Looking at BlueGriffon

I am fascinated by editors. Yes, simple text editors. I am also interested in tools (read HTML editors) to maintain my website. I have Dreamweaver, but have been looking at other WYSIWYG editors which might be used and are free.

I am looking at a free WYSIWYG editor for the website. I still love Dreamweaver, but am looking at something I can put on other laptops and operating systems without costing an arm and a leg to license. Enter BlueGriffon. It looks good, so far, but I have said that before about other editors. We'll see how it works out. Check it out here.

One issue I have run into is the source editor and it isn't very good. When I tried to position the caret on the line, I found that it was off by about 4-5 spaces from the display. Not real usable. I am also trying the editor on various platforms and have implemented it on my netbook and home laptop. On the netbook, I have installed it on both Windows XP and Ubuntu (Windows 7 on the home laptop).

One clue about installing on Ubuntu. It appears when it first installs that the configuration directory isn't accessible to you because the permissions aren't set correctly. The configuration directory also isn't obvious. It was hidden (i.e. a period in front of the name) and was called

.disruptive innovations sarl

I changed the ownership of the directory with

sudo chown : .disruptive*

(Note the use of the splat "*" as I didn't want to type out the name with escapes for the spaces.) Once I completed that, the program would start. Another interesting problem is getting the program in the launcher, but that's another story.

I have also added the FireFTP add-on which allows me to upload files to the site. It works pretty well. Right now, my evaluation of this editor is that it might be good for small changes, but still lacks for major work.

The other problem I have with this editor is the same one that I have with other systems except Dreamweaver -- site definition. In Dreamweaver, you can define the site and then use relative links in your work. In these other editors, I have yet to find a way to do this. When this happens, you have to create relative URL's and can't use references to the top level of the site, for example. Thus, if you have your images in the

/images

folder, and you are working on a page down in the structure you have to reference the top with constructions like

../../../images

to get the relative link and have the images or CSS show up.

More to come.