Your answer is crucial to your success. I've just read a white paper written by Dave Winer, UserLand's president. Below, you'll find a link to that article and a short quote from the paper. You can ask for advice here using nothing but your web browser. Authoring advice works similarly.
Manila works in a very similar manner.
Two-way authoring is about to revolutionize the web. This has been available for several years, but the tools released in the last year or so have made it much easier to do, since you don't have to write the background software yourself. Late last year UserLand shipped Manila which is a browser-based content management system. Now there are approximately 15,000 Manila sites. And the growth is not just happening at UserLand.