

Stop Publishing web Pages - pkeane
http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/stop-publishing-web-pages.html

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true_religion
I'm actually kind of tired of sites that just give a stream of data.

That's why on all my projects going forward, I'm going to try to take the next
step and design the page itself to be attractive as to the placement of the
content---more like a magazine, than like a Reddit.

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ClintonWu
How about image based streams? May be too Pinterest-esque for you but moves
more towards a different paradigm. Check us out at <http://skim.me> when we
release first version in a few weeks.

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utahsaint
i think streams for image based sites, so long as the taxonomy is correct
could be a killer UI. Thats one of the reasons Pinterest is moving along
nicely.

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pan69
This post seems a little naive. yes, people spend a lot of time on things like
Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. However, that's only half the story. People
also use search engines to find information. Information that is organised in
pages, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon. Streams are fluid. Information is there and
gone the next. Pages and streams serve two different purposes and one does not
exclude the other.

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mnutt
It's interesting that in a "blog about making culture" that he doesn't address
the issue of archival. While a CMS can produce a nice snapshot for archive.org
or another mirror to capture, streams are trickier, especially if they rely on
the app that produced the stream(s) to work.

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kisielk
Wouldn't streams actually make it easier? The site that wanted to do the
archiving could subscribe to the stream and slurp up the content as it became
available. As far as crawling older content presumably having a stream doesn't
preclude you from also having permalinks to each entry.

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ricardobeat
Streams are not always the best solution. How do you get an item at the end of
the stream? By scrolling for minutes and hoping your browser doesn't crash...

It's a model very well-suited to social publishing, immediate content, not so
for articles/timeless information.

~~~
STHayden
the browser crashing problem just shows it's still such a new paradigm that
programmers still are not tackling the problem correctly. many libraries are
already being written to better handle this problem.

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seane999
There is no doubt in my mind that streams will be a much bigger part of the
future than they are now. (They won't completely replace page-based content
where that is more appropriate.) Currently streams seem to be the domain of
the big 'platform' players (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, maybe a feedreader
for those so inclined) so I am only really have to 'keep tabs' on a couple of
streams. I think our current tools for creating and consuming streams are
still relatively basic and for 'streams' to break free from these strongholds
requires a lot more innovation in how we can create them, interact with them,
manipulate them and transition in and of of them seamlessly.

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alecperkins
Streams are more an attitude shift to match how people consume content than a
substantial functional shift. They still allow for permalinks; it's possible
to link to any tweet directly. Stream-oriented content is about acknowledging
that pages and destination sites are the wrong units of content. Content needs
to respond to platforms — more than just screen sizes. Content Management
Systems need to be treated as true _content_ management systems, not _page_
management systems. Content == data. See: John Borthwick's comments on content
as information; Substance.io and Prose; Medium; NPR's API; &c. Pages are a
legacy format.

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utahsaint
Streams allow people to find/stumble across information they may not have
known existed. A visitor could enter (site) with a permalink to the content
and then find a zillion spinoff conversations/articles - rather than forcing
them to search or use poor navigation by the site owners, they could now spin
themselves around the web based on streams of content... Love the idea!

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mgunes
Related reading: "Streams vs. documents" --
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software-
li...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software-
libre.rudd-o.com/Streams_vs._documents)

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danso
The OP took a reasonable idea: stop shoehorning content systems into producing
static HTML _pages_ (and instead, produce an API)...and jumps somewhat
illogically to "make it all a stream!"

Why isn't it possible to create an API which you dogfood to produce static
pages (because permalinks are nice) AND content for streams?

