Conversant: It’s Like Having a Paid Assistant
I have always been a compulsive writer. I have been writing 10 to 20 pages a day for so long that it is second nature. Maintaining a web site, however, is definitely not second nature.
The real pain for me was always managing a site’s structure. On a static site this can be a nightmare. Suppose, for example, I write an article about Fidel Castro criticizing Bill Clinton over U.S. free trade policies. Where do I put the file that contains that story? In a directory with other stories about Castro? Clinton? Free trade? And then I have to remember where I put it six months from now. An obvious solution would have been to just create an /articles/ directory and sequentially number all articles, but again this is difficult to manage when I might write 200 stories for a site in a year. Next year there’s going to be no way I will remember that the story on Castro and U.S. free trade policy is articles/2000/000035.html. That will never happen.
As I mentioned the other day, with Conversant this becomes effortless since I can link to that story automatically just by typing in the headline and surrounding it with pipes (the “|” character) and forget about the underlying structure.
Similarly tomorrow morning when I wake up and post a new article for this site, I do not have to worry about cutting and pasting the old articles to an archive and then re-uploading half a dozen files — the software takes care of archiving and keeping track of everything automatically.
The upshot: more time for writing. I conservatively estimate that when I was using Dreamweaver, for every hour I spent on writing, I had to spend about 15 to 20 minutes in web site maintenance, which was a serious incentive not to write. Every new article I wrote meant a new headache in updating the site. With Conversant, there was a relatively time consuming initial startup period in converting a couple thousand pages to Conversant which took about 30 to 40 hours overall. On a daily basis, however, I estimate that for every hour I spend writing I only have to spend 3 to 5 minutes maintaining the site. In addition I can concentrate that in an hour or two at the end of the week. It is very nice to spend an hour on Sunday night taking care of the administrative tasks rather than 90 minutes or more each day.
On Monday, for example, I wrote almost 7,000 words which is a lot even for me (that is about 30 typed pages). There is simply no way I could have possibly done that and got all of those articles up on my static web site in only a 16 hour day. With Conversant, I finished everything with plenty of time to go home and catch up on my taped episodes of “The Power Puff Girls.”
I an pretty much a one person operation — my wife does some editing for me occasionally — but Conversant makes it feel like I’ve got a paid assistant who I can hand off all of the routine, boring stuff to while I work on what I enjoy, updating the content. It is nice not to be up at 10:30 p.m. trying to upload changed pages to a static server.
Tags: Conversant