As you might have noticed, this site is powered by Pier, a cool content management system.

Here are a couple of reasons why I think it is cool:

• It allows me to edit both the content and the look and feel from the browser,
• It offers a wiki syntax, but in the same time, it makes it easy for me to make the page look like a webpage, not like an ugly looking wiki,
• It is based on a handful of easy to grasp yet powerful concepts,
• It offers multi-user management,
• It offers several plugins like the blog or the bibliography list,
• It offers link preserving restructuring of the site,
• It is implemented in Smalltalk (Squeak to be more exact).

I strongly believe that your wishes are heavily influenced by the means you have at your disposal. Before using Pier, I found it cumbersome to publish and update online content. As a consequence I hardly put anything online, and my webpage was always a couple of months behind events.

Pier radically changed this for me because the cost of posting and maintaining content is close to zero. As a result, I now constantly update this page. In fact, I am now involved in maintaing several Pier pages besides this one:

• www.piercms.com is the official webpage of Pier
• moose.unibe.ch is the official webpage of the Moose analysis platform
• choose.s-i.ch is the official webpage of the Swiss Group for Object-Oriented Systems and Environments
• scglectures.unibe.ch/evo2008 is a recently launched website that will accompany my lecture on Software Evolution held at the university of Bern.

So, I recommend Pier both for a personal page and for a community-maintained web presence. Of course, I am biased (being involved in Pier), so do not just take my word for it, but take a look at the recently released Pier 1.0.17 and decide by yourself if it works for you.