April 6, 2006
MarkBernstein.org
 

Modular

When people use Tinderbox to make Web pages and weblogs, they usually let Tinderbox assemble the page from lots of individual little notes. That lets each bundle of notes do one thing, and gives Tinderbox lots of opportunity to lend you a hand in keeping things organized.

For example, each of the calendar items in my upcoming talks list (top left of the main page) is a note. Each book I've purchased is a note; Tinderbox keeps them sorted by acquisition date and only displays the last 45 days. When I read the book, I write some comments and drag the note to the reviews page; the reviews page automatically timestamps the review and adds the book to the big lists of authors and titles. Each post is a note, naturally.

Rafe Needleman discusses the power of pluggable modules like this in Breaking The Page over at Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 . (Peter Merholz used to call this "building Web pages with Lego™ blocks")