looking for a few good ideas
  amongst the irregular verbiage

A new publishing tool

Fri, 11 January 2002 04:34

You may notice some changes in style to the Dispatch. This is probably due to the fact that I have changed how I write the letters.

Originally, I would wait until I felt guilty that I hadn't written, and then spend a Saturday remembering everything that happened since the last letter, using photos and stuff to jog my memory. Usually this was synchronised with updating out family photo album online.

Then I started an archive web site of my family letters. Soon afterwards, my dispatches turned into web pages that were then emailed out to everyone.

So, starting this month, I am using CityDesk . It's a pretty cool little tool. Basically it uses a database to store the "articles" and then provides a simple scripting language to generate the web site. I was very tempted to write something like it in FoxPro, but I must be getting old because this tool seems to do everything I could possibly need to do, and it's free for personal use.

The side effect of this is that the dispatch will become much more like a diary than before, because I'll be posting diary entries as "articles" every other day and then publishing a monthly summary rather than writing it all at once.

Hopefully this won't make the end result sound any more impersonal and introspective than it did before.

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