this is sippey.com

Editor’s note: This week, I kvetch. So if you’re not interested in hearing me kvetch, well, then, tough. Also, even though I own a Mac, I use my Windows machine to build my site. So all of the comments here are based on the things I want for the Wintel platform. So there, you’ve been warned.

As you can probably imagine, I have a Sunday night ritual. I boot up the PC, hog the phone line for a few hours connected to the net, tap away in my HTML editor, check the results my browser, and eventually publish (useless) nuggets of information for an adoring fan-base of screaming teenagers. Or something like that.

It looks simple, and it is simple. My content changes weekly, not daily or hourly like most of the high traffic sites. And even though I’m coming up on my one year Obvious anniversary, I only have about 50 files all told; I’m not managing a 500 or 1,000 or 50,000 page site. And the last time I checked my entire site takes up something like 500kb.

But it’s still a mess. Most of the process of writing, tagging and managing the Obvious is manual. When I redesigned and rearchitected my site a few weeks ago, I had to manually change each page, making sure that the internal links pointed to the right places, and that the tables flowed correctly. Even with the small number of pages I have, it took half a day of mind numbing work.

It happens that some major (and not so major) companies on the web are trying to solve these problems – to make it easy to create, manage and update a site.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that NetObjects, a startup with some impressive backing from IBM and UUNET, will introduce “Fusion” today (the 29th), a “fill-in-the-blank” web site builder. As I write this, NetObjects’ web site is just a big tease: “You used to think HTML was cool. You spent 12 hours building tables. YOU KNOW there must be a better solution. Come back on the 29th and find out the rest of the story.” The big story – Netscape is planning on co-marketing the product on their web site, as an easy way for corporations to hang the proverbial shingle on the infobahn.

NetObjects is just the lastest entry in an already crowded field. Microsoft is giving away FrontPage, the repackaged Vermeer product they purchased earlier this year. FrontPage has excellent site management tools. Need to see a hierarchical view of all your pages? No problem – FrontPage will show it to you in star diagram or in outline form. Very slick. Need to move a page, or change an internal link? No problem – FrontPage will automatically adjust them on the fly.

The problem with FrontPage (and other products like it) is that it has poor HTML manners. Its WYSIWYG authoring environment talks down to the user, hiding the HTML like rotting drywall behind a fresh coat of paint. Anyone that has been publishing on the web for more than a year has probably more than a passing knowledge of HTML, and would be horrified by the quality of the code that these products produce. I used Netscape’s Navigator Gold for all of one week before I realized that it was leaving empty bold and italic tags all over my documents. Heck, there’s a small army of tools whose sole purpose is to clean up the output of Adobe’s PageMill.

On the other end of the spectrum are plenty of low cost, usually independently produced applications which offer souped up text editing facilities for creating HTML. Few of these offer the site management tools that the “big boys” offer, and many of them are chock full of bugs, which can make Sunday night writing a frustrating exercise in rebooting the machine time after time.

So. What do I want? I want the the site management tools of the more advanced products, combined with a sophisticated HTML editing environment. It should have the following features:

• Manual HTML editing. I enjoy tagging. I enjoy being able to manually tweak the look and feel of my pages. I’m comfortable with plain old ASCII. But I want more than just text editing. I want floating toolbars, with user-definable buttons. I want color syntax highlighting, so I can separate my text from my tags. I want true indentation, like any good programming tool has.

• Templates. Not just file templates, but header, footer or paragraph templates for inside a document. I want to be able to “build” a page on the fly, with HTML from different templates flowed into a single page.

• URL Database. Why should I have to hand-code URLs that I continuously use? And why should I have to check periodically to make sure they still exist? I know that Dave Winer’s Frontier has a great object database that can be called from BBEdit, but alas, I’m not interested in using a dying platform for my website building.

• Automation. Every week I have some basic tasks: take the main Obvious page, archive it, add a new archive index entry, and start a new main page. Why can’t I automate that? And after it’s all ready, why can’t I automate FTP’ing it all up to theobvious.com?

Ok, </kvetch>. But I’m honestly hoping that someone (please, anyone) will find a market for a toolset that looks something like the above. It will be the perfect tool for half-serious geeks, folks who want to code manually, but automate site production without having to learn Perl.