Ryan Simms on BBEdit and Frontier

Ryan compares website building on a Mac with Windows NT.

From R.Sims@sc.edu, University of South Carolina:

I'm a die hard Mac user who recently graduated from college and entered the "real world". I've started to work at a web development company that is a total NT shop. The rest of the shop uses the standard assortment of tools - Photoshop, Freehand, Director, Cafe and the premier text editor on the NT platform - Notepad.

I'm lucky enough to have a PowerBook 5300 that I can bring in and work on. The reason - BBedit and Frontier. When I started working on NT, from day one I realized there was no toolset like those two. The production tools that do allow you to separate content from HTML structure cost lots of money and lack the seamless integration that Frontier adds to BBedit.

I love being able to set up a skeleton template and then fill in the blanks from Frotier's glossary. I store all of my client's copy in the Glossary - this keeps the structure separate from the content. It makes the copy an object and the html just a container. Lovely. And the ability to edit the Glossary directly in BBedit enables me to make quick changes to copy when a client requests them (as they often do).

I love the ability to create a doc so many different ways. I save my skeleton docs on my PowerBook.Then I zip them to a shared volume on the NT network with so little effort. When I'm ready to publish I can just FTP the docs to the live server - beautiful.

Too many times your product has impressed my coworkers. With BBEdit's power and extensibility and Frontier's glossary, I doubt there will be any equals on either platform. If there was an equivalent to the two we would have it on every machine - but there's not.

The solution - buy Mac for content production. Use powerful servers to serve.

I only see a couple things you could do in future updates. Possibly turn off the feature in the HTML parser that converts two carriage returns to a <P>. This is a bit of a quirk. Also under the shared scripts menu - you might want to allow users to specify the Local server and FTP addresses. Some less knowledge users might not know where to dig to find those in the tables. One other useful addition might be access to a simple file synchroniztion script. Since I work on two platforms, I'm synching stuff all the time - image folders especially. Others probably do too. It's be nice to do it all in one menu.

Thanks for all your work Dave.

Ryan Sims

Pointers

• Website Scripting with BBEdit 3.5 -- explains the tools that Ryan is using.

• "I'm Serious about Website Scripting" -- there are lots of pages about webmastering with Frontier on this server and others. This page links them together.

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