Why do I use Frontier? Because I would be absolutely crazy not to. It would drive me around the bend to go back to doing all this by hand, or worse, force myself into some wysiwyg piece of garbage that generates ugly/bad markup but gives me at least a little control over site management tasks.

Frontier has a reputation for a hard learning curve. Like a lot of web designers, I am not much of a programmer; I know enough perl to get by, and less C. But I was able to start using Frontier for production work within the first week of fiddling with it, and now, 2 months later, I can't imagine not having it. Were I not able to freeload off the sweat of others' brows, I might complain more. [1]

As it stands, I can still get work done while picking up the intricacies of Usertalk along the way. So far I've written a batch of scripts that do most of the heavy lifting on my main site, That's Useful This Is Cool (http://www.usefulcool.com/). The scripts assemble versions for both the web and email based on the same set of information, and archive the day before's column to boot.

Lynn Siprelle

[1] And here I'd like to thank Phil Suh for yahooPaths and apparently-Brent for the new navbar macro, neither of which I can do without. Thanks for sweating, boys; perspiration looks bad on me.

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Siprelle & Associates: Distinctive Web Design Since 1994
Lynn Siprelle, President: Newest Associate Josie Ark born 9/9/97
lynn@siprelle.com | info@siprelle.com | lynsa@habit.com
Portfolio: http://www.siprelle.com/ | TUTIC: http://www.usefulcool.com