Geobop:
What’s New?

The biggest news of the year is the conversion of all the major Geobop websites to content management systems. If you don’t know what a content management system (CMS) is, let me offer an analogy.

Imagine a person returning from vacation with one hundred color slides. He invites his neighbors over for a slide show, and they arrive to find 100 screens set up in his living room.

Obviously, no one sets up 100 screens for a slide show. Instead, people store their slides in a slide projector, then display the pictures against a single screen, one at a time.

Now imagine a person with one hundred articles that he wants to display online. He does what most people do: create a website with 100 pages.

But if you store your articles in a database, then you can in a sense project them against a single page. With a little techincal hocus pocus, you can even make it appear that you have hundreds or even thousands of pages on your website.

Of course, the big advantage of a content management system is time. Once you learn how to manipulate a CMS, you can accomplish much more in much less time.

The bad news is that I’m still perfecting my knowledge of content management systems and studying many other technical things as well. It’s hard to find time to research and write, which is really what Geobop is all about. Nevertheless, you should soon see the Geobop websites finally mature into technically sound repositories of information and purveyors of ideas, and I promise I will resume adding content in the very near future.

What I will work on next is a mystery even to me. It will take me literally years to write all the articles I need for GeoZoo alone. I also need to write articles about the political heritage of each of the 50 states for my least developed website, Kids’ Politix. And I need to acquire many more pictures for all of my websites.

So I’d better get back to work. :)

David Blomstrom, WebRanger