I’m branching out into feeble web design. I describe it as feeble because I know my limitations! A friend of mine has a website and I was on it the other day. He uses Microsoft FrontPage (UGH!) to edit the static pages. He wants more versatility and he wants to be able to make changes easier. Also, he wanted a public on-line calendar for events. By the way, he also has webspace and a domain. (I’ll let all of you in on this when the site gets off the ground with its new format.) Oh, and one more by the way, his site is on a Windows server. This leads to some changes in the way I think about dynamic content (like what appears here).

I use Movable Type, which does all of the content publishing for me. I have edited the templates and the end result is what you see here. My webspace server is a LAMP server: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl. This is perfect for Movable Type. He can’t use Movable Type because there is no MySQL database on his server, only Access databases can be used. Also, for server-side scripting he has to use ASP; there is no PHP on his server. So, off we go to check out the options.

I found an on-line calendar that, while not as detailed or as extensive as the one I use in PHP, is quite capable of doing what he wants. I use Datenator for my on-line calendar; it works quite well. For him, I found a nice one called ASP Calendar Manager from Ocean12. It is completely ASP and is a nice calendar. (You’ll see the calendar after the site is up an running in the new format).

We have settled on Blogger for the content publishing software. It will meet all his needs, which include team blogs. He will be the main “administrator” of the blog and have four others who will also be enabled to make posts. Of course, we have to set it all up. You can view a static design of the site here. Now we just have to set up the users in Blogger and finish the template publishing. Sounds like a weekend job to me!