Music Plug; HTML Editor Update

Posted on March 10, 2003    Posted by John Scalzi

A couple of random notes, which may or may not be of interest to you.

* My pal Joe Rybicki has a band called Johnny High Ground, and he’s written a tune that’s well likely to become the rock anthem for the “no war” crowd, called “Trigger-Happy Texan.” You can guess who it’s about. Putting on my music critic hat, I think it’s both tuneful and thoughtful, and doesn’t let its message get in the way of being a song you’d want to listen to. So I recommend it to everyone, even if you’re under the impression Bush actually knows he’s doing (or, alternately, if you think Bush hasn’t a clue what he’s doing, but don’t mind popping Saddam).

It’s here — scroll down to the bottom of the page for the streaming audio (there’s a hi-fi and lo-fi version).Then hop up and down and make your own mosh pit right there at work. Your boss will love you!

* A couple of weeks ago, I declared the end of my use of Microsoft products, when/if there was a viable alternative product — the cause for this being a ham-handed maneuver by MS to block me from using my copy of Front Page 2000 (it wasn’t personal; they’d block anyone in my position apparently). The sort-of boycott is still in effect, although it’s not without its difficulties. For example, the simple matter of finding a viable alternative HTML editor has been something of a headache.

The fact is that I don’t need a particularly sophisticated editor — the code on this site is kept intentionally clean and minimal, because I’m not the sort of person to geek out for hours on it, and because on occasion I like to change the look of the site. Front Page was in fact much more editor than I needed (I got it specifically for its ease in putting in headers, so I wouldn’t have to create a new one for every Web page I created).

This means that it doesn’t make much sense for me to spend hundreds of bucks to shell out for another massively full-featured Web design product, of whose features I will end up not using 99%. But the flip side problem of this is that most really basic WYSIWYG editors are kind of crappy and kludgy — really no fun to work in.

This was surprisingly the case with Mozilla’s built-in HTML editor, which is, sad to say, truly poorly designed. For example, Mozilla’s html editor doesn’t let you select something as simple as a font, and that’s just really stupid (alternately, it may, but the point of fact is you can’t do it easily, with a drop down menu or whatever. If a feature is not immediately obvious, one can argue it’s not really a useful feature). For another, it doesn’t have a spellcheck. I may write for a living, but my spelling stinks, and I’d prefer not to make that any more obvious than I have to.

My immediate solution is to go back to an HTML editor I know has the features I want without the headaches I don’t — the “Composer” feature on the Netscape 4.6 client. I think it’s a little sad that I have to reach back three years to find a suitable HTML editor, but I don’t know if it’s sad because there’s no decent basic WYSIWYG html editor available today, or because I’m so pathetic in my Web design that I have to use a clunky old editor in order to feel comfortable.

Some people have suggested that I get with the 21st century and use one of the Blog generators, such as Blogger or Moveable Type, but I’m fairly unmoved by the ones I’ve seen. As I understand them, both those (and other similar products/services) would route my content through an unrelated site in order to be updated, and that’s never any good. Also, I’ve used the Movable Type interface for Blogcritics, and I just don’t like it. That’s the problem with being picky. The benefit of doing that stuff is then I could take advantage of the latest stuff like RSS and XML and blah blah blah, but as you can guess I pretty much fundamentally don’t give a crap about anything like that. People find the site just fine, even with basic HTML.

Fact is, I just want something I can type into, upload, and then forget about. The whole point of doing this stuff is that it’s easy to do. If it’s not, then why bother?