A while ago I ditched the whole business of building websites using HTML. I had bought software packages including good old HoTMetaL from way back when, and Expression Web and managed to tame them to the point where I could get a halfway decent website. However, the joys of nesting tables (look it up but include the term 'HTML' unless you want to get something in teak) paled somewhat and I decided that I needed a way of building websites that hid all the messy html stuff and allowed me to simply put things on the screen that looked right. I am more interested in using software than coding so when Moonfruit came along it seemed the answer to my prayers - and was, for a time at least.
Moonfruit uses a Flash based interface which allows sites to be built using their website in the web browser rather than software installed on the computer. I could lay things out on the page and nudge them to suit. I could upload images and they would be resized by the software rather than me having to painstakingly do it myself. This is what I had been waiting for. I could even let other have access to parts of the site to change themselves without forking out for the aforementioned software. Heaven.
There was one small problem. That same 'Flash' that allowed this to work had issues. Not everyone had adopted it so anyone looking at the websites on an Apple device didn't see what I saw. The same went for mobile phones, not a problem when everyone's phone had a screen the size of a postage stamp but these days everyone expects to surf the web on their phone even whilst driving. Even the devices that used Flash had their problems. As new versions of Flash have been brought out first Google Chrome and then Mozilla Firefox started to glitch. I found that Chrome wouldn't display YouTube videos, a little ironic as they own YouTube. Then browsers started missing out anything in bold type which left odd, unexplained gaps and caption-less photos all over my website. Then the layered images that I had used for backgrounds started to display areas of black behind them. I checked all of these things out on other computers just in case it was my video card on the fritz but it was consistently wrong. The only fix for this that I could find was to disable the latest version of the Flash player, and this worked, but other glitches then appeared to replace them. This was a big problem.
Then the Seventh Cavalry appeared in the form of HTML5 and there was the promise of a solution. Moonfruit responded. Realising that Flash was going to be dead in the water soon they started to rebuild their Sitemaker software retaining the friendly Flash interface but then converting everything to HTML5. They promised that they would upgrade everyone and even gave dates.
They have now stopped giving dates, they can't take the grief. After missing deadline after deadline they finally unveiled their new 'v6' software - but only for new websites. We longstanding established website owners were promised that we could migrate at a later date, whenever that was.
Eventually the big day came earlier this year and we were encouraged to convert our sites from v5 to v6. There were just a few issues though. Large chunks of functionality that we had rather got used to in v5 were not yet there and there was no guarantee that there ever would be. These included forms, blogs and membership and a whole lot of other things. So, not small chunks. Rather large chunks. In fact the sort of size chunks that meant that migration couldn't sensibly happen.
This is still ongoing. I can't update my websites because the effort may be completely wasted by me having to go elsewhere to build and host them. I can't have sites without member areas as that would make the whole business of being a member pointless. I just have to sit and wait and hope that something comes along to put me back to where I thought I was 18 months ago.
Technology apparently progresses backwards.
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