What is the content?
As the next version of Noteworthy inches ever closer to reality, I'm starting to think more and more about content and what it actually means. The other night the question turned over and over in my head. It demanded an answer. One wasn't forthcoming. What is the content? Is it a blog post? Is it a page? Is it a picture? Is it a Google Map? A Tweet?
Fact of the matter is that content is all of these things ... or none of them. Content can be something we've yet to discover, too. How do we build this into a database? Go the lazy NoSQL way and just treat everything as an object of indeterminate type? It's certainly very tempting, but this could create more problems than it solves going forward. The more I think about this question, the more I'm looking at simplifying what a piece of content actually is; bringing it down to it's purest and most forward-compatible format.
The next Noteworthy update will include database support and a host of new content types and filters. This will allow for a pretty slick search mechanism1, easier data import tools, and a much more useful API subsystem. I've said before that Noteworthy is essentailly 95% API, 4% presentation layer, and 1% hot coffee, but the next release will change this ratio. The API will become far more useful, allowing better integration with 3rd party systems2. The front-end will also become much less cumbersome, though.
All this said, if the definition of content is incomplete, pushing forward with an update would only create more problems than it'd solve. One of the reasons this tool was created was to get away from the semi-thought-out structures found in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and other robust CMSes that try to be everything for everybody. Noteworthy is supposed to simplify everything for people and ensure that posts from 10 years ago are just as beautiful and readable as the ones we make today and tomorrow. It's not an easy thing to do, nor does it need to be. So forward progress for the sake of a version number makes absolutely zero sense.
But the question still remains: what is the content?
