And interesting feature of Sandvox. A way forward for NWP?

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greenmorpher
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And interesting feature of Sandvox. A way forward for NWP?

Post by greenmorpher »

I've just adopted Sandvox for website building. It is template-based so inherently limited in the variety of designs you can produce. Or so it seems.

In fact, it is much more flexible than it first appears to be because it has a feature called "Code Injection" which you can apply to a page or to a whole site. This is the injection of CSS or HTML fragments to do specific things.

The first thing at which I found myself chafing at the bit was that Sandvox and its templates do not provide a way to adjust line spacing/leading along with other typographic parameters. Odd! The troops say there are too many ways template designers can to do this in CSS for it to be part of the basic Sandvox. However, you can do it with a code injection.

In response to my plea for a line spacing adjustment tool, one of the other users on the Sandvox forum wrote a cri du coeur against Sandvox becoming feature heavy at the expense of actual functionality and fun in use (he gave MS Word and Photoshop as examples of programs that suffered from "feature-itis").

That actually sounds good to me provided the code injections are made available by the template developers (in the case of Sandvox -- I am finding it really is fun to use and I have already redeveloped and published two sites in it).

And it gave me to think about NWP. Yes, there is stuff I would like to see -- but there is lots of stuff in NWP that can be done and is done with macros, and the macro capability has long been a key component of NWP. I wonder whether the head gnome who is directing the gnomes who are churning away (according to Martin -- let’s all assume for the moment that he is real and the gnomes really are churning :)) should give us a bit of a road map and say, for example, that unless something changes momentously, desired features "x", "y", and "z", are so far towards the back of the stove that no work will go into them but any macro development in those areas will be supported.

Or has this all happened, and I have simply missed it as usual? (Sigh!)

A postscript to my redeveloping my sites in Sandvox. I switched to it from Canvas X for this work because the Canvas code is creaking with age even more than my joints and Sandvox proudly boasts of its modern, clean code, Google (etc.) friendliness, etc. The first site I rebuilt was my http://www.rabaulpng.com which had long been languishing in the Google search stakes. I deleted the old site and put up the new Sandvox-built site just days ago. Then yesterday I had cause to check Google in an area that impinges on the rabaulpng.com site. Rabaulpng.com popped up 5th on the first page! "Wow! There's a turbocharged result!" I thought. Yes, you’ve guessed it! It was a page from the old site that now no longer exists! Sod's law at work! LOL.

Another postscript -- have a look at the Karelia.com site (the makers of Sandvox) for their polite response to Steve Jobs' obliteration of their first app, Watson, with Sherlock 3.

Cheers, geoff
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