4/9/2003

First cut evaluation of Macromedia Contribute is disappointing because editing is hosted on the users computer, not on the web. Contribute is a dumbed down editor that makes link, photo addition easier, makes review of changes easy and hides the FTP process behind a publish button. It is not all that simple, but probably masterable by people who can do WORD or PowerPoint. It allows people to add new pages, and appears to manage site files when more than one person is involved. I want something more web-based and simpler. I want the single person owner of a website, say a professor, an artist, a social worker, a small business owner to sitdown at a computer anywhere and change at least the text of pages in a site, and to do it mindlessly. AS if their site is a big notebook on the web. Perhaps I am not looking at the right software. I suspect this is already available -- the web-based 'editing' of yahoo/portal home page content is along these lines. I simulated what I want --- web based editing --- by wrapping a webpage as a template around Blogger code. Then Blogger acted as the web-based editor by doing its thing of taking input off a form and glomming it into a pre-existing page. Blogger, the whole process from Day One, has made sense to me. Contribute, for what I want, simple site updating by a busy, non-technical, often mobile user, does not. I want to update from a beach in the Dominican Republick, where I happen to be working.