How The Straight Dope uses Frontier

From Matt Jetmore, mjetmore@infocom.com:

I was doing an unauthorized fan site for a newspaper column called The Straight Dope. They had no official presence on the web and my site got a lot of traffic since it was really the only game in town. However, the site was pretty bad since I just worked on it in my off hours (I have a day job).

The creators of the column contacted me and said, "Hey, your site is full of copyright violations and we want to shut it down, but we also want a presence and don't know the web. So how'd you like to hire on with us?" The catch was that it had to be up to professional standards, but they were just going to pay me a token fee ($50/wk plus Internet connect fees). I therefore had to build and maintain this site in as an efficient method as possible.

Here comes the success story:

I discovered Frontier. I spent a weekend setting up the site. Over time I added macros to automate as much as possible. It's a fairly dynamic site that has content being added and dropping off weekly. Several indexes must be updated.

With Frontier, I have it set-up to do all the routine maintenance with literally one keystroke. The site is served on a Unix box, so I FTP it up, but including the transfer time, the whole thing takes only 20 minutes a week. I get paid $100/hr (on average) and they get a professional quality site for $50/week (and don't have to worry about maintaining it). If it hadn't been for Frontier, I never could have pulled this off. It's really a win-win situation for everyone.

Check it out: http://www.straightdope.com/.

Matt Jetmore

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