Looking at the dismal state of affairs for my family website (hand coded in vim), I decided to replace the entire thing with something easy to maintain, looks nice, and allowed me to easily upload pictures, videos, and news. I decided on the following setup:

1. Main site - Wordpress 2.x for how easy it is to post content, there are a million themes, and has many plugins available.
2. Pictures - Gallery, using the excellent Gallery2Wordpress integration. I also downloaded the iPhoto plugin for Gallery, which makes publishing pictures easy. You can also use the Gallery Remote application.
3. Video - I am using Rossgerbasi.com’s Extreme Video plugin for Wordpress.
4. Subscribers - Using the Subscriber 2.0 plugin for Wordpress allows me to have a list of email addresses to send content whenever I post a new message (since most of the family does not use RSS).

My publishing workflow consists of the following:

1. Upload pictures using Gallery or upload video.

2. Create a new post in Wordpress with a link to the new album or video.

3. Publish

There are obvious replacements to the above if you don’t want to host the pictures or video on your own website. The most common replacements are Flickr for photos (using the Wordpress Flickr integration) and using YouTube to host the video (you can use the Extreme video plugin still for this). For video, I just download the video to iMovie and export it as a Quicktime video for web (or Flash video because I have Flash MX Pro).

So far, this has proved very reliable, easy to maintain, and I get a bunch of comments from friends and family about the pictures and video.

I have been working with Wiki’s a lot more recently for documentation, website creation, and more. The flexibility and the publishing workflow that comes with it makes it very powerful collaboration tool. Many IT shops that I have seen are using Wiki’s for documentation. There are even some, like Trac, that integrate wiki in with subversion and bug fixes for code development (very cool).

However, I have a wish that I think will transform how many businesses could work. I think that someone should combine an online document processor like Writely or AjaxWrite, spreadsheets like Wikicalc, and a presentation package like Thumbstacks and put it all into a Wiki. Then package the entire thing as a bootable Linux Live CD and you have an almost instant web-based collaboration environment.

Most businesses that I have seen spend an enormous amount of time creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that house the majority of the day-to-day information collected, processed, and then saved during the workday. Most of these businesses toss these files on a shared folder somewhere and then use a directory server to control access. Then they have to implement VPNs for access from home or other offices, taped backup procedures to archive incremental changes, spend man hours to recover from accidentally removed or edited files from the file server, and so forth. Worse, many companies also have Intranet’s that provide a lot of information that is often duplicated on a shared drive somewhere, or linked from the Intranet.

The idea to combine typical office documentation with a wiki solves many of these problems. A wiki already indexes the content, users can determine how to best organize that information, it is saved incrementally so it can be rolled back, and collaboration becomes much easier. It is cross-platform, and can even have access restrictions on groups of people who can edit. There are RSS feeds to inform on regular updates, and some wikis like MediaWiki have a great API to build any extension that can plug right into the wiki, making it infinitely expandable.

Wiki’s right now can do some of this, especially for documentation. However, one of the reasons why I use Wordpress for my blog is that it is easy to use to publish information. Wiki syntax is beyond some of the less technical or stubborn people in an infrastructure. However, if wikis use an interface that people are used to, one that looks similar and functions similar to MS Word or OpenOffice, then I believe adoption would be simpler. Combine that with spreadsheet and presentation software, then I believe you have something very powerful.
That is my rant. I am sure I am not the only person to think of this. Post comments/flames below if you have any ideas on this.