I just got tired of messing around with FrontPage every night and especially rolling pages around every week, updating old indices, having it publish every page on the site, etc. Although a lot of things are easy in FrontPage, you were completely correct in saying that maintaining this sort of site is not one of its strong suits.

I’ll send Noah a title too in a couple of weeks. He seems to have worked himself into a frezy producing this product from what I can tell. He did a fabulous job, though.

But it’s not ideal for this type of site. It’s the wrong kind of tool. For a Daynotes/Weblogs site, you just want to shoot in some text, have the computer worry about fitting it into the template and creating the new files and linking the new files to the old ones, and if you can give the users some interactivity, that makes it even better. Manila does a pretty good job, but Greymatter’s free (I’ll send Noah Grey a book or two off his wishlist if I’m still using this in a month or so) and runs on free operating systems. But since it’s written in Perl, you can throw as much hardware at the problem as you want. If a Greymatter site needs AS/400 power for some insane reason, you can do that. An NT-based solution like Manila doesn’t have that kind of versatility.

Microsoft’s products of late really make my stomach turn. It’s disconcerting (to say the least) to watch as 29 pages of freshly written material disappear and the nice "We’re sorry" error pops up on the screen. How polite of them.
By the next week I should have a lot more infrastructure in place to get rid of Microsoft’s unpredictability.

Thanks again for the mention.