Boxer Editor

Ok for those of you who are not coders, do not do CSS or HTML or care for the software reviews - talk among yourselves.  For the rest of us.

As most of you know I am a great supporter of small useful utilities.  This one is not so small is extremely useful and while it is not free it is well worth the price.  Boxer Text Editor. I love this tool.  I was introduced to it by an online coding acquaintance (Ken Perry) who suggested I try it. Ken is blind. (He says he hates to be called visually impaired and prefers blind). He was looking for an affordable accessible editor. He suggested I try it knowing I hate the wordpad like editors. I missed Multi-Edit but at the time the cheapest version was around 500.00 too rich for my out of work self (they now have a lite version I may look at.) I started with the 30 day trial and have used it through a few versions now for over 4 years.

Installation
I opted for the disks to be sent to me.  It arrived quickly and well protected - good job! Yes you read that correctly 1 disk.  Download is also an option but my connection is slow and who know what my daughter is downloading or uploading as we speak?    Boxer installs like a dream. No glitches on Vista, Windows 7 or my old 98 machine. First time I did it it went so fast I was not sure it worked. But it started up with no issues. The Boxer Shorts tips are cute, they get annoying fast though. You can turn them off easily.  User configuration and preferences are a breeze to set up. Projects are more work and sometimes a lot more annoying but you can start right out coding.

Features
I am very happy with Boxer.  It is small, easily configurable for any language and comes with quite a few templates like HTML, C, and Pascal, users have made others that can be downloaded from the site and you can of course add your own. I made one for myself for DIL using the C as a base.  The entire program is small enough to run on a thumb drive (5 MB fully installed) which is great for carrying to a client site so you have an editor you know well.

It has all the features that make my life easier and I expect in a code editor; like find mate so you can ensure all your braces, brackets and parenthesis are closed.  You can set it format your code (or plain text) and most other main features that larger and more expensive code editors have are built in.  Side by side window configuration to find differing or same lines when comparing source. In other words it is a professional level tool.

For HTML, it is an excellent tool that includes a spell checker you can set to ignore HTML tags so that only the text is spell checked. When I hover the mouse over a color code, a small pop up appears showing me the color. The find mate works to find the end tag or starting tag in a pair.

Boxer also has some handy tools that save time, the HTML color, ANSI and OEM charts as well as a calculator, and a calendar. It comes with quite a few user macros and you can download more from the site to use as is or study to make your own. You can set up projects or just work on individual code. There is a an evaluation of 30 days available.  I bought a copy after playing with it for a month, 30 days was not enough time to complete what I was working on, and I liked it well enough I wanted to continue using it.


Drawbacks and Issues
For the most part it is a nice little package. However every once in a while if I am working on a project it starts to hog the ram and fight over memory addresses. It has caused the Vista machine to lock up if I am running a telnet client or winscp or other ftp software on the WiFi router.  Sometimes the text for linked documents or projects will show up in a hover type alt text and not go away. This last can be annoying.  And like any tool that has autotext it can come up with some very odd fill ins. I usually keep that turned off. Lastly it is not 100% accessible on all features. Ken could not use the find mate for parenthesis and such. But he did use it almost exclusively on his windows machine.


The only issue I have with it for HTML editing is if I am editing a document and adding tags to an existing site (like a div for a new CSS class)  it adds the end tag automatically. so if I want to change a section it looks like this div /div stuff I want in the div. I then have to go back and delete the end tag and put it where I really want it.


Making a simple "find this text in this situation and change to title case" is kludgy when making a macro. Something a word processor or pure text editor does easily.  A lot of the pure text  manipulation is not intuitive and you wind up writing a macro in the C-like language. While it is powerful I do not recommend this for say a blogger or an article writer.


Overall
The drawbacks are minor though and truth be told I tend to push my ram a lot. If I could just find the conflict with winscp I would be elated. But I suspect it is something unique to my Vista machine and over all I highly recommend this product for any developer. At $59.99 it well worth it.  It is available for both 32 and 64 bit. It is great for a consultant or even for a consulting company due to the small size and the fact it leaves no traces on the client machine when used from a USB drive. I actually cannot say enough good about this product. Just go down load the 30 day trial and see for yourself.  But be ready to be impressed.

Wordpress

Today I made a blog over at WordPress. I had to to walk someone through adding tags and categories to a blog for crawlers to find. Let me just say this about that I am not impressed.

First if you are low vision or have problems seeing the screen, the default layout I was assigned was awful. Light gray on white does not do it. So Of course I go looking for a high contrast theme to make my life a little easier. Some are really nice but the default picture has nothing to do with what I blog about or even is anything I would want to have on my blog. I see one I like, I preview it and an then I see it is 75.00 to implement. I think not.

So I try to go back of course the back button does not work, I see a second tab opened in Opera click on that and am brought back to my dashboard - sigh so I have to load the themes again. I notice an Edit CSS option and get excited. Cool I can just add my own!  I click on it and start reading expecting the usual no .js no scripts agreement stuff to ensure I am not trapping readers. Here is what it basically says :

If you are familiar with CSS or you have a stylesheet ready to paste, you may delete these comments and get started. Great! I think, and settle back to read what I can and cannot do. There are 2 check boxes one says to add to this style sheet, the other says to start blank - Better! Ok maybe this is not so bad oh wait..

You can not edit the stylesheets of your theme. Your stylesheet will be loaded after the theme stylesheets, which means that your rules can take precedence and override the theme CSS rules. The Sandbox theme is recommended for those who would prefer to start from scratch.  There is a bunch of what they encourage and a bunch of what they will strip out, only one that I question is unsafe code - I think I know what they mean, but what if they decide a scroller is unsafe code. But oh well this is just a test right? But if I like it maybe I will move the gaming blog over there, or set up Sunflower's stuff. So I click the box to create my own CSS from scratch, I figure I have to use the divs and the classes they define anyway so having a default to work from is not such a bad thing. I hit the start from scratch and just use this and preview to see what is what in the page. At the top of the preview is this little notification. you must purchase the Custom CSS Upgrade to save your changes. So, let me get this straight, I do the work and you want me to share it with the community and I have to pay to do it ? I think not.

Now I have decided not to move the blog, but maybe I will use it as another blog site in case I ever want to separate the game stuff from the gamer stuff. So I browse some of the other options. Akismet - all the description says is Askismet. Now if you are a blogger already you probably know this is anti-spam API  But if you are not it might be nice if they explained that and HOW it works. (It does the best it can, so I am not bashing it, it just is not perfect and people need to know that.)

They have some interesting choices like box.net and Akismet.  Neither of these are free tools under normal circumstances and the fact the provide them as widgets and seemingly at no cost is nice. But the box.net security seems to be undermined somewhat by allowing any blog reader to download files.  Most of the  widget choices are nothing that great or fancy or indeed even unique, most reputable blog sites  - even this one provide similar services.

There are whole lot of other tools for making the blog look spiffy, display well on mobile media,  hell even making it look like a webpage, but  I am not impressed with actual content editing.  I see why so many Wordpress blogs have serious typos in them. They do not make it easy to edit your words, your text or even your tags and categories. Which is why I went there in the first place. Because my inexperienced client could not intuitively figure out how to do it. So I ask anyone reading this who uses Wordpress, Why do you?

Test Almost Over

As some of you may or may not know I have been 'playing' with the site building tool for the ZEN site for RPGs. My evaluation is that it is OK. Now what does that mean? That means NOTHING made me say "wow that is neat!" but on the other hand nothing made me curse for hours at it either - well maybe one thing but I am getting used to that issue.

The Tool
Trellix SiteBuilder-

First I ran a generated page through the w3 compliance checker. It failed on 23 counts. All failures are Trellix generated code, not webgems as they call them for my html.

Line 1 column 0: no document type declaration; implying "!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM".
Warning Line 7 column 211: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "sUrl".
Note that in most documents, errors related to entity references will trigger up to 5 separate messages from the Validator. Usually these will all disappear when the original problem is fixed.

Error Line 7 column 211: general entity "sUrl" not defined and no default entity.
Info Line 7 column 210: entity was defined here.
Warning Line 7 column 254: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "Command".
Error Line 7 column 254: general entity "Command" not defined and no default entity.
Error Line 7 column 261: reference to entity "Command" for which no system identifier could be generated.
Info Line 7 column 253: entity was defined here.
Warning Line 7 column 271: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "FileName".
Error Line 7 column 271: general entity "FileName" not defined and no default entity.
Error Line 7 column 279: reference to entity "FileName" for which no system identifier could be generated.
Info Line 7 column 270: entity was defined here.
Error Line 10 column 47: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
Error Line 14 column 20: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN".
Error Line 14 column 34: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN".
Error Line 14 column 50: there is no attribute "RIGHTMARGIN".
Error Line 14 column 66: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH".
Error Line 14 column 83: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT".
Error Line 21 column 39: there is no attribute "BACKGROUND".
Error Line 71 column 62: there is no attribute "BACKGROUND".
Error Line 71 column 139: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
Error Line 71 column 139: document type does not allow element "STYLE" here.
Error Line 118 column 112: document type does not allow element "DIV" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.
Error Line 125 column 110: document type does not allow element "P" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.
Error Line 139 column 112: document type does not allow element "DIV" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.
Error Line 178 column 45: end tag for element "P" which is not open.
Error Line 205 column 154: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
The W3C Validator Team

The document Failed W3 compliance.

Now that having been said, I IMMed a friend who uses JAWS 8 speech client and had them check the page. JAWs handled it fine, so the product does create code that is accessible.

The builder is very simplistic, it is designed to work ONLY with Netscape and I.E products. This of course cause a bit of cursing on my part, since I use Opera as my main browser. It would not allow me to start my site creations using Opera. However, I easily performed site maintenance and added additional pages using Opera.

The page file naming conventions leave much to be desired. They do not draw from the title nor do they prompt the user for a name upon creation. As a result they are named cryptically with such titles as ID1, ID2, etc.

The backgrounds supplied with the product are fairly boring in my opinion, but that is better than bad. A fair amount of editing is possible on the editable templates, from color to columns. It is easy to pick up and figure out.

I saw no archive or generation storage to allow for a rollback.

The manual and tool assume the user is not at all sophisticated and as such lacks information on advanced topics such as RSS feeds, frames, and tables. Although if you use the tool as is and are not trying to do anything too fancy, it functions well.

Overall I would recommend this tool for a small business who wishes to have a web presence or as a personal website builder. It could be used as a pure site maintenance tool or as a quickstart on a site. They did make changes over the period of the two weeks or so I used the tool, so the tool is trying to be improved. I will give it one or two more days of playing, then will rebuild as I wish. For the record, my styles tend to be a bit darker.