My daughter starts fourth grade next week. Back from our family re-union which came on the heels of a beach trip which was scheduled (i.e. the spot reserved) in better times. Now perhaps I can get back to the important task of finding employment.

I'll probably give Norm a hand next week with band instrument rentals. He'll need the help - and perhaps give me a chance to say hi to some of my Sonica friends.

I've done some interesting stuff recently with the website software. A lot of consolidation of things which are similiar. These leads to better code, since similiar things aren't duplicated. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to help get anybody to take notice of what either the software or myself are capable of doing. Sounds like I need a concerted marketing campaign...

But let's take an example. Categories. Forums. Subscriptions, photo albums. These are all very different - n'est ce pas? Categories are collections of articles with the same tags. Forums are collections of articles. Subscriptions are collections of forums. Photo albums are collections of photos.

Whoa, hang on. They're all collections.

So I created a software class called 'containers' with an associated 'contents'. Contents are the things which go in containers. Together they create a collection. Of anything. I no longer have different database tables for all these different collections of things. I just have a bunch of containers that contain things.

Remember not too long ago when I mentioned that forums and weblogs and newsfeeds were all just collections of 'articles'?

Similiarly, a while back I created permission lists. Which are - containers. But I digress. Permission lists can be associated with anything. Photos, weblogs, forums, whatever. Until last week I just had access permissions. But what about write or post permission? It's the same thing. Just a list of permissions. 

So now you can not only create a private forum, you can also specify who can post to it. You can create a soapbox that only you can write to and everybody can read. But wait a minute... That's what a weblog is. So I've just created a new way to create weblogs - as forums. So why would anybody need a separate thing called a weblog? A: They don't. So eventually I will get rid of them as well. No I don't mean that I'll remove weblogs from the software. I'll just remove the management of things called weblogs from the software. It isn't needed.

Where is this all going? There's a lot of unneccessary code. At some point there will be another re-write. When that happens, a lot of the extra crap will be tossed into the bit bucket. What will be left? Containers. Things that go in containers. And perhaps 'people'. That's all. And it will still do everything the software does now. It will do everything you could ever imagine doing with a content management system. Want buddylists? Want MP3 collections? Private groups? Public groups? Taxonomies? Events? In every other content management system, these are all new database tables, new software classes. More code and data to manage in some unique way. But it doesn't have to be that way.

They're just boxes of stuff.