[ale] Linux Website Builder

[Steve Litt]

On Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:30:31 +0000
"Robert L. Harris" <robert.l.harris at gmail.com> wrote:

>    Finally looking to update a VERY out of date website.  It
> currently uses shtml and CSS pages and I would like to find a WYSIWYG
> tool that'll do complete editing of the site, not one page at a time
> or a page without formatting etc.

Be careful what you wish for. 1996-2012 I authored Troubleshooters.Com
with a succession of WYSIWYG editors: Netscape Gold, Netscape
Communicator, Mozilla whatever, Bluegriffon. Then, when encountering a
distro lacking in any working WYSIWYG HTML editor, I used Bluefish,
which, as you mention, is just a text editor with zencoding and
autocompletion and a few other HTML syntax knowledgeable helpers.

And sometimes I had to edit pages made with the WYSIWYG programs, and
holy crow what a mess. Tags thrown everywhere. Wrong tags, wrong use of
tags, long-ago-deprecated tags. I mean really, <a name="whatever">.
What century was that deprecated in?

And this had consequences. For instance, Google recently boosted
rankings for sites that are "mobile friendly", and business is
business, so I had to make my most trafficked pages (and all new
construction) "Mobile ready". For sites constructed with hand-picked
HTML in Bluefish, it was pretty easy. For sites made with Mozilla
compozer and Kompozer and Bluegriffon and all the rest of the WYSIWYG
nonsense, it was impossible. I had to either not change them, or
rewrite them from scratch.

Yeah, WYSIWYG helps you get a page created pretty fast. But code in
haste, repent in leasure.

> 
>    I looked at bluefish but that doesn't seem to load full
> pages/styles. For instance if I load the index.shtml I get the basic
> background and nav bar but no text.  If I load the main page
> ( included by index.shtml ) I get no formatting, style, etc.

Like you said, Bluefish is just a text editor with some HTML smarts and
helpers.

>    It was originally created with VI but I'd rather try out a
> comprehensive tool before I go back to that route.

Vim has some zencoding plugins that make your task easier, but I'd
recommend Bluefish. 

By the way, I'm coding my pages to Xhtml 4 strict, which in Bluefish is
just a matter of a quick and simple wizard. With an Xhtml website,
which I make sure is well formed XML, I can test with a little XML
checker I made with Python. No matter how well it renders in the
average browser, I don't upload it until it passes that XML check.

One more thing: As you get more and more used to using CSS for
appearance, and using attribute-less tags, makes HTML coding much
easier and more maintainable.
> 
> Suggestions?


Bluefish is working for me. It's working so well that I just authored
my last book in Bluefish and used a Python program to convert it to
pure, validated ePub:

http://troubleshooters.com/twb/

SteveT

Steve Litt
June 2016 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother?
http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb