I’m sitting in the Austin airport right now, leaving SXSW early (insert big frowny face here), thinking about the last panel that I sat in on today. Steven Champeon talked about non-traditional web design, but it wasn’t design in the sense that everyone talks about — he was talking about true design, from the back end all the way to the user experience, including the structure of a site, the storage system that holds the site’s text and image and whatnot, and the way that that raw data flows from that system out to the user as a palatable document.

At some point in the 75 minutes, I started wondering if I was outgrowing the system that I’ve set up — Manila, with a few custom extensions and whatnot — and how I could go about both setting up a new one and get my data into it. Userland seems to be making a clear move towards Radio, with features that aren’t in Manila (and that it isn’t clear will be in Manila), but that I want in order to implement some of my ideas. Maybe it’s time to start programming my own; we’ll see.