This website has been around since 1996. During that time, I have used a variety of tools to manage the website. I would have preferred to stick with the same tool through the years, but my software tools kept getting abandoned. There was one tool that I abandoned: RapidWeaver. It’s sort of a low-price DreamWeaver. It aims to provide every possible feature that anybody could ever imagine, and as such it’s a user interface nightmare. I dumped it for a great many reasons described at some length here. Eventually I moved on to Sandvox, which served me well. It, too, had some bothersome quirks, but I could live with them.
Erasmatazz.com now contains just under 2,000 pages of content comprising 1.3 gigabytes of information, including over 3,000 images. Some of the imagery is no longer in use, but Sandvox doesn’t permit you to clean out old unused stuff. This is a big site.
Now I learn that Karelia Software, maker of Sandvox, has apparently gone dead. Their website is still there, they are still selling their products, but they don’t respond to any user queries. This situation has lasted over six months now, so they are probably gone. It’s only a matter of time before Sandvox stops working or fails to keep up with changes in the operating system. I’ve been cast adrift again. I need to find a new website manager.
I’ve been researching my options and they don’t look good. The central problem is “cross incompatibility”. This is an ancient bugaboo that has been solved in just about every field of software — except for website managers. Let’s consider it for the simple case of word processors. Every word processor (Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Word Perfect, Nisus Writer, etc) has its own special internal formatting system for organizing the text on the page. There are lots of custom codes scattered throughout the text telling the program exactly how to display the text. Every word processor has its own set of custom codes, and they don’t all do exactly the same thing. However, most of them are close enough that it is possible to write a program that can translate from one system to the next. My Apple Pages program can read and write in Microsoft Word format.
The same thing goes for lots of other file types. Spreadsheets, databases, images, movies, and sound files come in many different formats, but it’s usually not too difficult to translate from one file format to another. You might have to purchase a special translator program, but it’s possible.
Such is not the case with websites. If you build a website with Brand X, you are forever stuck with Brand X. If Brand X goes out of business, you’re screwed. It’s that simple.
There are solid technical reasons for this. Let’s go back to the word processor example. You write a letter with your word processor and print it out. You think of your letter in terms of what you see: the printed document. But the letter on your computer is bigger than the letter that comes out of the printer. The file on your computer has all those hidden codes that tell the computer how to arrange the words on the page.
In the same fashion, the website you see on the Internet is smaller than the file on the computer that created the website. The file on the computer includes all sorts of special codes that tell the program how to organize the stuff that makes up the website. But unlike other file types, website source files are not translatable from one format to another. Which means that, once you’ve built a website using Brand X, you’re stuck with Brand X forever. If Brand X disappears, you cannot change your website any more, except by reverting to raw HTML editing, which is not feasible with a website as large as mine.
I cannot believe that this situation is actually the case. Surely there have been enough cases of this problem arising that somebody, somewhere, has created a tool to deal with the problem. However, I have not been able to find any solution. I’m pretty good at searching the Web, but my many attempts to find such a solution have come up empty-handed.
At this point, I don’t know what to do. I shall continue my researches. Ifsomebody tells me how to fix my problem, I’d be very much in their debt.