Converting Robertmoir.co.uk to CityDesk

I hate html

You know I usually hate working on web site stuff. I enjoy helping others, and I put stuff on the web like this site so that when I hit upon something worth saving and repeating I only have to paste it up here and just hand out links But writing out web pages is a drag. It seems that no matter what I do, no matter how I try to use a nice template for my layout, there is always something "not quite right" when I put the page up on the screen and check it. Hrmph.

All I want to do is write or often just cut and paste something else I've already written in another source into a web page. Sounds easy right? Wrong. Why do I always end up spending 4 hours worrying about why a table won't quite render correctly? This was my official excuse for the updates on this web site being so few and far between.

Something new

One of the web sites I always try to find time to visit is Joel Spolsky's "Joel On Software". This guy always has something interesting to say about software development and project management. Some time ago he announced that his company were working on a new web design/content management tool that would make things easy for people like me to "just write" and publish without having to fiddle around with html on every single page. Was I interested? You bet! Has it made a difference? Since getting CityDesk, I have probably written something on my site every day because it is just as easy as typing something into Word. I don't always publish every day, but then I have a few weird ISP issues to sort out sometime.

4 pages

At the time I started writing this article I have had to make 4, count them, f-o-u-r html pages for this whole site. One index page, one "home page" for both of my two sections, and one

template that all my articles use. Even I can cope with that! Of course, I may have to stretch to a whole five html pages by the time I've finished the site because I am considering a different layout for the two main sections, so they'll each need their own template.

Fast enough for you?

CityDesk is very quick. I've got the 4 html pages and 8 articles online in the time it would normally take me to do one or two pages by conventional methods. For pulling over old material from the old site, cut and paste works just fine (you do have to be careful not to grab the table layouts though!) and for new content, like this article you are reading right now, you can just type away into a window that looks like wordpad on steroids. If you are comfortable with Windows, and you can write a letter in Word, you are already a Citydesk user! This rules! It's the best "1.0" version software I have seen in a long time.

It's not perfect, of course. You can't set targets on URL links from within the main editor window, unless you change to HTML view, and as you can see from the URL above it generates "weird" URLs [n.b. both problems have been FIXED in the most recent update to CityDesk], and there are other bits and pieces that I would like to see added eventually. I also don't think it's an ideal tool for teaching web design, because it hides all the complexity of putting up a decent sized website from the user. Of course, if all you want to do is write and you don't actually care how it all works as long as it does.. hmmm which I would imagine describes most people... then it's wonderful!

You can download a free trial (up to 50 objects in a website) version of CityDesk from the Fog Creek website.

Top