What is Clay Basket?
What is Clay Basket?Welcome to Clay Basket!Clay Basket is a codename.
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Clay Basket is website management software for Macintosh content developers.
I like to think of Clay Basket users as sysops, like system operators of BBSs and local networks, the Internet has a culture of people who develop and manage. They build systems and make them work. The tools that sysops need are different from tools that users need. Clay attempts to bridge a gap, to make it possible to set up very powerful and quick systems for publishing on the web that are easy for writers to use.
You design a website as a Clay Basket outline with text files linked into the headlines. Configure Clay Basket to use your favorite HTML editor, like BBEdit or PageMill, or use the simple text editor built into Clay Basket.
You get automatic link management thru Clay's built-in glossary. High powered scripting interface. Templates for page layout give the designer total control over the appearance of each page. Text editing is easy for writers. It's very easy to reorganize your website. Manages a local Mac-served site, also includes FTP client software for managing remote websites.
It's an integrated development environment for websites, patterned after the powerful IDEs for professional programmers.
It's a public beta. It's free.
From previous releases...
You can use Clay Basket to edit the contents of Netscape's Bookmarks menu. You can also use it to record all the URLs you visit using Netscape. Because it's an outliner, you can organize and annotate your URLs. This can really boost your bandwidth in web browsing. If you've been somewhere, it's easy to get back there.
Clay Basket is a full-featured outliner. It has all the usual reorganization commands. Find and Replace. A new Look & Feel capability makes it easy to make very colorful and pretty outlines. It's fully scriptable using Frontier.
Philosophy of this product
The Internet can be viewed as a bunch of hierarchies. The web is a hierarchy, FTP archives are hierarchies. So are Bookmarks menus. Your email inbox and outbox are hierarchies. And so is your website. Outliners are great hierarchy editors. Clay Basket is an outliner extended to manage the hierarchies of the Internet. It's an online outliner. As we evolve the product we're extending its reach into more an more of the hierarchies of the net, both for browsing and for development.
We're focusing on the needs of a specific community -- web content developers who use Macintoshes. This is a very broad group of people, ranging from people who do production work for newspapers to reporters and editors and even novelists, poets and song writers. Since web publishing is a new activity, there's lots of room for innovation and not much competiton. So it's a great place for us to be creative with our software.
We're also focusing on script writers and system developers. There are lots of hooks into Clay Basket, inline macros, a glossary for link management, and it's a fully scriptable application. It has a great connection with our own Frontier and Apple's AppleScript.
It's also about making money too, someday. For now Clay Basket is free. We want the most people possible to benefit from its power. We think our software is the best, and we think you'll think so too. We want to make sure you use it. There will be opportunities in the future to create a commercial version of Clay Basket with extra features and performance for professional users who want a supported product and a relationship with a company.
If you like Clay Basket and want to help, spread the word.
A framework for website design
Clay Basket is a framework for website design and management. We took the same project management idea implemented by integrated development environments ("IDEs") for C programmers and applied it to the task of building websites. It's all held together with an outline, of course.
In Clay Basket, you use your favorite tools to edit text and pictures, and use Clay Basket to link it all together. When you want to see how a page works in the web, put your cursor on it, flip a switch, Netscape shows you what the page will look like. All in a second or two.
You can iterate over your site, quickly trying out new ideas. Because Clay Basket is a totally programmable environment, there really are no limits to the kind of website you can generate. But the complexities can neatly hidden behind macros. With a minimum of training, even editorial people can achieve masterful results with Clay Basket.
Punchline: Clay Basket can be used to build the most interesting, easy to use, most comprehensive and feature-rich websites.
See the corresponding DaveNet piece
I wrote about free software in my Geeks Rule the World DaveNet essay, released on October 25, 1995.
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This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Mon, Jul 22, 1996 at 10:37:40 PM. Thanks for checking it out! Dave |