BuildSite by Frontier

A letter to a friend about a new HTML discovery. (This is NOT a review of the full-fledged Frontier scripting language, and doesn't begin to address its many powerful, built-in programming-like features). This entire web page, including graphics and footer, is an example of a Frontier page. It's perfectly ordinary HTML, but it was built automatically by the script and template discussed below.

About a month ago, I wrote about one of the items on my wish list. No, make that "whine list":

"The other, a related idea, is a web script which automatically indexes whatever's in a given folder. So you can just toss more jokes in the folder and they appear in the index without manual entry. If you ever get wind of such an animal, let me know. I imagine someone's done it in Java script, but I haven't seen it."

Turns out there is such an animal, and the same code runs on Mac and PC. I'm so jazzed I'm writing a review of it for my web page, and thought I'd tell you about it first.

It's the old Frontier (yes, the Dave Winer product), with a new HTML feature set. They still offer a freeware version of it. I took another look at the code while in PHX, and it didn't look so tough as it used to, so I downloaded their tutorial and found a demo script called "BuildSite".

Reportedly, Apple wowed one of the Mac Expos with this thing during an Amelio presentation. You throw a bunch of text files into a folder, and images (if any) in another, and run the script. The script makes some assumptions about how you want the text to fit into a pre-made HTML Template. Frontier supplies their own template with their demo, but you can make your own any way you want it.

In less than two seconds, BuildScript will turn 20 text files into formatted, tabularized HTML files with title and subtitle and header and footer, AND an attractively and accurately indexed "home" page.

If you like, for your own demo, you can display each page as they blur thru your Browser window while being built on the fly. But that will slow you down to about 1/2 second per page.

File this away for future reference. I'm not "selling" anything, not recommending it, unless you have plenty of spare time and are looking for a development platform replacement for HyperCard or a compiled scripting language.

The "experts" say Frontier's complexity lies somewhere between AppleScript and C. For whatever reason, it's at least 10 times faster than AppleScript, too.

If you should find yourself with a folder full of dozens or hundreds of text files, and would put them all up on the web except for the formidable task of formatting and indexing them all, this "engine" might be just what the doctor ordered.

you could put this whole engine together with the script in under a weekend (including the learning curve.)

Winer basically puts his whole site up this way, and I have to admit it's pretty cool. There are drawbacks. All this script yields is paragraph text. Source material that needs to be pre-formatted, like a recipe, will get converted to paragraph style. You would have to fix or re-paste this. It's not meant for graphics and formatting-rich "designer" pages. But the basic grunt work is done for you in a few seconds.

BuildSite's strength is in processing a large number of source files in a consistent pure text style. The number of source files is pretty irrelevant. The more the merrier. I wish I'd known about this before starting to convert your joke collections!

I have made a basic HTML template for my own needs and will probably use this little sucker a lot -- even though I can easily create HTML by hand, or via engines like MS Word, PageMill or FrontPage.

Suppose you don't like your initial try. It's actually easier to tweak the layout and the script and run it again (overwriting the original HTML folder contents with the new set) until you do like it, than to try fixing anything by hand.

If this ever sounds like a solution for a task of yours, you could check it out at:

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/

Or, if you're just curious, you could check it out anyway. I've used Frontier for years for simpler things like lists and backups, without ever writing a script of my own.

As for me, I can hardly wait to get back to tweaking my custom BuildSite HTML template. This thing is really cool.

Best,

Alex

by Alex Forbes, copyright ©1999