Starfleet Jedi

So here's the story.

I may start a techie "website", with technical stuff of the kind we talk about here, and I'm looking for the simplest way to put on up.

First of all, I don't want to spend a single penny on it. I will rely on my photoshop l33t sk1llz to turn any basic template into something nice if the basic models are fugly.

I'm looking for some system which doesn't require lots of work to maintain, which would allow me to create pages with anchors in them, easily post videos (and eventually come with a free player if I have to upload videos to the website's FTP) and allow each page to be commented.
I've been fiddling with dreamweaver years ago but I'm not sure I want to go through that again.

I was sort of looking at something that's between a blog and a wiki perhaps.
The blog was very interesting, as editing each page is very simple, and I planned to update pages as long as needed. It's an option with potential as you can have a discussion go side by side with updates on a page. It practically allows every embedding of media as well, which is very nice, and globally setting up the layout is quick as well.
The problem is that I haven't seen a single blog with anchors in pages, and the other issue is that it's quite odd as the articles would be sorted by date. It's not much of a problem though, since it's always possible to put links to blog pages which would be lists to other articles, but obviously it wouldn't be what a blog is intended for.
But a blog is extremely easy to use and setup, and that's what I'm looking for.

Now there are the wikis. They're more complete, although they need to be hosted and really, if this could be taken care of by the host automatically, it would be perfect. I can't really be bothered with the technical behind the scenes stuff. Now there are much more layout options, and people can post in the discussion tab of each article.
That said, I don't like the idea of an archived history of each page (I'd erase older pages forever) and the discussion system is really a pain in the ****. The layout is messy.

The blog is really cool, but I'm certainly not going to use it as a blog, which makes the idea a bit on the wut? wide of things.

Now I think there could be another solution here, by using portfolios. I think a recall once browsing an artist' portfolio and iirc, there were both pictures, html code and even simple video players present on the pages. I think I've also seen one a while ago which had a comment section for each page.

Now that's for the wishes. The technical limitations include monthly bandwidth cap, space, backup, etc.

What's your opinion? I'm open to any suggestion.

You could do something like CMSimple, quite probably the simplest content management system. The only tough part is getting it set up initially . . . after that you're golden. That's what NoLettersHome.Info is running off of, still . . . too much going on in recent months for me to do more with it right now.

However, if you start getting jealous of feature-rich websites, you might start to find CMSimple a little flat. There are simply things that CMSimple cannot do. For instance, if you want to collaborate, you're screwed . . . one admin, one password. And frankly I'm not 100% sure about commenting . . . I'd have to check. But, it is now completely free and there are plugins that may allow commenting.

NLH on CMSimple is fun, but I wanted to have a wiki-esque experience at times. The little scroll datapad thing that everyone carries around . . . I so wanted to have the capacity for people to click on "Scroll" when I spoke of it and go to a page that automatically or quasi-automatically showed every paragraph in which I referenced them. And I wanted something where tags regarding, say, the Munificents would allow you to go to a page that shows previous tagged bits for Munificents . . . for instance, I'd love to do an NLH-style site where you could just click "Munificent" and have tags and sub-tags (e.g. "Munificent -> Engine Room") and have it include every paragraph thus tagged from each episode summary.

In theory, such dynamic content is possible, but I haven't seen anything that can do it even reasonably simply (if at all) yet, showing the same data in both episodic and content-relationship way.

Drupal with Views and Wikitools could allow such things, in principle, but I'm not an expert at .php . . . not to mention that Views uses a distressingly unique user interface and design theory, AND Drupal absolutely blows when it comes to handling images. Literally, CMSimple is vastly superior in this regard, just to give you a sense of how bad Drupal is. That's a big part of why my Drupal-based backend work on ST-v-SW and the other sites came to a dead stop. It's one of those open secret sort of things . . . you only find out when you're like "WTF? Why can't I do squat with a picture?"

Another alternative would be to simply have an old-fashioned website (e.g. index.html and all that jazz) but install a WYSIWYG and commenting tools. In other words, "normal" web developers have noticed all that content management crap and realized it didn't take all that overhead just to do what people wanted. So, for instance, TinyMCE-style interfaces (giving a Microsoft Word sort of experience) can be accessed from anywhere, and you simply write pages in your browser. And there are commenting systems that can be done the same way.

(This is, incidentally, much how ST-v-SW.Net started, except instead of a browser it was Pico via telnet.)

I'm surely going to pay attention to CMSimple. I don't really need anything complicated either, aside from that blog-like ability to reply to each article I'd like to try... although I'm wondering if it's not just better to do it like it's done everywhere else, namely the website with absolute authorial control, and then a blog or mini-forum in parallel.
I wanted to see a demo of the stuff you can do with CMS but you need a login.
However there's a video on YT, but it's confusing, you don't really get what the person is doing.

You wouldn't have other CMS examples by chance?

I've been trying to find a host that provides many advantages, and there were quite a good many examples to pick from. I chose the first two main ones, so I took a look at weebly and webs, and there's plenty of functions and possibilities to add other languages which provide fancy gadgets to the basic html. And there's everything, really, with blogs and forums if you want to.
The building interface is great if you want to make a very quick website, but it's too dumbed down imho, and as far as I've tried with many templates they provide, you're a bit stuck with their folding out "menu in a menu" hierarchy. But there's lost of potential, and creating a very simple blog is extremely fast and simple.

That said, if you like to have a bit more liberty about the layout, at some point you may feel the need to go try the manual code editor. But then you could wonder what the point really is, if you have to build it the old way.
I could do with dreamweaver and see if I can force my own dreamweaver-designed website into, or in place of the basic template provided by such free all-in-one web solutions.
It just feels like there's not enough control and not enough clarity about the website's hierarchy with those very wysiwyg things.

I'll keep looking around.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:I wanted to see a demo of the stuff you can do with CMS but you need a login.

You may login using password "test".

The building interface is great if you want to make a very quick website, but it's too dumbed down imho, and as far as I've tried with many templates they provide, you're a bit stuck with their folding out "menu in a menu" hierarchy. But there's lost of potential, and creating a very simple blog is extremely fast and simple.

You've thus already found the problem with most web design assistance methods (be it a CMS or a website builder or whatever) . . . . you can get help, but only for what they've made, and to take it further you basically have to learn to modify what they've done, which might very well take longer than if you just made the parts you needed yourself.

Yes, it's quite like "what you see is what you get and if you don't like what you get then fuck off and drag yourself through 2 years of web design studies." :)

I'm really considering going with it the old way, digging up dreamweaver and just make sure the layout doesn't look outdated with html only, while learning a bit more over time to see how to attach more fancy stuff to the website.
Adding a blog isn't the hardest part of it though, any free blog system allows you to host your blog on your own ftp if you have one. I suppose they also let you use the same edit tools.

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Yes, it's quite like "what you see is what you get and if you don't like what you get then fuck off and drag yourself through 2 years of web design studies." :)

I'm really considering going with it the old way, digging up dreamweaver and just make sure the layout doesn't look outdated with html only, while learning a bit more over time to see how to attach more fancy stuff to the website.
Adding a blog isn't the hardest part of it though, any free blog system allows you to host your blog on your own ftp if you have one. I suppose they also let you use the same edit tools.

Blogger discontinued FTP.

As for doing it the old way, it is a good learning experience and I recommend it.

You might try to make website in Dreamweaver and then upload it by using FileZilla. There is freeoda server and several others that give limited space for free users. However you will need some time to get used to Dreamweaver - basic functions (drawing tables etc) are simple but anything more advanced needs more time to get used to (and not-so-low level of knowledge - there might be tutorials on Internet, thought). I made site about Lord of the Rings and uploaded it on freeoda - however, I won't post link here - it is on Croatian, so I doubt you would be able to read it. Or you might make blog on Blogspot.