Adobe is right near the top of my list of software companies I hate, second only to Symantec. Why? They code crap. Acrobat is quite possibly one of the most overpriced, bloated piece of rubbish I have ever had the misfortune of using. Now I know all the anti-ms folks out there will point the finger at MS doing the same thing, but I see a huge difference. I mean, most folks would argue that Vista is overpriced and bloated - I am not trying to argue that point, but imagine, for a terrifying moment, that Adobe started making operating systems. You would be paying about $4,000 for an operating system that runs like an asthmatic pensioner carrying a disabled seal.
Now, with that argument completely killed, let's move on.
Considering that I maintain my own website and am everything to everyone in my client's eyes, I need a few things. I need to be able to make and read PDFs, I need to be able to make websites without resorting to frontpage (see my previous entry), and I need to be able to do some image editing for the websites and whatever else suddenly becomes within scope.
Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Adobe Photoshop are the 3 that immediately jump to mind. Now, I am in no mood to waste $2,500 on buggy as hell software today, nor any other day, but I need to be able to do these things. So what is out there that can do the job?
PDF was the first hurdle. I know of open source stuff like ghostscript, but last time I played with that it was ugly as hell. I am not completely against spending money, so I raised my sights from "free" to "sensible" and came up with Nitro PDF -> http://www.nitropdf.com <- at $99 for the full fat version, and $49 for the basic version, it beats the hell out of $700! So far, it has done quite well. It starts faster than Acrobat reader, has a PDF printer and even looks like Office 2007 with the ribbon bar. I am not a fanboy yet, but the fact that it started in under 2 minutes means that it is already lightyears ahead of Adobe.
HTML was the second. There are a multitude of applications that do this, but the concensus is, you either want to use Dreamweaver or Frontpage. I may go back to Frontpage or Expression Web or whatever it is called today, but for now, I want to know that I am not going to stuff anything (my blog) up horribly. After some serious googling, I found Nvu -> http://www.nvu.com <- considering it is free, and very clean, I have to say I am quite impressed. It looks and feels familiar, which is handy - but as I completed the majority of my site hack with notepad, I will have to wait and see how we go. Another $715 saved.
Finally, we had Image Editing. This I thought would be the hardest, I knew that Photoshop was good, and I knew that it was complicated - surely there will be no really good and reasonably priced alternative. Assuming I was going to be forced to use mspaint, I found paint.net -> http://www.getpaint.net <- This is a project that grew from a college project mentored by Microsoft and does a remarkable job. Take into account the fact that it is FREE, and so far, has been able to do whatever I used Photoshop for, and I have just saved $1,155.
Now, if only there was a way for me to uninstall Adobe Flash player...
I have been an unwilling participant in this battle through my own laziness. I didn't want to code my site from scratch, so leaving it in frontpage was the easiest thing to do. Until now. In an effort to have a blog and website that can actually live together in harmony, I decided to kick the hell out of my website.
It was a hard decision, but ultimately the right one. Frontpage does some horrible things to web pages, not as bad as Word, but still, pretty bad.
The real problem was that I built the site in frontpage, using a theme. This in an of itself is not so much of a problem, the issue is that Frontpage extensions and ASP2.0 cannot live together on the one godaddy server.
I can't update the frontpage website (and have it live) without frontpage extensions on, and when they are on, my blog is down. The catalyst for this was a recent format/reinstall of my main PC, as well as a new laptop, and logging into my blog to cover some horrible problems, only to find that my blog does not exist. Sigh.
So, how did I defrontpage my site? Relatively simply.
I am by no means a coder. I can read HTML, and regularly kick it until it works, but I haven't got a creative bone in my body - I am an engineer, not an artist.
The things I was worried about were the menus. I cracked open the index.htm file and started ripping out all the frontpage related garbage.
The first thing to break was the left menu and the rollovers, the theme that I was using autogenerated images for the menu - this is clearly not going to work anymore, but I doubt I will be adding much to it anyway. Fixing this was as simple as copying the topbuttons (which were part of the theme) over the sidemenu. I decided to rename all the images to make it easier while I was at it.
So, now I had the mind numbing task of going through all the pages and updating the data so that it points a the new files, with the new rollovers. I uploaded the site, it all worked and looked surprisingly good - it fails w3 validation, but not on anything too bad. I also updated the helpsite, but have not yet uploaded it.
As soon as I got the site up, I made sure frontpage server extensions were uninstalled, resetup ASP2.0 and click on my blog link. Nothing. Fantastic, so I severly retard myself by hours of HTML coding, and my blog still doesn't work. I scoured through my install notes from when I initially installed community server, only to find that all the godaddy options have changed because there was an update 3 days ago...
So, I rip it apart, setup my permission, setup my ASP directories again and wait for the update. I can't test it internally because CS resolves www.block.net.au/cs to block.net.au/cs - as block.net.au is my internal domain name, I obviously can't go split DNS'ing that. So, I abuse my admin powers and login to a client site to test it - down. I search for any other insight I might have left myself by googling my name (knowing that I am both the first hit of my name, and that I had full install details of what I did the first time).
In a string of what can only be described as endless, influenza induced boobery, I discover that my blog has been taken off Google. Kinda serves me right for not noticing it was down for so long I suppose...
So, the #1 Kieran Block is now my hero, a young lad from Canada who plays hockey, and punches the absolute crap out of people week in week out. A heart warming moment, but not a whole lot of help for me.
After clicking every link in Godaddy's control panel hopefully trying to find the "uber-secret-makeitwork-page", I stumble across the DNS section, which is throwing an error because block.net.au is not resolving to godaddy, but rather somewhere else.
A whole lot of swearing and a hosts file hack on the remote terminal server, and here I am. And now, slightly satisfied and disappointed with myself all at once, I am off to bed.
Kieran