Bricolage and memory lane

Thinking about Salon and Bricolage took me for a walk down memory lane.  Through the wonders of Google, I found a PowerPoint from 2000 that Andrew Ross (Salon's VP of Business Development and one of Salon's founders), presented at Seybold about MPS (Millenial Publishing System), named so by Ian Kallen (the chief developer and architect of it) since we were in the year 2000.  MPS had been preceded by SPS (Salon Publishing System), which was developed by Shane Holland in the heady days of early 1999.  Shane and I worked on similarly designed systems (i.e. web-based frontend with Solaris/Oracle/Apache/Perl backends -- we should have called it SOAP!) back when we built CNN/SI in 1997 -- at the time, the largest web site (in daily page updates and sheer number of pages) at the largest media company in the world (Time Warner).  (Some of the people who were there are present in blogspace:  Paul Beard, Paul Holbrook, Frank Steele).  One day I'm going to work with all of those guys to sketch out the lineage of this thing like one of those BSD/System V charts.  In any case, the system would have ended up in the dustbin of technology history without David Wheeler keeping it going.

I also re-discovered a very well-done and beautifully designed article about Salon from DesignInteract.com, detailing our decision to build our own CMS -- and a great glimpse into what is was like to work at Salon (i.e. very, very fun).  I'm glad they took a screenshot for the article or I might have never seen the system again.  You'll notice the Creation Engines logo in the top left -- that's a longer story that is best left out of blogspace.  I'm saving that one for the book -- or the time when you buy me a drink and ask me to tell you the story.