Tong Family

PHP Builder. I’m going to convert tongfamily.com from a FrontPage plus IIS specific site with blogger on top to a pure blog over the next could of months. This is going to be a big project given how many dependencies there are on Microsoft technology right now. Here’s a short list of things to do:

1. Remove the current dependencies. Right now I use ASPs for includes on the main page and FrontPage specific navigation. I’m going to start ripping these out so that I will fall back to Server side includes (.shtml) and also simplify the navigation.
2. New Content Tool. Right now, I’m thinking that the main publishing tool will be a blogging tool. Either Movable Type or cafelog. This will make it easy to update it regularly.
3. New Layout Tool. I’ve been using FrontPage for the layout and right now most people appear to be doing raw HTML level hacking. I need to find a tool that has some WYSIWYG in it, but isn’t as confining as FrontPage. Ironically now that I merged Blogger into the original FrontPage theme, I’m hacking away at HTML anyway. The issues here are doing nice graphics layout and being able to put the blog within it.
4. New Photo layout. Right now I’m using ACDSee into a FrontPage thing on the way to just using FrontPage 2002. Now I’ll stop that and look for a nice auto thumbnailer publishing tool. If you know of any email Rich on that.
5. Link checking and Navigation Bar building. Probably the best tool in FrontPage. I haven’t found an analog to it yet.

Wish me luck!