So, the last two days have been a little frustrating. I’ve been trying to get a basic homepage running for furcle. Nothing fancy, just a homepage and some supporting pages with information and a link to the blog. Now, this is actually harder than it seems. I simply want something that operates like a desktop publishing tool (WYSIWYG*) that will convert that into something I can publish to the web. Here’s my adventures so far**:

1. iweb – nope, templates pretty much fixed although I hear you can engineer your own… too hard.
2. rapidweaver – as above although I did get some good info from @WebKarnage on twitter on how to modify rapideweaver templates. I need to get savvy with style sheets and the like though…
3. Flux 2 – also on a lead from @WebKarnage. This looks like a great and almighty web design application, however don’t talk to me about learning curve. I can see mountain goats from here. This does seem the most promising though but it does seem a little rough around the edges and there’s very little documentation or tutorial information around. Maybe someone could tell me how to centre my block of text so it’s always in the centre regardless of browser size?
4. Dreamweaver – Another almighty web design application. I think Dreamwever is a career, not a piece of software. Not for me.
5. Nvu/KompoZer – I stopped as soon as I couldn’t drag the furcle logo to where I wanted it to be on the page. That logo image REALLY wants to stay stuck to to top left of the page…
6. Sandvox – I thought it was supposed to be WYSIWYG but turned out to be WYSIWYG in templates. No good.
7. Random searching of google using the same search phrase hoping that different results will be returned… Oh dear.

Sorry for the rant. I don’t like wasting time unproductively. I suppose I could have just have had someone do it for me and saved myself the trouble. In these times of more time on my hands and less cashola rolling in, I need to be able to do more of this stuff myself. Arrgh, the conflict. Maybe it’s time to call in a favour with mates currency – a case of beer.

* WYSIWYG = What you see is what you get = Draw it and they will come

** adventures may be result of incompetence or general lack of interest in spending time on stuff that wont work first time. If you know I’m wrong – let me know!

*** picture from e-magic on flickr

Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees.  I was on another conference call this week with some business partners in India and it occured to me the ease with which I could collaborate with people around the globe now.  Email is obvious but there are so many other great, and quite often free, tools available to be able to communicate and collaborate.  I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the tools that I can’t live without.

• Skype.  This may be a little obvious, but I love skype.  The ease, the flexibility, the price!  There are other tools out there as well that all let you conduct voice or video calls like Google talk and Microsoft’s live messenger.  They’re all great.  For some reason I use Skype.  You can pick your own.
• Google docs is amazing.  You can write, store, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and pdfs.  You should definitely check this out as it’s great to be able to be simulataneously editing a document while chatting with someone across the globe on Skype.  It’s also great because Google are continuously improving it and it’s getting better every day.
• Acrobat.com is also great.  They’re building a suite of web base document tools that you can use for collaboration.  I must admit that I don’t really use these but they do look a lot nicer than Google docs.  What I do use though is the screen sharing tool.  This thing is great and it’s free!  It allows you to share your screen with anyone who has an internet connection and a web browser.  Again there are a number of other options available but I don’t know that I’ve found any that are free.  One that comes to mind is GoToMeeting, however I don’t think this one is free.

Just a quick post.  Hope these tools are useful.  If you’ve got any others that you think are great then please feel free to post a comment.

**Update**

Just thinking after this post that you should make sure that you’re comfortable with the terms of service for any of these services.  Sometimes the owner of the service may be taking ownership of your content if you use the service.  An example of the different approaches are the google docs and google docs for google apps terms of service.  Make sure you read and understand if you’re using these tools for business (and even personal) use.