I am, I confess, easily bored, and more easily distracted. Shiny things seize my attention, although "shiny" often comes in the form of a peculiar new corrosion that intrigues me. This struggle is one of the reasons for my lack of formal education: I cannot attend school and work at the same time. It takes most of my energy to maintain enough focus to keep a roof over my head.

But I've published tens of thousands of words on this site over the years, and I'd like to make some of them more accessible. I am also tired of the way Hidden City looks and need to refresh things a bit. While my migration to the "new Blogger" was uneventful, I am finding myself a bit hobbled by it.

So I've spent the last couple of months auditioning various content management systems for use here on Hidden City. Hosted systems and site installations both have been reviewed, and frankly, none of them really thrill me. Here's what I'm looking for in a content management system: flexibility, simplicity, ubiquity, portability, expandability. Is that too much to ask?

Well, yes, it seems. Part of my problem is that my desires outstrip both my needs and my reach. There would be something liberating about moving to a hosted system with limited options — just use a default template and type away! — and that's what I probably should do. After all, I'm a writer, and only the words should matter, right? But I know myself well enough to admit that I am too much of an auteur to ever be truly comfortable with letting someone else have control. Also, I admit I have trust issues with Internet companies. I've watched enough of them go out of business and take my data with them that even trusting Google with my words makes me uneasy. (Yes, I download my Gmail to a local drive, too.)

So after a tremendous amount of research and soul-searching I've decided on Textpattern, which is used on Critical Miami, albeit in a somewhat mutated form. It is highly idiosyncratic, using an arcane "simplified" markup language in the place of HTML, but is also tremendously versatile. However, it is a difficult system to master. While decent templates are available, there's little point in adopting a "plug and play" approach with something this versatile. Its complexities lend themselves more for a web-based magazine than a list of posts and archives, and it seems obvious to me that its target audiences are professional sites with paid editors and staff members, or people who live for the chance to tinker with PHP/MySQL code. If you just want to organize some words, it is probably overkill.

For a control-freak writer like me, though, who would fret endlessly about matters of cover art and book design, it looks like a pretty good fit. It doesn't meet all my criteria — it is far from simple, and my words will be stored in a database rather than plain text files — but it's the closest fit available for me.

Now all I need to do is pry some time and focus away from my job — managing an IT audit and co-producing an awards show while composing annual performance reviews for my team — and there will be a new version of Hidden City available.

One of these days, anyway.

My thanks to Alesh for his insight into Textpattern's capabilities. Oh, and my apologies in advance to Rick for forcing him to endure the Textile comment mark-up on another site.