When I started American Antigravity in 2002, I had to dig to find information. There was little in the news, and most of my leads came from the newsgroups....we'd go months on end without anything significant happening, which was fine because the site was focused around my own research & experiments. American Antigravity wasn't a news-website: we focused on showcasing breakthroughs that the mainstream press never paid attention to.

By the beginning of 2005, it had become apparent that American Antigravity required a new facelift...something larger than adding a cleaner page-template for new material, and more manageable than our 200+ pages held together by a Dreamweaver-managed directory structure. Within 3 years, we'd gone from a specialty research-site to being the primary news-source for bleeding-edge space technologies online. It wasn't about "digging to find stories" anymore -- these days, it was about controlling the flood of new material from conferences, inventors, startup-companies, and government projects that we were now privy to.

In July, I seriously began looking at "Content Management Systems" for managing the diverse content from hundreds of people doing research into gravity-modification. Simply put, we were a victim of our own success -- in that by starting the revolution in science, we now had to manage, archive, and correlate all of the information that we were generating. Managing all of this wonderful information means building better tools, allocating user logins, etc....the very things that I'd been interested in to better manage our content back at AT&T Wireless.

I already knew what didn't work -- or at least what wouldn't work for me.

The Enterprise Mission: (click here) Richard C. Hoagland's "Face on Mars" hypothesis made him a highly-controversial figure in the alt-science community, and his frequent appearances on the Coast to Coast AM Radio Show gave him access to a multi-million person annual audience. We should be so lucky, right? However, the Enterprise Mission suffered from issues in managing content because it was built around a static html model for pages, which meant that he had the same problems managing data that I did.

In early July, Hoagland's webmaster had technical issues that prevented him from updating the website on a show-night: Hoagland was in a bind, and asked me to publish part 6 of his Iapetus story online. I was happy to help, but it outlined the issues relating to ease-of-publication for Hoagland's research, and as result I felt compelled to build him "The Captain's Blog", which is now one of the main features of the website.

The Captain's Blog was ultimately successful for two reasons: first, it gives his audience a consistent user interface, and second, it automatically manages his content. He logs into a special web-interface and types in his posting, and it automatically appears on the blog-page with no code-related hassles. Even the graphics are managed automatically, giving him an easy way to publish data without dealing with managing it thereafter.

The Captain's Blog is a single-page blog, though -- it doesn't offer any type of real content-management, other than automatically archiving the blog postings. However, being able to see how much more productive it made Hoagland gave me a new impetus to begin refocusing my vision on building something similar for American Antigravity. Thus, the search for "Content Management Systems" began...

Pure Energy Systems: (click here) Sterling D. Allan runs one of the premiere new-energy websites on the planet, and takes his job of reporting the daily news very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he decided to manage the enormous amount of news he was generating through a Wiki-System that he built into "Pure Energy Systems" website. Wiki is well-known for being a user-driven website, but at the same time suffers from some flaws in terms of separating the writers from the audience. (Why Wiki Sucks...)

Open Source Energy Network: (click here) Sterling had later thrown in with Mathew Carson from the Disclosure Project to build the OSEN online portal. This is a great tool, but it's built around the Microsoft Sharepoint application, which meant that simple adjustments to code now required a programming team & lots of money. Since Carson owns NetroMedia, he can donate time & money from an existing programming staff to build and manage the Sharepoint system, but for the rest of us it's not quite that easy...

ZPEnergy.com: (click here) Vlad's ZPE-Energy portal is probably the most successful approach to content management I'd seen thus far, but it's built around the Php-Nuke platform, which is versatile but difficult to customize. What I mean by difficult is that Php-Nuke is so flexible that it's tough to really define the unique look & feel for a website, which ends up looking similar to every other Php-Nuke driven website on the planet. Also, one of the real challenges around Php-Nuke is that it's far too easy for simply anybody to begin posting, which means that if your website didn't start out as a messageboard to begin with, it will rapidly become one if you base it on the Nuke platform.

American Antigravity needs to be different -- to be the unique gem that it's really become. While all of the websites I've mentioned above do great work, none of them are AAG. Was our goal to spend years building a unique interface to the Antigravity community only to have it disappear as a clone of somebody else's site, or was it to make something good even better through a new CMS-interface?

Thus, I now unveil our new ArticleLive platform. It's not perfect, but it meets our needs, and hopefully meets yours as well. The goal is to build something that looks good, works well, and automatically manages our content.....because as Antigravity comes of Age, we have lots of new content to manage!