepting new
researchers due to overwhelming popular demand), but I do like to help
out when I can.
Good luck with your site.

~Dmitri
P.S. I see you're considering reading Master and Margarita as part of
your book club. It's a wonderful book, one of my all-time favorites,
and I look forward to your discussions and reviews.