USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011213.2154 (On Screen): I've been doing a lot of messing around with CityDesk and it looks as if it is not too difficult to make it display the site the way I want it to. See the link for a practice site I created using it, copying a few log entries just for experimentation purposes. It doesn't quite seem to display the main unspecified font the same way; it appears to be a different font size for some mysterious reason, and it was necessary to rearrange the fields on a log entry slightly. But it is more powerful than it looks on first blush.

For one thing, what they call "variables" can be treated as macros. The header and the sidebar are each single lines in the templates, fully defined in the variable section. And one variable can make a call to another, so they can be nested.

The big question I have right now has to do with what the practical difference is between a "home" license and a "professional" license (besides a higher price). The collaboration feature is not of interest to me; the other limit on the "home" version is "500 files". Problem is that I'm not just sure what they mean by a "file". The page I just posted is actually one single file on my desktop computer which contains everything in one big database. For example, the image behind the header is part of that database. On publishing, CityDesk explodes them all back into individual files on the server. So is "500 files" post-explode? I'm going to have to get onto Fog Creek Software's discussion system and ask, because It takes me about two months to generate 500 log entries at the rate I've been writing recently and if each of those counts as a "file" then I definitely have to go for the big license. I might do so anyway just on general principles, so that I don't run into any magic gotchas. (discuss)

I probably should have mentioned that the new layout is not the same. It wasn't possible to exactly duplicate the current format, for reasons which are too complicated to go into.