Rogue Librarian

A must read for Veteran’s Day: Ghost Soldiers; The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides. This is the story of the rescue of some 500 American and Allied POWs, those few survivors of the Bataan Death March, from the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines.

Macromedia Contribute is now available for download. Finally I can talk about this new software. Contribute is not a CMS, but it does quite a bit of what a CMS does , and it is only $99.00 a pop.

This GUI allows non-technical people to author content by typing and draging text and images into what looks an awful lot like a web browser.

The software is based on Dreamweaver, so the HTML that Contribute generates is as pretty as Dreamweaver MX’s mark-up. But you can also drag Word and Excel files into the interface, and Contribute will clean that markup as you drag. Dreamweaver templates have been incorporated into this new product, so you can limit editable areas on your pages.

Contribute also has a versioning system, so you can roll back if your content people do something bad to your site.

Macromedia’s latest is important not only for what it does, but for what it says about the industry. The price point suggests that Macromedia sees the writing on the wall, and knows web developers will have to continue to do more with less. Contribute will be available for the PC in December, and for the Mac in 2003.