Dynamic configuration of context-sensitive personal sites and membership channels

A personal site for organizing network content. The site includes one or more channels, and each channel is associated with sub-nodes. The channel is dynamically linked with the sub-nodes, and each sub-node can have one or more associated pages. The sub-nodes and the pages can include pointers to content such as uniform resource locators. Upon a user logging in, the site dynamically retrieves and builds a representation of the organized content and displays a node structure for the representation. The user can dynamically configure the representation by dragging and dropping items, such as content or network addresses, into the displayed node structure. The user can also specify master nodes for use in publishing content to user groups. The master nodes are copied, such as through dragging and dropping, into user groups, and each instance of the master node in the user groups inherits the user-specified properties of the master node. The user can also specify custom nodes having user-specified properties and fields, and can specify query nodes having search queries used to dynamically retrieve and expand sub-nodes for the query node.