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Automating things By: Mark Morgan on 5/1/2000; 5:45 PM Listen (Aradia) all you web site creators (Matthew Patterson) who are doing things the hard way. Stop! I swear, I'm going to get everyone to love Conversant as much as I do. Over the weekend, they announced a site privacy feature, because a couple of us asked for it. But that's not the coolest thing. They released a table of contents feature today. I generated this site's Site Map with it in about ten seconds. No, I'm not kidding. It will be a bit more to format it the way I want, but it's done. I'm also hoping to leverage it into a tool to automatically generate the index pages under "essays" and "fiction" and "poetry." This site's going to pretty much run itself here by the end of the day. Or would you like to keep doing everything the hard way? Sign up for hosting now, or pull all your stuff and put it here and I'll do all the work. But stop killing yourself hand coding every freaking page whenever you want to turn the navbar from emerald to sea green.
RE: Automating things By: Aradia on 5/1/2000; 9:26 PM Hey, Morgan, there's a difference between doing things the hard way, and doing things the lazy way. I don't do things the hard way, I do them my way. Besides, I hate having uniform pages (I don't mind a uniform setup, though). Nyah nyah, Matthew, he mentioned me first! Btw, were you ever going to link Memories, or should I just delete the bloody thing?
RE: Automating things By: Mark Morgan on 5/2/2000; 12:00 AM I am, it's just been a busy time. This new indexing feature just arrived, and I'm trying to get them to modify it to do all the hard work for me. And as for doing it the lazy way, let me tell you, when you have to redo fifty pages because you've changed the logo, you'll appreciate things. There's nothing stopping you from doing every single page differently in Conversant. But the pages render instantly--no waiting for FTP. Want to move things around? Also instantly. Want to have every page indexed in a search engine? The Conversant search tool indexes your content (say it with me) instantly. Want to be able to edit your site from any internet-connected computer on the planet? Want to be able to view pages and messages from your site in a Usenet Newsreader like Outlook Express or Navigator's newsreader? Want to be able to send and receive messages to your site as e-mail? Want free, unlimited web space with no ads? With Crosswinds you get their dog-slow system. With your Webjump pages you get that insipid framing for their ads. Whether you pay or not you deal with none of that with Conversant. Want to be able to assign people you trust authority over different sections of your site? There's doing it the hard way, and there's doing it the right way. If you ever have a discussion board, you're going to find it's a bit of a pain to link it to your site. You know what I do to make talkback areas for stories and essays? Nothing. And I can customize the site within an inch of its life. It's as easy as filling in a form. Then I can get back to the business of creating content. Doing it the hard way wastes the valuable time you should be spending doing the writing you love. Why?
RE: Automating things By: Aradia on 5/2/2000; 1:11 AM Hey, Mr Dillingham, you really should hire Morgan to be a spokesman for Conversant. I can see it now: Posters on billboards, ads splashed over the 'net, all of Morgan with the same catchphrase - "Do it now!" And a big smile on Morgan's face, pointing directly to the Conversant logo. It would work, it really would. On the other hand, Morgan, since I don't touch Olendiak anymore, and I have no idea what Kevin wants to do about the Webjump site (which means I don't touch that either), I have no site to "do things the hard way." Which means that you get to display all of my strange writings. Unless that was some sort of blatant hint lacking the subtlety I was expecting to go and get my own site and use Conversant?
RE: Automating things By: Mark Morgan on 5/2/2000; 10:32 AM No, I meant Political Perspectives.
Re: Automating things By: Brian Carnell on 5/12/2000; 11:40 AM Mark Morgan wrote: I am, it's just been a busy time. This new indexing feature just arrived, and I'm trying to get them to modify it to do all the hard work for me.A very nice summary. I've been telling folks its an HTML version of Legos since you can mix and match the basic parts to build incredible things. But I also mean that, at least for me, using Conversant actually made updating my site enjoyable again. When I first started posting stuff on the web in 1996 it was awesome -- here was this new technology where I could write something and have it made available for reading around the world by practically anyone. Then after much stumbling and unplanned growth I found I had a 4,000+ or so page site that was a pain in the butt to keep updated. I found myself spending as much time maintaining the site as I did actually writing new content. The whole thing became a real drag. A lot of the things that Conversant does can be replicated with CGI scripts, but a) they're difficult to install and maintain and b) they generally don't connect to each other in consistent ways (my search engine and discussion groups don't know each other exist, for example). Conversant lets me do things in seconds that would have been far too
time consuming to even attempt otherwise, and I actually am back to enjoying
updating my website rather than seeing it as a dreary chore.
Re: Automating things By: Brian Carnell on 5/12/2000; 11:40 AM Mark Morgan wrote: I am, it's just been a busy time. This new indexing feature just arrived, and I'm trying to get them to modify it to do all the hard work for me.A very nice summary. I've been telling folks its an HTML version of Legos since you can mix and match the basic parts to build incredible things. But I also mean that, at least for me, using Conversant actually made updating my site enjoyable again. When I first started posting stuff on the web in 1996 it was awesome -- here was this new technology where I could write something and have it made available for reading around the world by practically anyone. Then after much stumbling and unplanned growth I found I had a 4,000+ or so page site that was a pain in the butt to keep updated. I found myself spending as much time maintaining the site as I did actually writing new content. The whole thing became a real drag. A lot of the things that Conversant does can be replicated with CGI scripts, but a) they're difficult to install and maintain and b) they generally don't connect to each other in consistent ways (my search engine and discussion groups don't know each other exist, for example). Conversant lets me do things in seconds that would have been far too
time consuming to even attempt otherwise, and I actually am back to enjoying
updating my website rather than seeing it as a dreary chore.
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