Why Dont You Blog?

It is with great pain and suffering I have to make this rant today. I am a big fan of Linux and love it. It is running now. I am using it to play music, download USENET artciles, render and image and burn a cd all at the same time – right now!

However, I have to confess to one pretty significant annoyance.

Webdesign.

Now, given *nix’s functionality on the internet, you would think that it would be the ideal platform for web development. Largely it is. Native FTP / SSH is wonderful. It is an easy task to SSH into the webhost and make changes directly. I can set up cron jobs to automatically update / refresh / back up my files etc.

However, there is big failing – there is nothing to compare with Dreamweaver. Nothing. Nvu is good – very good – but at anything other than static HTML pages it becomes a terrible chore to use it. I have been trying to use it for site development for quite some time now – and overall, I have had to resort to going back to the Wintelbox and using Dreamweaver.

Now, on price issues NVU wins hands down. If I was purchasing this for my own use I would never have even contemplated DW. There is always the chance that years of practice fighting DW may mean I am biased but I would be interested to see anyone who has tried both, and finds NVU is better for PHP/ASP driven sites.