fluffy's page also has a great 404 page (volume on) and a deceptively detailed 403 page. If anyone else has a custom 403 page, I'd like to hear about it.

It's not lost on me that comments to this blog have always been respectful of those who take time to participate in an interview. Doing this stuff is more time-consuming and labor-intensive than it might seem, and I appreciate that readers are not afraid to share their opinions yet do it gracefully.



Q: At what point in a site's development does a person have to make an informed decision about their content management strategy?

A: I think that as soon as you realize that there is going to be a large amount of interrelated content, you need to at least think about how things are going to be arranged. Even without an automated content management system, being able to keep things straight as far as where things are going to go and how you'd find them again is important to keep yourself sane.

Personally, I feel that as soon as you're going to have more than two pages with the same overall layout, you should really look into using a CMS. Editing one template is always going to be a lot less work than editing multiple files, especially when there's fairly complex layout and style issues to deal with.

Q: We recently covered some of what Word Press/Comic Press has to offer. What system would you recommend, and how is it different?

A: WordPress/ComicPress are fine for simple sites where you only expect to have fairly basic content, such as a single comic series and a single blog. However, modifying WordPress requires a decent amount of programming knowledge, and the fact that WP always needs an active database connection to function (and that it only works with MySQL) are pretty big turnoffs to me.

Personally, I use Movable Type. Its category system is, in my opinion, much better than WordPress's, and its template system is a lot easier to get up and running with. You can still put PHP into your templates if you want to, but you don't have to know it; Movable Type instead provides its own templating system which uses HTML-like markup tags.

Another big advantage to Movable Type is that it allows you to set up multiple subsites which are all managed from a single control panel. For example, on my site, there are three sections: the main site, my weblog (http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/), and my webcomic (http://beesbuzz.biz/d/). Each of those use separate template sets, designed around the needs of each section.

I do use rather a lot of PHP in my templates to add things which aren't straightforward in Movable Type, however, but the basic templates are all using Movable Type's own markup language, and there isn't anything fundamental to my site which absolutely requires PHP (aside from how I use phpBB as the comment engine instead of MT's built-in one). The main use of PHP is to allow me to delay-publish entries in the future without using MT's own scheduling interface, which doesn't show a "live" preview of how things will work within the templates (I have a separate template for previewing my pending entries).