Attack on India

Pakistani terrorists tried to bomb the Indian parliment and kill the top elected officials of the Government in a dare-devil attack today.

The attempt was foiled, through the sacrifice of the security personnel which included a woman, but the tension in the region now sprirals to a war-time level. Perhaps this is a good thing, forcing the usually ineffective Indian administration to act.

Review of CityDesk

Summary: What it does, it does well. (But it doesn't do much.)

CityDesk by FogCreek Software is about three years late to the market. By that I mean not they have missed the opportunity, but that the need for such a tool was most felt about three years ago when everybody started creating websites, and Geocities was still free.

CityDesk (I tried the free, personal edition) is a simple point and click website creation and publication tool. It is a great tool for creating websites of the kind hosted on Geocities -- small, personal, websites.

The coolest part is that it is a Windows application (fast, no net connection necessary, data stored on your hard disk), has a WYSIWYG editor and FTP built into it. Templating, content scheduling (publish this on...), spell checking are other features I liked.

I also like the Variables feature, which is allows for separation of form from content, as the variables can be changed at any time.

CityScape has other stuff like support for RSS, and MLI (Multiple Language Interfaces), that I personally do not care about.

Now the Rants

• The import doesn't fix up relative URLs. CityDesk has an import feature, but it is no more than the save as feature found in the browsers. What good is that?
• How can you update the site while away from the desktop? You can't. This is a severe limitation of the product especially since it is being marketed as a tool for rapidly changing websites such as weblogs. Most competing products let you update the website from anywhere as they are browser based. So the best feature of the product (that it is Windows based) is also its biggest shortcoming.
• Unlike their other product FogBugz, the source for CityScape is not available. This is a real shame because I would have loved to integrate my content management solutions with CityDesk and use it for what it does best. The scripting interface is just too limited to consider extensibility. There is nothing in this product that cannot be achieved by a custom written addin for Microsoft FrontPage.