After much moaning and groaning and hand-wringing, I decided that I had to abandon WordPress. In doing, I flushed $3750 down the toilet. That really hurt. But I was only going to suffer more loss remaining with WordPress, so I had to bail out.
The parachute I chose is the website manager that I’ve been using for perhaps seven years now: Sandvox. Unfortunately, Sandvox went bust last year, and the program is not being maintained. One of these days, Apple will release an operating system upgrade that will break Sandvox, and I won’t have a website manager. In effect, my parachute is on fire and will surely fail me at some point in the future.
My resolution to that problem is based on many years of working with website editors. I have been forced to hop from one sinking ship to the next. I have forgotten how many website managers I have used over the last twenty years; there have been at least six. In most cases, I was forced from one website manager to the next by the vendor abandoning their software. In two cases (RapidWeaver and WordPress), I chose to abandon ship.
I am sick and tired of being subject to the incompetence of software vendors. Most software is riddled with design mistakes and bugs. Granted, software is difficult to build; having published some fifteen games in my time, I fully appreciate just how difficult it is to get a piece of software perfect. But I should not have to tolerate gross design blunders, which are all too common in software these days. There are a few applications that are well designed and I sing their praises: BBEdit, which I’ve been using for decades; Pixelmator and OmniGraffle are two other excellent programs that have carefully-thought-out designs and work very well indeed. Most Apple products are pretty good, too, although Pages still suffers from some design confusion.
The worst problem is the dependency of the user on the platform. Only in website managers do we see this problem. Every other computer design activity has easily convertible file formats. In graphics, we have dozens of applications for building images, and dozens of formats, but if the makers of Pixelmator or OmniGraffle slip beneath the waves, I’ll have little problem picking up the pieces with another program. Yes, I’ll lose some work, but it will be an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. Word processing? Sure, I have hundreds of documents I’ve created, but I’m not worried; no matter what happens, I’ll be able to jump to another word processor and I’ll be fine. The same thing goes with sound programs, movies, or computer programs. EVERY field of content creation on the computer has multiple platforms permitting easy transition from one platform to the next— EXCEPT for websites.
With websites, you’re stuck with your vendor. If you’re using WordPress, you can’t just translate your website to another platform. The same thing goes for Wix, or Sandvox, or Adobe Dreamweaver or Adobe Muse (which Adobe dumped last year) or any other website editor.
There’s a solid technical reason for the inconvertability of website formats. All document-creating programs use file formats that define what the 1s and 0s in the file mean. Those file formats have been officially defined; you can look up their definitions on the Internet. But the formats for web sites have not been officially defined; every company that makes a website manager creates its own custom format. The primary factor preventing the creation of a standard file format is the continuing evolution of the web. We keep adding new features to the technology. HTML is the underlying language of the web and it undergoes regular changes. You can’t nail down a precise definition of a moving target. Hence we have technological anarchy.
There’s only way to establish independence from the vendors of website management software: revert to HTML, the underlying language of the web. Admittedly, HTML can get pretty hairy, and editing it can be a major headache. But I have a huge advantage to bring to bear: I am uninterested in changing the graphic design of my website. All 1500+ pages use the same format.
So when the day comes to bail out of the spiralling Sandvox, I need merely create a standard HTML template using any of my existing pages as the basis. Then I pour my text into the template. There’s still some work in setting up links; that will be a bit tedious, but it’s no harder in HTML than it is in WordPress. I would prefer to remain with Sandvox indefinitely, but I can live with a future in HTML.
You might ask, why don’t I jump to one of the many new-generation website managers, like Wix or Sparkle? The problem here is importing the old stuff into the new format. Sparkle does allow me to import pages one at a time, but with 1500+ pages, that’s just too much work. I can afford to wait. If I find the HTML solution too difficult, I can always resort to one of the modern website managers.