Stardate 20030829.1841

(On Screen): Fog Creek just released V2.0 of CityDesk, which is the content-management tool I use for this site. I'll be working on upgrading the site over the next few days to try to take advantage of some of the new features they've incorporated.

Top of the list are two things in particular: adding "next/previous" links to archive entries, and pinging various-and-sundry update monitoring sites.

The latter is now possible because I can take advantage of this new feature:

If the built in features aren't enough for your site, you can program CityDesk to run an external program or batch file of your choice after publishing.

For example, you can create a batch file which modifies the HTML which was generated in any way. Or you can use an external program to upload files to your web server after the site is generated, if the built-in ftp support is not adequate for your needs.

Or, I can make it run a Windows batch file which executes Windows commands to take care of whatever ping it is that people wish I'd make. So let me know what it is. (But if you say, "I wish you'd ping thus-and-so site" then it won't do me any good. I don't have the slightest idea how to do so unless you give me the exact Windows DOS command to do it. If that requires me to use some particular program, tell me what it is.)

In just the first couple of minutes I've already noticed a few things I like a lot. The box for editing the text of macros is now resizeable.

However, what I'm mainly going to have to do is to spend a bunch of time reading the list of new capabilities to see whether any of them might be useful to me.

And in the mean time, this is the first post made with the new version. Let's see whether it works.

Update: Well, one interesting thing was that it decided to completely upload the site.

Update 20030827: Alas, I cannot put "next/prev" links in the archive. The feature works, but the time it takes to publish the site grows from about 45 seconds to what I estimate would be about 25 minutes. (I wasn't patient enough to wait for it to finish in order to find out for sure.)