By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

Five years ago I wrote my first Content Management System from ground the ground up. After forty-five days of coding day and night I diagnosed myself with ‘coder’s elbow’. The main symptom being a sharp and agonizing pain in on the inner elbow the ulna meets the humerus.

It was in the middle of one of these painful episodes that I was working on the database and the trying to figure out how I was going to transfer that content to the display layer that my a-ha moment occurred. I wasn’t building a content management system to circumvent the issues and limitations I was having with WordPress, I was creating a distribution tool.

Once I had the content in the database the display layer could be anything that I chose it to be. It could be sent anywhere that I choose. The greatest of all these bursting thoughts was that it could go places that I didn’t even intend it to. The content would have a life of its own. No more was I restricted by developing a site architecture and held to the constructs of a storyboard with A to B to C or D back to A.

With my coder’s elbow I went on another week long journey through RSS to make sure that the content would be in the right namespaces, that it could be personalized with unique URL elements, creating search and keyword feeds, developing feeds that could use Basic Auth to restrict usage and the holy grail of individual content metrics. Imagine throbbing pain in both of my elbows now as these feeds overtook my life.

What came from this platform was a CMS that I began licensing for professional development, blogging, podcasting and for real-time metrics (back in 2005). I literally began my first business with it and continued to use it and variants of it for startups and media companies like MTV.

One thing remained constant in all of these scenarios – syndication. Along with that syndication came the monitoring and proof that the programs and companies were getting the most value from the digital projects they had entrusted to me.

I decided to write this post and explain my process after I found a series of posts by Daniel Jacobson (@daniel_jacobson) from NPR. He was one of the individuals responsible for developing their robust, media rich API. It’s not an API that I have discussed here at Tech Startups because I don’t use it for any projects. I did test it when it launched and found it to be a great way to traverse NPR’s archives and deliver legacy content as if it were created that day. Daniel Jacobson gets it.

So to spare yourself a case coder’s elbow that could ruin your tennis game, you should start with Daniel’s COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere post. This will put you in the right frame of mind to follow with . . . wait – I’ll list them in order.

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization
Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4