Last month Kursor had the chance to ask some questions to Dean about weblogs, Open Source and Textpattern.
Thanks to Kusor and Dean, who gave permission to publish the short interview here on TXP Mag.

K: A good day, you decided day to start Textism, why a weblog?, merely fashion?

Dean: Honestly I didn’t have too much of an idea of what a weblog was when I started Textism. I was more interested in finding a way to keep discreet chunks of content separate from page layout, and, by extension, an easy interface to quickly record stupid ideas for the world to read. My previous site, Cardigan Industries, came into being because I thought I had some humorous things to day, but Textism came about because I wanted to play around with scripts and databases.

K: What tool did you use to handle Textism beginnings?

Dean: It’s rather like how Textpattern is today: the txp_users database table is only about 25% different from how it looked on the day I first designed it in 2001. Much more has expanded out of that, but the core ideas of what makes up an article are the same. As to the PHP that actually put the page together, I’d rather not even think what that looked like: a lot of clumsy parts put together from O’Reilly books.

K: Which are the needs that moves you to code the first Textpattern piece of code?

Dean: I always thought the most important thing for writers was to write, and not think about the tools they’re using. Textpattern was intended as a web writing tool, that would give little resistance to someone who simply wanted to publish regularly on the Internet. Its flowering as a ‘content management system’ came as a secondary by-product, though I’m very happy with how that’s turned out as well.

K: Why Open Source?

Dean: Well, I’m not unaware of my limitations as a programmer, and I’m constantly surprised by what my colleagues with a background in computing science are able to bring to the project. If it weren’t open source, Textpattern wouldn’t be constantly driven forward as it is now.

K: Your expectations – Textpattern related – for the next year?

Dean: We’re going to see how well it fits into some niche markets where it should do very well: with professional site developers and with people doing e-commerce sites. A turnkey, pre-installed weblog system is also in the works. Also, I’ve been promising people xml/rpc access to the application for about ten years…

K: How to get a bloggie? ;-). Seriously: do you plan to write again?

Dean: Yes!

[Kusor: Got the hint about XML-RPC. Is yet to come.]