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Case studies Case 12 - Beta testing CityDesk - my second site
My second CityDesk site during the beta is this one: http://tk-jk.net/tk/tklog.htm. I'm actually using CityDesk to publish this case study, in fact I'm typing this into a CityDesk article right now. To the surfer these cases are just one part of my personal site. I originally published the whole thing in FrontPage. I decided to "CityDesk" it for several reasons: CityDesk is ideal for publishing articles. The cases are the only part of the site that changes very much. Publishing articles is so easy in CityDesk, maybe I'll publish more. I really don't expect too many folks to ever read these things. I do it as documentation, so I'll remember things. I do it to develop my writing skills and exercise my brain - both sorely needed. This was my old method for publishing a new case study in FrontPage:
Here is the CityDesk method:
So what? Are you asking yourself, "what's the big deal?" Well, it may not be a big deal but it's certainly some kind of deal. I just told CityDesk I wanted to a new article, I typed it, saved it, and hit the publish button. CityDesk automatically formatted my new article just like the old one, it added the article's description and link to my "table of contents" page. I save several error-prone steps. I'll get around to describing how I did it in a minute but first there is another "so what." After I published all my cases in CityDesk I was proudly admiring the webpage, thinking how smart I was and noticed that my text was all scrunched up. It was too narrow. I wanted it wider. To make my cases wider in FrontPage, I would have edited all 12 of my old cases, made the table wider on each page and republished. Actually I would have decided that the articles were perfect just as the were and left them alone. In CityDesk, all I had to do was to change the table width on one template and republish. CityDesk automatically applied the template to all of my cases. That's "so what!" Building CityDesk site within a FrontPage site was both easy and .... : It was decision time: Should I just import the whole site into CityDesk and leave FrontPage behind or should I just use CityDesk for my case study pages? At the time importing the whole site seemed like too much of a leap: Most of the pages rarely changed. I knew FrontPage better than CityDesk. It sounded like a lot more work. I also wondered how CityDesk might manage my relative addresses and bookmarks. Finally, I wanted to see if it was practical to publish a piece of a site. So here goes:
Publishing for the first time revealed the hard part The first time I published -- it looked great. I was a genius for 30 seconds and was basking in my skill and courage until I started clicking my menu links. Not a single one of them worked. Now I'm sure all of my readers will refer to the first and second steps of "the easy part" above and know that I had a problem with relative addresses. Of course, at the time, I knew what relative addresses were, I knew they were probably a good thing, and. until then, I have never once had to engage my little brain to think about them. But there it was. After a long sulk I realized that all of my menu links were relative address -- they referred to other pages within my FrontPage website. Within CityDesk they referred to pages that didn't exist. Now, I'm sure there is some slick way to keep my links relative by adjusting them a little. After all, my new "contents" page and cases were going to be in a subdirectory of my FrontPage web and I'd seen those little dots in the HTML in front of relative address. But, I wasn't slick enough at the time to figure it out. I just wanted my new pages to work. It wasn't too much trouble. I turned all of 9 my "content" page's menu links into absolute addresses. Then I copied the menu with the now absolute addresses into my template and published again. It worked. But I'll have to study link addresses a little more to see what I should have done. In fact, maybe I should have moved the whole site to CityDesk after all.
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