Simple website management with Webby?
Jason Scragz 3 months ago // 3 responses // Digital Life Tips, tricks, and advice

I really like the idea of Webby. Though I didn’t like the statement, “You should be comfortable with your terminal if you’re going to get serious with Webby.” I want my GUI!

I did notice some oddities on your site which have been frustrating with markdown in general and textile in particular. The only one I can remember of the top of my head was where you listed [i] motion. The brackets are used to make a footnote, but in the case of your link it looks like it converted it to a language attribute on the anchor tag.

And that is the only hassle I see in using textile (or any flavor of markdown really) to make an entire website. It kind of eats up what you are writing sometimes. But I guess if the overall convenience and speed of development is sped up, it would be a worthwhile trade off for the occasional syntax nuisance that needed fixed. On your own site you would have more options though, such as simply using the “notextile” tag as needed to escape the formatting engine (which we don’t have the option for in the community blog here).

One other note: Your sidebar seems to have extremely limited padding, thus feeling a bit squished. It’s a nice clean design and quick overview (very functional – just like you!), but I miss your original site a little bit. Looks nice though.

If I make an icon will you fix that linking gaff that I pointed out the other day? :)

One other thought on Webby and any html templating system really. Once you are doing something this simple is it possible that simply switching to some kind of WYSIWYG authoring environment would be just as well. All the conveniences gained by using Webby, as far as I could tell, are achieved with a WYSIWYG? I know you wouldn’t want to spend the money, but could you give an objective view on WYSIWYG authoring tools in realtion to Webby and templating?

You really need to get past the GUI thing. Not having a graphical interface with, what, three or four buttons is part of what makes this great. You could, e.g. write a script that checks an email account that you will be sending your blogs to, writes new mail to files which are processed by Webby, and then Webby deploys everything to your site. Just one example.

...

For me, writing in Textile keeps me focused on content first, semantics second, and display a distant third. You start with a WYSIWYG and you start worrying about display first. Not to mention bloat/complexity, limited portability (no Dreamweaver/GoLive/Frontpage on Linux), and lack of scriptabilty.

Don’t you guys agree on anything?

Not sure if it applies here (cause I really have no idea what you are talking about) but, “Use the right tool for the job, but if the wrong tool works, it’s okay by me.”