Uechi-Ryu.com

A thought and a request for written thoughts:

The weird things that the new Netscrape 6.xx does to my website [sometimes...] caused me to take a close look at my Visual Uechi Ueb Builder and start writing code to accommodate this madness.

What's happening is that the builder is becoming much more generic than I had envisioned when I started writing it. It is approaching, and can be brought to a level, in which a generic martial arts website can be built and embellished into the specific without any knowledge of HTML, Java, or CSS.

My questions are: Would such a program be feasibly marketable? Are there enough people out there who wish they could put up their own karate website but don't know how to but would if they did? Even build a custom website for their own home office if they are not interesting in publishing it on the internet?

I ask because if there is a "decent" interest, I'd rather incorporate extra "stuff" into the current revamp rather than retrofit it later.

Responses?


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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

Sounds like a winner Al. Do you edit or build your site using FTP? If you do, your program should take into consideration the people who need your help probably know very little about what to do with the material, once it is ready to be uploaded.

I use FrontPage, which has many limitations, but allows me to edit on-line, in html mode or in a window that lets you see the results as you edit. These tools are perfect for the neophite webmaster-wannabes.

Tell us more though...

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GEM

Having it do ftp is no problem, George.

What I am doing is writing a GUI-based website management tool that will be simple to use, yet elegant in the results it will provide using the KISS principle. NOT an HTML tag generator, Front Page is a good example of something I DON'T want. It can do some pretty weird stuff to the code.

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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

Sounds interesting Al. . . With everyone doing their own websites, such a tool should prove helpful.

Notice how the "free" offers are beginning to dwindle? Seems as though the e-biz industry are evolving into the next step of their marketing plans: ****** the consumers into accepting their free websites, email addresses, etc., then when they are hooked, hit them with the new and improved "fee based" generation of services.

I was happily using a free store for two years. This all ended when Freemerchant was sold. Now, I have been offered the opportunity to pay $30/month for what formally was free. My choice is to redo all the work on another shopping cart or pay the ransom. Unfortunately, all the reasonably priced shopping carts require heavy knowledge of programming, whereas my (now) expensive cart program is all menu based and simple to use.

My point in all this is that your (allan's) web creation program won't be as popular with people who are getting their 10 page website and creation software that is browser based; but as these free offers disappear, those who graduate to regular paid services, will welcome user friendly programs for building their webs.

As the e-biz shakeout continues, the survivors will either be doing their own programming (like Al does now) or will be people like me, with a moderate amount of programming knowledge and who will need user friendly programs like FrontPage (with it's problems) or similar but better programs like the kind Al envisions.

Best,
George

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote

Sounds interesting Al.

The economy is going south real fast, George, and I need to hone a few rusty skills to keep myself marketable when the fit hits the shan. Greenspan’s little speech the other day failed to impress me and as I see the dominoes start to fall all over software-land.

So the driving force between this one contains several closely-coupled reasons for doing the venture as I prepare to do battle in the consulting world with younger less-experienced s/w engineers in a world controlled by the laws of supply-and-demand. That’s my impetus, and I’ve got to move fast to get to where I want to go.

The spin-off from this will be a website management product which I am already using in bits and pieces, but needs to me molded into bug-free user-friendly package.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote

Notice how the "free" offers are beginning to dwindle? Seems as though the e-biz industry are evolving into the next step of their marketing plans: ****** the consumers into accepting their free websites, email addresses, etc., then when they are hooked, hit them with the new and improved "fee based" generation of services.

Remember when data on the net was free, George? Sources of valuable free information are quickly drying up.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote

I have been offered the opportunity to pay $30/month

That’s a good one, George. Really a bad one, but the way you wrote it is a dry way of describing the direction things are going. When the gov’t starts taxing internet business, you may see the return of the Bradlees’ the Office Maxes, the Leechmere’s, etc.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote

My point in all this is …will welcome user friendly programs for building their webs.

The challenge to me is to make it user-friendly.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote

similar but better programs

Remember in the old days, George, when you wanted to build something you sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil in hand and started making a list or an indented list of the materials you wanted, particulars about the materials, wrote down what you wanted it to look like in narrative form? I’m thinking of this piece of paper right now. “I want a website. One main page. Ten pages off the main page. This is what I want to write on the third page. In the top-right is where I want to put that picture of cousin sue…”

Ok, instead of a piece of paper you type it into a computer. “The name of my URL is uechi-ryu.com. The title of the main page is Eastern Arts OnLine Magazine. I want the page separated into three columns with a nice menubar at the top. For pictures, I want three at the top right, arranged …..”

You get the idea. Whether it could become popular? Who knows, but ME, I want to write down a shopping list of what I want, how I want it, hand it to my friend Mr. Thunderbird Senior sitting next to me, and say will you have this done for me in a few minutes? And by the way, I’m going downstairs for a coffee. Could you ftp it to my website for me and have it all tested by the time I come back. If there is anything wrong, please leave me a note so either you or I or the both of us can fix it and pretty it up if necessary. [Thunderbird is the CPU in the PC]

THAT’s what I want to do for myself, and if I can make it interesting for others to spend $50 to save $1,000 or something like that, then I’ve got something marketable. If not, I’ve put my time and effort in the direction to help keep me off the bread lines when time get tough again. I promised a screen up yesterday, and completed the Table Configurator portion of it this morning, a “proof-of-concept” thing that shows automatically generated code and provides an opportunity to touch it up. As is, it generates a nice webpage after it grabs the desired data from the database. Building a GUI is fast so this one will change or it may not even exist by the time I’m finished.

The next step for this baby is to grab data from an Access database, which it already does, or it could be convinced into accepting a comma-delimited list data structure as its database, and generate the pages then merge them into the rest of the website if it os with the website manager. If I say “Use Java” or “Use CSS” [coming next], in the meantime, it’ll make some “intelligent” decisions on its own and pick what’s appropriate from a library and rebuild itself. Etc, etc.

The fun part will be when I connect the pc up to a microphone and start speaking the commands and requests and watch the behavior of this little… [no, I won’t say it], Jewel.
http://www.uechi-ryu.ws/stuff/volatile/gemforum/dojolynxpagesetup.gif


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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

Some of the "formerly" free web server hosts were offering programs to build a site which was menu driven. Very simple and surprisingly feature rich.

And it was all done from your browser!

Front Page is a piece of cake allen. It would be hard to top that! Not to mention, it, as well as DreamWeaver do not alter existing code.

Hi George, Tony.

I guess I'm pretty much into writing code, Tony. Designing code is all about figuring things out and solving, sometimes unsolvable, problems in a logically well-defined manner as well as it burns-off excess creativity which sometimes bubbles over. It's a way of thinking which I enjoy to the extent that this is how I make my living. I'd rather be out exploring caves or climbing mountains, but without a good pair of legs, this'll do; it pays the bills.

Almost no one in the world can top Microsoft's products, so I'm not going in that direction. I've got Front Page on one of my office sets, I think it is Office 97, but I loaded it only once, a few years ago, and wasn't interested in it.

Now, in terms of Front Page, when my server pointed uechi-ryu.ws at it, they added parallel directories for front page extensions. For what reason I don't know; the dumb answer was that I was going to need it if I used front-page to develop my webpages with -- faulty assumption. However, what they did effectively almost doubled my server disk usage, putting me over the top of my megs limit and I had to have the ISP wipe out my entire website then I had to start from scratch.

I know exactly what I want and how to code it for my website; I like the feeling of close-to-the-bone control of writing my own code, even when I screw up. With a large commercial tool I'm insulated from that. Same thing as when I was a kid and liked to rebuild cars and see how fast they would go; part of my personality; this must be the symbolic way that I get cyber 90-weight gear-grease and rustoleum primer gets under my fingernails and all over my cyber tank-top.



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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

Allen,

I can dig that. I'm gonna write a style sheet once I figure out how I want my site to look and reference all my pages to it. Should give me alot of control also. I like your utility though, it's very cool! Why don't you submit it to www.nonags.com or something and see how it does?

Style Sheets are cool.

Just got back from nonags. I scanned the list of HTML editors and the list is lengthy; everyone and his brother writes one. However if I went down the list looking at them to attempt to determine if one of them fit my needs, I wouldn't have time to develop my own.

However, I did read this about EasyASP for you: <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote

EasyStyle is a style sheet (.css) editor, with a point-click interface that greatly simplifies .css development.

There ya go, Tony. Maybe this one can teach an interested party how to do style sheets...

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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

Coming back atcha Tony, I couldn't resists scanning that site, and went down that even lengthier list "HTML Tools Download" page and have written many of those types of tools on the fly and have thrown them away after I got what I wanted out of them, not realising anyone else could be interested in such tools.

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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

Gooey GUI!

Got the [forseeably] most difficult portion of my little cruncher program debugged and loaded the results up a few minutes ago. Finally after six years I’m edging closer to fully automating my website. A sample of the results of what I did this weekend is at

http://www.uechi-ryu.ws/dojolist/north_carolina/

with a link to the GUI part. I LOVE that state flag. It has to be my favoritest out of all 51.

Now I've got to clean it up and fix the database up a little, but next week, or tomorrow even if we get the promised 3-day Nor'easter. It’ll be mild, but I’m excited because I haven’t seen a good-ole New England snowstorm in awhile.

I have on my agenda to get <font color=red>RedHat</font> when I'm done with the windows side of things and re-write the GUI part under Linux. They are close enough to having sufficient tools, but an awful lot of GUI stuff is handled by MFC internals that I am going to be forced into writing and developing my own API for. That's what I do not look forward to doing, but Linux is coming down the pike to a pc near you [many of them, actually], and will do so within a few years. Got to keep marketable. One more wave...


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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera