04/24/1997 - WINTER PARK, FL USA
Maintaining a web site consumes a great deal of time. Since time is precious in my hectic schedule, I use virtually every resource at my disposal in the arsenal of web page authoring. While I was reading E-mail on the dataperf listserv, I read a brief comment about someone using DP to generate an HTML document. I cannot recall what the purpose was now, however, I began to explore the possibility of using DP in streamlining the web site updates.
The News Room articles share the same format regardless of the article's content. There is a logo at the top, the title has a large font, and the article's text is in a normal font. As new material is submitted, I simply need to insert the information in the appropriate areas of the new HTML document. Using HTML authoring software, both commercial and shareware, I have found it difficult to manage files and create documents for the News Room quickly.
While exploring with DP, I found that by using a simple application, I could generate reports and articles easily and would seldom have to deal with the HTML code itself. I, therefore, created an app with 6 panels and 2 reports. A normal article is created using one panel for the data and one report to generate the HTML code. The Counter report, which includes several tables of data, consists of 5 panels and one report. To generate the HTML documents, I simply input the data into the various fields and then run the subsequent report. The HTML code is not accessed when I'm working with the contents of the article. Therefore, the risk of damaging the HTML code is virtually eliminated. As an added bonus, the report creates the same HTML code every time. Thus, there is consistency in background colors, location of images, and text formatting for all the articles in the web page. This gives the News Room a more professional appearance.
Accomplishing this task using most web page authoring software would require the manipulation of HTML code in every update or creation of a page. Most programs require that you save your changes prior to viewing them on a web browser; such as Netscape. Therefore, if I have inadvertently deleted or changed an HTML tag while working on an article, the change is permanent. My work now becomes more difficult and time consuming since I must now search for that tag and make the necessary corrections. Sometimes finding the error in the web page code is as difficult as debugging a program and not knowing where the bug is.
For those instances where I need to insert HTML tags to separate paragraphs, bold text, or insert a bar, a macro takes care of the code. For example, when I wrote this article, I simply needed to insert the tags to separate the paragraphs. Pressing ALT+SHIFT, P at the end of a paragraph accomplished the task. I was off and writing the next paragraph in seconds and I only needed to concentrate on the content of the article. The report generated the code for the header, the News Room logo and the separator bars, and the copyright lines in the footer. If I needed a spell checker, I simply used the Shell macro or a word processor (HTML documents are saved as plain text).
In all, the application took about an hour to complete. However, it has saved me countless hours worth of work. Using HTML authoring software, a News Room article takes about twice as long to complete when compared to my application. DP has become a valuable tool in my daily web page authoring! Here's proof positive, once again, that DP isn't dead!!!!!!!!