My wanderings through the desert of website technology continue. In the previous essay I described all the pain and hassle I went through when I realized that the website manager I have been using for years, Sandvox, is no longer being supported. It was obvious that, at some point, Sandvox would break, and I'd be stuck with no ability to work on my website.
I did lots of research, but every alternative I looked at suffered from the same vulnerability. How could I be certain that some other website manager wouldn't do the same thing to me? After lots of research, I decided that my best bet was WordPress. This website manager has a long history, is open source, and is used by millions of people for zillions of websites. It's not going to disappear anytime soon.
There was one killer problem: transferring my website to WordPress format. Indeed, this is the killer problem for every single website manager, because every such manager has its own special format that's incompatible with everything else. So I would need to convert all 1500 pages on my website to WordPress format.
The solution came when I learned that there is a software tool that automatically converts a website into WordPress format. It's not perfect, of course; there are always stupid details that must be corrected by hand. But this website has a simple structure that lends itself to easy transformation. This appeared to be the solution.
So I hired a professional website designer to carry out the translation. It took her several months (she had other committments) and cost me $3750, but when she was done, I had a shiny new website implemented in WordPress. There were some teething problems. But then I ran into the brick wall: WordPress doesn't support large websites. It's great for little websites with perhaps a hundred pages, but the larger a website grows, the clumsier WordPress becomes. My website, with over 1500 pages, was simply impossible with WordPress.
So I threw away all the time and money spent on WordPress and, for the moment, reverted to simple HTML editing. It is a major pain working directly in HTML. But I was committed to finding a new solution.
I tried all sorts of things. Sparkle is a really nice website manager; I really like the user interface design, and the people behind the program seem genuinely determined to build a good user interface.
I reconsidered RapidWeaver, and quickly dropped that idea; it's an even greater mess than it was when I walked away from it years ago.
SeaMonkey looked promising, but after detailed study, I decided against it. I played around with Blue Griffin, and was definitely attracted to it, but in the end I decided that using it was just too clumsy.
My latest affair has been with BBEdit, and this has proven to be much more than a one-night stand. I had purchased BBEdit when it first came out in 1992, and I have used it continuously ever since then, but I always used it as a straightforward text editor, taking advantage of its powerful text-editing tools. But I never bothered to learn its advanced features. Surprise, surprise, they kept adding to the advanced features over the course of the last 27 years! Nowadays BBEdit is one of the most powerful tools for editing HTML websites. I am surprised at how useful it is, despite the fact that it's a keyboard-driven text editor.
It has great tools for modifying a large group of text files. This is essential to fixing up my website with its 1500 pages. In delving into the HTML code generated by Sandvox, I was appalled at the amount of junk code generated by Sandvox. It seems that one of its design principles is "When it doubt, slap on a pair of div tags". It also likes to slap formatting instructions on every single line of text, endlessly repeating the same lengthy instructions over and over.
Granted, I'm being obsessive-compulsive. A few hundred (or thousand) wasted bytes on a web page are no big deal, either in terms of storage or bandwidth. But I grew up pinching bits on tiny 8-bit machines with a few kilobytes of memory, and I just can't get past the desire to clean up. I'm a dinosaur, I admit it. Rawr!
So I am currently using BBEdit, learning how to use it more effectively. I'm willing to give it a few weeks' use to see if I truly can make this work. After all, if it works, then I'll never have to worry about software going obsolete on me again. I'll have direct control over my website. I'll be a free man.
But there's a glimmer on the horizon that keeps distracting me. You see, Sandvox still works. Somebody just confirmed that it works just fine with the newest Macintosh operating system, Catalina. This OS obsoletes a lot of software, but Sandvox still works on it. That suggests that Sandvox might well continue to function for a few years more.
If I revert to Sandvox, I'll still be able to pick up the pieces when it disappears, because I'll always have BBEdit to fall back on. Moreover, I cannot rule out the possibility that Sandvox will rise from the grave. It is still on sale at the Apple App Store, the website is still active, and they are keeping their page counter software operational. It may be that they're just working out legal issues. It's hard to say, but Sandvox isn't dead yet, so perhaps I shouldn't abandon it until it is truly dead.