Web Software
 

Hi,

I am looking into getting new web-writing software (HTML) for the buzz website, as you can see, the website now took me 3 weeks to write because I was sort of given the role of webmaster. So, I would like to enhance it somehow. Any suggestions on what kind of software to buy??? Thanks!!

-Steve A.
Buzz Webmaster :D

The best program i've used is Dreamweaver. It kicks butt. Its pretty expensive though (i think, never bought it :-). It can do things that you wouldn't think of until you see its features. Go to www.macromedia.com to check it out.

Well, I see that you used Front Page Express to generate the site. (Or at least the front most page)

Honestly, putting a web site together isn't so much the wiz bang WSIWYG editior. It does help.

I use the full blown version of Frontpage2000. However, that's just because it came with Office2000.

Lot's of people like dreamweaver. Others like ColdFusion. It's a crap shoot on which you like.

Websites
 

If you want a no frills site with just neat backgrounds, text and pictures, just make one in MS Word, then save it as an htm or html file. This works good for me for what I'm doing for another website that is non-FIRST related.

Dream....
 

I'll have to agree with Ogre on this one. Dreamweaver is one of the best WYSIWYG editors around. Frontpage, and other Microsoft products are good for beginners, but as you get better you realize how limiting these programs are on actual development of your web-site.

~Just a note for ya.

First off - if I offend anyone, I apologize!

Second...I HATE HATE HATE Frontpage and MS Word as html editors!!! If you go to a webpage made with either of these programs you will find various "junk codes" in the html source...it's disgusting. Personally I think at that point you are just better off hand coding the html.

I was dead set against all WYSIWYG editors for ages because of that -- but then I came across a demo of Dreamweaver. Excellent program and it makes the contruction and updating of pages a breeze. It's what I use now on FIRST-a-holics and the RCU pages as well as my home page and a local band's site I help do. Highly highly recommended. I know that I havent even found all it's features yet! :p

~ lora

PS - again, for any of you that use Frontpage or Word...I apologize if I offended you :)

No offense taken....
 

No offense taken here!!!

I was given frontpage express and the manual... this was at kickoff by the way... and I had no clue what I was doing. Now I know that frontpage is not really that good and what is on www.buzzrobotics.org, is really the best I could do in the time frame I was given!! Thanks for the suggestions, it really helped me to make a decision in what to get to help our webpage out!! Thanks again,

Steve A.
Buzz Webmaster

No offense. I too agree that MSWORD fills the page with worthless crap. (For the people trying to understand this conversation, if you view the source of the page, a small paragraph would turn into 8 or 9 printed pages of crap.)

Frontpage doesn't clutter the page too much, but it does have it's crappy parts.

I'm an ex-notepad user myself, and I'd probably switch to dreamweaver, but frontpage is what I get at the office, and it's easier to just use one editor.

Re: No offense taken....
 

Here's a bit more advise.

In general, it's better if you try to avoid frames. It's easy to make mistakes with them. (Ie, not breaking frames when you leave your site, and spawning multiple duplicate frames.)

Instead you might want to try including a common Table of Contents page in the document, using the object tag (or your Editors way of doing it. Frontpage has a way of doing it, and its semi decent, but it only works on Frontpage enabled webservers)

for specifics, see one of the best resources out there:
http://www.w3.org/
specifically, the HTML section
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/

This is a decription of every tag that exisits, what it does, and what attributes it takes.

AMEN SISTA!



Never _EVER_ have I used, or plan on using FrontPage.
And I'm pretty sure the authors of vBulletin wouldn't use FrontPage also. And if they have... I may have to go thru and edit all the html :)

ehhe

sorry.. i get all weird about that kinda stuff.

DREAMWEAVER!
 

Go Dreamweaver! It's gotta be the best at everything and the best to work with. To clean up the WYSIWYG junk it sometimes creates (it's not perfect!) I use Edit Plus. It is really versitle and it understands commands for HTML javaScript, PERL, PHP, C++, etc. It's a lot better than notepad :)

[quote]Originally posted by Brandon Martus
Never _EVER_ have I used, or plan on using FrontPage.
And I'm pretty sure the authors of vBulletin wouldn't use FrontPage also. And if they have... I may have to go thru and edit all the html :)[/qoute]


Actually, i was refereing to http://www.buzzrobotics.com

The main problem I have with Dreamweaver so far (actually Dreamweaver Ultradev) is that for dynamic actions it only supports ASP, JSP, and ColdFusion. I really wanted Perl support or at least PHP. So, unfortunately, I'm stuck coding a web-based front end to a database in ASP. Aren't I lucky?

Matt

[quote]Originally posted by mpking

Quote:

Originally posted by Brandon Martus Never _EVER_ have I used, or plan on using FrontPage. And I'm pretty sure the authors of vBulletin wouldn't use FrontPage also. And if they have... I may have to go thru and edit all the html :)[/qoute] Actually, i was refereing to http://www.buzzrobotics.com

oh.. hehe my bad :)

Brandon, didn't you say at one point that most of CD was written using vi. Is that still the case?

When I'm developing a site, I look at the time availible and make my decision. If I have a lot of time, or the site isn't complex, I use notepad (or emacs if I'm not in windows ;)). Generally (at least when I'm working on our teams site, time is short and money is nill. In that case I use frontpage express to do most of it, and then edit everything in notepad to remove the extra junk.

yep.

all vi or vim (vi-improved)


alot of the html for the new forums is contained in templates which are located in the database. So there is alot of editing via the admin control panel...but other than that, im all vi.

i remember when i didn't know vi.... how did i survive? :)

the thing i hate most about vi, however, is that when you're filling out forms on webpages, like this one for example, and you think you're using vi, and you hit ESC to go to command-mode, which resets the form, and you lose all of the text you just filled in.
but other than that, im glad i forced myself to use vi.

The one and only command I ever use in vi is ":wq" (minus the quotes). The EDITOR environment variable on the Sun's at RIT's CS Department like to default to vi for some odd reason. Occassionally I forget to set the EDITOR to pico and CVS throws me into vi.

Matt who thinks that who ever thought-up vi must really be a sadist.... ;)

vi was a HUGE improvement
 

vi cannot be judged in the light of today's editors.

While many of the features seem to be difficult to use and somewhat quirky, it was a HUGE improvement over the editors that were available.

Remember that it has actually gotten harder to learn since we are all using PC keyboards to pretend that they are VT-100 terminals keyboard (or whatever your particular school happened to buy). The terminal keyboards actually had an arrow to the left on the h key, an arrow down on the j key, etc. These clues are missing from PC keyboards which makes the business of learning vi even more cryptic.

But, just because I cut my teeth on vi, doesn't mean that I am blind to its flaws. I was glad to see it go. About the only time I use it now is when I rlogin to get to some UNIX box 3 states away and I want to make a quick change to my .login file without the bother of using ftp. At such times I am glad my fingers still know the way around the old dinasour.

Joe J.

I have to agree with Brandon here. How did I ever survive before I used vim? If you take the time to learn it Matt, you'll spend your time actually writing code instead of hunting through your code and repeating the same commands. I keep trying to convince my co-workers to switch to vim. It has syntax high-lighting, split windows, and when integrated with cscope, you can jump to any occurrence of any variable or function in a project with a couple of keystrokes.

I must be a sadist because I enjoy using vim.

Mike, who likes to include comments after his name just be be like Matt ;)

For most development work I tend to use emacs. Syntax-highlighting and all kinds of other good stuff. ;) I don't bother with vi because it tends to be orthogonal to my thought process and given me nothing short of trouble whenever I've had to use it. I think what it comes down to is whether or not you like to hit escape or control more often. The other reason I started with emacs was that it integrated very nicely with the JDE so it made Java rather easy to develop. Plus emacs will do all kinds of nice cvs stuff for me. :)

Matt who started the whole comments after name thing on here so :-p (and wonder's why there isn't a tongue smiley on here)

.org ....
 

It is really www.buzzrobotics.org

but anyways, I will be working over the summer to make the buzz page a little bit better than it is.... now I know that frontpage is not the very best :rolleyes: (but you have to admit, the pages that are up now are pretty good for a first timer!! :) )

Steve

Wow, I never realized there were so many UNIX-heads in FIRST. I'm pleasantly surprised. :D Hopefully more will come about when Mac OS X gets more attention (and swing users to the deep underground world of ... dah dah dah dum ... FreeBSD).

Like Lora and Brandon, I recommend not using commercial HTML editors such as Frontpage... unless you are in a huge rush. HTML is not hard to understand (half of the tags are simple english words). Basically, the more complicated of a site you want, the less and less I recommend commercial HTML editors. If you happen to have Visual Studio and happen to use a Microsoft server, I highly recommend using Visual InterDev... But I mostly edit the raw HTML, even in that program. For example, the Buzz U page has some automated features such as CGI so It'd be much better to learn the raw HTML.

Now, personally, I think you have to throw away the HTML altogether :p Using XML along with XSL transforms & style sheets allows you to completely separate content from layout and formatting. For example one change to the XSL transform would instantly change the way all pages on your entire site look. Unfortunately this technology was only standardized in the past year so very few browsers yet enable it, so for now the transformations need to take place on server side. Also, CGI is quickly becoming a thing of the past... On UNIX, PHP is now popular and ASP is popular on Windows servers.

That was one of the plans for a system I'm developing this year. Storing robot scouting data in an XML format allows XSLT transformations into XHTML (for display over the Internet) or VXML (for listening over the phone). I'm still in the process of learning how to tackle this problem, but some folks from SOAP108 seem interested in the project as well.

I'm trying to learn the finer nuances for VXML. I've managed to rattle together a short application that is a small proof of concept for the 2002 season. If any of you would like to try it out, call 1-800-555-8355. After listening to the advertisements, press 134778. The only option right now is to "get data", on "a team" for team numbers 190, 596, or 800. These are just some test cases that allow me to debug the system.

Hopefully, a large company like Motorola, Lucent, or AT&T would like to cooperate with this project and allow us use of their Voice Browsers. The TellMe Studio browser (at the number listed above), contains many advertisements and delays.

Back to the original topic however, it'd be so nice to have the data stored in a nice format like XML, available for export to many different formats. Maybe even running an RDF file off the server so teams can grab their latest statistics or something. Oh, all these ideas in my head, not enough time to become technically competent to execute them. :o

FreeBSD is my unix of choice. I learned unix with it, and have been with it since.

On my home computer, when I use Unix, I run Debian GNU/Linux (I'm at home for the summer now and haven't set up dial-up internet access in Linux yet). Generally, for me, if it has the software on it I need (or I can ssh to a machine that has it), and it runs Bash I'm happy. ;) Personally I find the combination of X-Windows and ssh a very powerful combination. It'd made it easy to work on CS projects from my dorm room among other things. :)

Matt

Awwww, c'mon folks. . .
 

Dreamweaver is just way too pretty to be a useful editor!!!

At least, that's the opinion from someone who's never taken the time to figure out what all of those happy little buttons do.

I use Adobe GoLive, which offers WYSIWYG and code-based editing and it's all easy to get to! For me, it seems to just write code on it's own. It doesn't get any better than that.

For graphics and roll overs and things, I use Macromedia Fireworks, and it's always worked fine for me. Vector based art is the way to go, but, that's because I'm used to its applications in graphic design.

Anyway, that's just my $.02 about software. Now, remember, though, GoLive and things aren't exactly cheap. You can, however, pick up Macromedia's Bundle, with a student discount, no less, for ~$300, I think. That includes Freehand, Flash, and Dreamweaver, if I recall. I could be totally wrong, though.

I feel Stupid....
 

This thread makes me feel really stupid. I can't even get Linux Mandrake to boot into X-windows (is that the name?), without frying my monitor..... I really feel stupid.

Re: I feel Stupid....
 

You messed up your modelines (horizontal and vertical sync rate). Some monitors (mostly older ones) don't deal too nicely with modelines out of their range. Most newer models will simply reject bad modelines.

Matt who has yet to kill a monitor....

JUST USE NOTEPAD!!!
 

Hey all why go out and spend more money than needed? Just use notepad and either learn HTML or get tutorials online. Check out Team 69's site. Other than the 2 flash things everything else was done in notepad. And it was done by 3 kids no enigineers or adults.

great tutorial site
 

www.htmlgoodies.com

Awesome html site

-Jessica B

Re: JUST USE NOTEPAD!!!
 

Notepad? Pick a REAL man's text editor. Say, like emacs. Don't get swayed by that horrible vi though. ;)

Matt who really should be working on a website for work....