Weblogs as online journals, are already just fine. TypePad is easy enough and quite full-featured and Blogger is ultra easy if not so full-featured. If all you want to do is blog, you are set. But, I'm self-employed. I work for a living - for myself. I need to have a web presence that does what websites do and the weblog is just part of what I need to do.
Now that I've been blogging for several months and reading lots of weblogs, I'm beginning to take for granted that I can cite a particular *chunk of information* specifically rather than an entire web *page*. I have two websites: tokerud.com and studio-manager.com plus one active weblog - this one. When I want to cite something on my web pages, I can only easily point to the page, not the exact *spot* on the page where the information I'm talking about is located. That doesn't work for me - anymore.
I want my websites to be organized by chunks and pieces just like my weblog is. In fact, I want more than what my weblog does. Because, on my website, I put mini-articles and little chunks of information in all three columns - not just the center column. How do I reference those? I know there are such things as anchors, but I don't think they work well in multi-columnar situations.
I'm a database developer, so I'm especially interested in information design. I want all those *chunks* of information to be cataloged and stored somewhere for easy access. I don't want my web pages to be *dumb* sheets of text. They could just as well be made of paper for as smart as they are right now. OK, they do have links on them and that warrants some acknowledgement. But, now that I've been using a weblog where each post is stored in a database and has its own URL and can be categorized and archived and displayed on a calendar, I expect more.
Websites need to be more like weblogs, but, weblogs need to be more like websites too. Websites are good for static content such as author profiles, archives of all your articles or newsletters. Pages devoted to any particular topic where a journal-dated format isn't appropriate.
Typepad is working great for me, but I would like a way to add an extra page and have templates of several possible formats for those pages. The first format should be for single articles that have appeared elsewhere. I can work around the problem by *posting* the article in my blog and then it will in effect have its own page. Maybe I don't want to do that. Can I create the same effect without having to post it first? Where do I put my list of all the songs I've bought on iTunes or all my CDs in my entire collection? It's too long to fit on a TypeList. Then what?
I want to drive my websites with TypePad or Movable Type so I get all the content-management benefits I get from a weblog. But I don't want to lose any of the flexibility I have with a website. That's where I'm going. I'm looking for easy ways to do this. If I bang my head up against the wall long enough and pore over my many tech books and experiment and tinker, I'll figure it out. OR, maybe someone can point me towards some answers that must be somewhere either in someone's head or already written up and perhaps even published somewhere.
Big honking web-making software packages like DreamWeaver need to help you build blogs into your websites. Or someone could create a little blog-helper program that works with these code monsters (I was going to say dinosaurs - oops!). Or maybe this blend of weblog and websites is only available to the hacker and the professionals who will do anything if you pay them enough. I'm also hoping that TypePad will keep giving us more capability and that Movable Type Pro will come out one of these days (the press release dated in February said it would be out in the Summer) with features that help us get to the holy grail between weblogs and websites.